Academic books by our students

Glory Days: Brisbane’s Art World to 1970

Written by: Judith Hamilton

Publisher: Boolarong Press 2020

ISBN: 9781925877496

Details: This book recounts the glory days when Brisbane was seen as the art capital of Australia. Great artists such as renowned, award winning artist, Margaret Olley and two time Archibald winner, William Robinson, were developing and exposing their skills. Brisbane had many prestigious art galleries, art organisations and groups. These times inspired great art teachers such as Wendy Allen and Mervyn Moriarty who made such a big impact on the education of students in primary and secondary schools and tertiary colleges in the city and country areas of Queensland.

A River with a City Problem

Written by: Margaret Cook

Publisher: UQ Press 

ISBN: 9780702260438

Award: John and Ruth Kerr Award for Historical Research 2019

Details: When floods devastated South East Queensland in 2011, who was to blame? Despite the inherent risk of living on a floodplain, most residents had pinned their hopes on Wivenhoe Dam to protect them, and when it failed to do so, dam operators were blamed for the scale of the catastrophic events that followed.

A River with a City Problem is a compelling history of floods in the Brisbane River catchment, especially those in 1893, 1974 and 2011. Extensively researched, it highlights the force of nature, the vagaries of politics and the power of community. With many river cities facing urban development challenges, Cook makes a convincing argument for what must change to prevent further tragedy.

A Cultural History of the Bushranger Legend in Theatres and Cinemas, 1828-2017

Written by: James Couzens

Publisher: Anthem Press

ISBN: 9781783088911

Details: The bushranger legend is an important component of Australia's cultural history, with names like Ned Kelly and Ben Hall still provoking strong, if ambivalent, responses. Storytellers mobilize this legend in unique and exciting ways that reflect upon both the cultural and actual history of bushrangers, as well as speaking to contemporary concerns and driving debate on the national character. This is a multidisciplinary investigation into the history of cultural representations of the bushranger legend on the stage and screen, charting that history from its origins in colonial theatre works performed while bushrangers still roamed Australia's bush to contemporary Australian cinema. It considers the influences of industrial, political and social disruptions on these representations as well as their contributions to those disruptions.

Postfeminist Whiteness: Problematising Melancholic Burden in Contemporary Hollywood

Written by: Kendra Marston

Publisher: Edinburgh University Press 2018

ISBN: 9781474430302

Details: In the first extended study into the politics of whiteness inherent within postfeminist cinema, Kendra Marston interrogates representations of melancholic white femininity in contemporary Hollywood cinema, arguing that the 'melancholic white woman' serves as a vehicle through which to explore the excesses of late capitalism and a crisis of faith in the American dream. This figure may be idealised or scapegoated within these films, yet strategic performances of gendered melancholia may produce benefits for white female directors and stars disadvantaged within a patriarchal industry. Examining film genres including the tourist romance, the fantasy film and the psychological thriller, the book also contains case studies of films like The Virgin Suicides, Blue Jasmine, Gone Girl and The Girl on the Train.

Political Communication and Leadership

Written by: Elena Block

Publisher: Taylor & Francis 

ISBN: 9781315694436

Award: PhD 2014

Details: The long-lasting hegemonic rule of President Hugo Chávez not only involved significant rearrangements in the control of political power in Venezuela but also shifts in the way its citizens constructed, connected and interacted with politics. In this book, Elena Block explores the political communication style developed by Chávez  to transmit his ideologies and engage with his publics– a style that unfolded incrementally between 1998, the year of his first presidential campaign, and March 13th 2013, when his death was announced after a long struggle with cancer. What sort of political communication did Hugo Chávez  develop to establish hegemony in Venezuela? What made him so popular?

Thomas Hardy’s Pastoral: An Unkindly May

Written by: Indy Clark

Publisher” Palgrave MacMillan

ISBN: 9781137505033

Award: PhD 2013

Details: This book reads Hardy's poetry of the rural as deeply rooted in the historical tradition of the pastoral mode even as it complicates and extends it. It shows that in addition to reinstating the original tensions of classical pastoral, Hardy dramatizes a heightened awareness of complex communities and the relations of class, labour, and gender.

Science Wars through the Stargate

Written by: Dr Steven Gil

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield 

ISBN: 978-1-4422-5619-4

Award: PhD 2014

Advisors: Professor Phil Almond, Profession Jason Jacobs, and Dr Lisa Bode

Details: Steven Gil offers the first in-depth analysis of the series and places it in the context of contemporary debates about the nature of scientific thought. Gil contends that representations of science within SG-1 can be more fully understood through the prism of the Science Wars. Scientific ideas put forth in SG-1 demonstrate how such complex intellectual exchanges and debates have a place in popular culture and can be further understood through these fictional articulations. Although SG-1 serves as the principal case study, the analysis also casts light on the role and position of science in science fiction television more generally.

Postfeminism and the Fatale Figure in Neo-Noir Cinema

Written by: Samantha Lindop

Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

ISBN:9781137503589

Award: PhD 2014

Details: This book is a thought-provoking study that expands on film scholarship on noir and feminist scholarship on postfeminism, subjectivity, and representation to provide an inclusive, sophisticated, and up-to-date analysis of the femme fatale , fille fatale , and homme fatal from the classic era through to recent postmillennial neo-noir.

