People
| Name | Research & Teaching Interests |
|---|---|
| Prof Christopher Bigsby Professor of American Studies | Contemporary and recent American drama, with a particular focus on Arthur Miller and David Mamet; American literature and culture; American television; National identities; African American history and literature; The city; Creative writing. |
| Prof Sarah Churchwell Professor of American Studies | 20th C & contemporary US fiction; biography and life-writing; icons, celebrities and cultural value; films of classical Hollywood; reception histories and the role of audiences/readers; representations of women; film, popular culture and the history of popular literature; and public intellectualism and journalism. |
| Hilary Emmett | Eighteenth and nineteenth century American literature and culture; transatlantic and transpacific American studies; American classicism; children's literature; US-Australian comparative literatures. |
| Dr Jacqueline Fear-Segal Reader | Native American history; the American West; photographs as historical sources; immigration and Americanisation; race and racism; museum studies; history of childhood; and, more generally, the history of the USA from the Civil War to the Cold War. |
| Dr Rebecca Fraser Lecturer | Gender in 19th Century America, Slavery in the USA, African American culture, Social and cultural histories of Reconstruction. |
| Dr Sarah Garland Lecturer in American Studies | 20th century American literature, modernism, visual cultures. |
| Ross Hair Lecturer in American Studies | Modern and postmodern American poetry; collage and intertextual poetics; ecopoetry and the poetics of place; pastoral; late twentieth-century transatlantic poetry networks; American poetry and music; the continuing legacy of Romanticism and Transcendentalism in modern and postmodern American poetry; twentieth-century American poetry and western esotericism. |
| Dr Malcolm Mclaughlin Lecturer | 20th Century US history, Violence, Civil Rights, Urban America, The Great Society. |
| Dr Rachael Mclennan Lecturer - American Literature & Culture | American literature and culture from 1950s to present day, adolescence, youth and aging in American literature and culture; American Autobiography; the Holocaust in American literature and culture. |
| Dr Wendy Mcmahon Lecturer in American Studies | Contemporary U.S. literature and culture; Latin American and Caribbean literature and culture; Cuban and Cuban-American literature and culture; Spanish colonialism in the Americas and literatures of conquest; masculinity and nation building / nationhood; literatures of exile (and issues of identity and belonging); the relationship between the body, culture, and capital; the relationship between literature and history; literature and philosophy; literary theory. |
| Kaeten Mistry Lecturer in American Studies | Twentieth century American history; US foreign relations; the international history of the Cold War; historiography and historical narratives; intelligence; transatlantic relations; political and psychological warfare. |
| Dr Jonathan Mitchell Lecturer in American Studies | US masculinity and national identity; US literature and culture of the 50s and 60s; psychoanalytic theory (Lacan and Žižek); queer theory; narrative theory; and ‘Christian Identity' groups. |
| Prof David Peters Corbett Dean of the Faculty of Arts & Humanities | American art (particularly painting), c.1850-1950; Anglo-American artistic relations; word & image. |
| Prof Geoffrey Plank Professor of American Studies | Early American history; early modern British imperialism; warfare in the early modern era; religious history; Native Americans; the Canadian maritime provinces; Scottish Highlanders in North America; Quakers; antislavery; political economy; textiles and material culture. |
| Prof Nick Selby Professor of American Studies | American literature, American poetry (especially experimental poetry) and poetics, Ecocriticism, Modernism, Whitman, Melville, The Beats, Postwar American art, poetic difficulty and the ethics of close-reading. |
| Dr Thomas Smith Lecturer | Nineteenth century literature and culture; Mark Twain; New Orleans and the Mississippi River; Transatlantic culture in the nineteenth century; American music history; the South and early West; outlaws; popular culture. |
| Dr Rebecca Tillett Lecturer | Twentieth and twenty-first century multiethnic American literature and film, with particular emphases upon contemporary Native American writers and film makers; Writings of the American Southwest, including Border Studies, ecocritical writing, the relationships between literature and place, environmental racism, and environmental justice; the politics of contemporary resistance writings and the relationships between texts and politics; and Race and Postcolonial theory. |
| Thomas Wright Lecturer in American Studies | Pre-1900 literary and cultural history; voice and orality; travel and travel writing; performance; rhetoric; journalism; non-fiction aesthetics. |
We welcome PhD applicants in any of the above topics, but we also supervise across a much wider range. Recent doctoral studies (several resulting in book publication) have included work on Sherman Alexie, Paul Auster, William Gibson, Thomas Pynchon, Sam Shepard, the Broadway musical and show business, nineteenth century American humorists, American Militia Movements, the Cold War, and the early history of the Mississippi River. You can also see what a selection of our current PhD candidates are researching.