Breaking Bad and Dignity

Written by: Elliot Logan

Publisher: Palgrave Close Readings in Film and Television 

ISBN: 978-1137513724

Award: MPhil 2013

Details: An ambitious interpretation of the critically celebrated and widely popular crime drama Breaking Bad , this book argues that not only should the series be understood as a show that revolves around the dramatic stakes of dignity, but that to do so reveals - in new ways - central aspects of serial television drama as an art form.

Creativity, Culture and Commerce

Written by: Dr Anna Potter

Publisher: Intellect 

ISBN: 9781783204410

Award: PhD 2012

Details: Since the late 1970s, Australia has nurtured a creative and resilient children’s television production sector with a global reputation for excellence. Providing a systematic analysis of the creative, economic, regulatory and technological factors that shape the production of contemporary Australian children’s television for digital regimes, Creativity, Culture and Commerce charts the complex new settlements in children’s television that developed from 2001 to 2014 and describes the challenges inherent in producing culturally specific screen content for global markets. It also calls for new public debate around the provision of high-quality screen content for children, arguing that the creation of public value must sit at the centre of these discussions.

Family and the State in Early Modern Revenge Drama

Written by: Christopher McMahon

Publisher: Routledge

ISBN: 978-0-415-80775-3

Award: PhD 2007

Details: In this book, McMahon considers Early Modern revenge plays from a political science perspective, paying particular attention to the construction of family and state institutions. Plays set for close study are The Spanish Tragedy, Hamlet, The Revenger’s Tragedy, The Malcontent and The Duchess of Malfi. The plays are read as unique events occupying positions in the historical process concerning the privatisation of the family (by means of symbolism and concrete household strategies such as budgeting and surveillance) and the subsequent appropriation of the family and its methods by the state.

Verse and Poetics in George Herbert and John Donne

Written by: Frances Cruickshank

Publisher: Ashgate

ISBN: 978-1409404804

Award: PhD 2005

Details: This book is an important contribution to the ongoing scholarly dialogue about the nature of literary and cultural study of early modern England, and about the relationship between the writer and the world. Cruickshank confirms Donne's reputation as a fascinating and brilliant poetic figure while simultaneously rousing interest in Herbert by noting his unique merging of rusticity and urbanity and tranquility and uncertainty, allowing the reader to enter into these poets' imaginative worlds and to understand the literary genre they embraced and then transformed.

Robert Helpmann Biography: A Servant of Art

Written by: Anna Bemrose

Publisher: UQP

ISBN: 978-0-7022-3678-5

Award: PhD 2003

Details: Ballet dancer; mime artist; make-up artist; musicals performer; choreographer; actor on stage and screen; director of ballets, plays and operas; co-artistic director of the Australian Ballet; and director of the 1970 Adelaide Festival of Arts - Sir Robert Helpmann was all of these and more. The importance and richness of his contribution to the performing arts both in Australia and overseas is without parallel. Despite the extraordinary breadth of his career and the acclaim his work in Australia received at the time, very little has been written about Helpmann's career in Australia. This beautifully illustrated biography develops a career profile of Helpmann assessing the nature and value of his contribution to the performing arts in Australia.

The Penetration of Online News: Past, Present and Future

Written by: An Nguyen

Publisher: VDM

ISBN: 978-3639081558

Award: PhD 2007

Details: As the recent unprecedented penetration of online news into societies has shown no sign of stopping, there is still insufficient knowledge about the socio-technical dynamics of its diffusion to help forecast its future. In what way do the much-touted features of online news contribute to the way people adopt, use and integrate it into daily life? How is this process affected by users' existing socio-psychological conditions (e.g. social status, news orientation, atttudes to new technologies, Internet experience)? Does the rise of blogs, forums and other "Web 2.0" platforms spell a slow death of journalism? What does all this mean for the future of news? This book explores the 160-year evolution of online news to answer these and related questions. 

Can I Call You Colin? The Authorised Biography of Colin Thiele

Written by: Stephanie Steggall

Publisher: New Holland Publishers

ISBN: 978-1-741101423

Award: PhD 2005

Details:  Born into South Australia's German immigrant community in 1920, Colin grew up surrounded not only by the culture of his parents' homeland, but by the natural beauty which was to inspire his writing years later. After serving in the RAAF during World War II, Colin came home to his beloved South Australia to become a fine teacher and key figure in the development of the state's educational system and teacher-training facilities. His varied life experiences would fuel a writing career that has spanned more than fifty years, one that has seen Colin produce works in various genre - poetry, drama, history, biography, fiction. But it is his children's books, his desire to teach children through story, and his deep sense of environmentalism for which Colin Thiele is best known and loved.

Banana Bending: Asian-Australian and Asian-Canadian Literatures

Written by: Tseen-Ling Khoo

Publisher: Hong Kong University Press 

ISBN: 978-773525511

Award: PhD 1999

Details: Tseen-Ling Khoo shows that Asian-Canadian and Asian-Australian literatures are developing in dissimilar ways because of demographic and geographical differences, the degree of governmental intervention through cultural policy initiatives, and the levels of encouragement or financial support for racial minority authors and their work. Khoo exposes the particularities of literary development within specific historical bases through comparative critiques of Asian-Canadian and Asian-Australian texts and argues that the questions of whether authors of Asian descent writing in the western world are adding to national canons or creating subversive (but marginalized) streams will remain as long as binary demarcations prevail.