S.W. Brooks Visiting Fellowship
The Samuel Wood Brooks Visiting Fellowship was established in 1962 by a bequest to The University of Queensland of Arnold Edwin Brooks, Architect, of Brisbane, who died in 1958, to be known in memory of his father Samuel Wood Brooks.
The purpose of the Fellowship is to promote visits to the University of Queensland by scholars in English Literature and Economics in order that staff and senior students of the University may benefit from their special knowledge and experience.
2026: Professor Porscha Fermanis University College Dublin
Beyond the Pocahontas Perplex: Intimacy, Sex, and Grief in the Australian Interracial Romance
The conceptual starting point of this paper is what Rayna Green has famously called the ‘Pocahontas Perplex’ or the perplexing fixation that the Euro-American imagination has with the Native American princess. Interrogating the unstable princess/squaw dichotomy on which this fixation depends, the paper begins by placing the Australian interracial romance in transnational context. On the one hand, it argues for the importance of Pocahontas as a reference point for overdetermined representations of Indigenous women in nineteenth and twentieth-century Australian fiction. On the other hand, the Australian interracial romance, unlike the US model, tends to reject race union as a symbolic basis for affective nationality, reflecting a widespread reluctance among Australian settlers to portray Indigenous women as the idealised, easily acculturated figures of literary romance and thus as ‘founding mothers’ of a new Australian nation. More broadly, the paper argues that the interracial romance reveals the constitutive role of intimate attachments in evolving conceptions of autonomous liberal personhood in Australia. It considers the extent to which settler romances such as William Anderson Cawthorne’s Kangaroo Islanders (1854) and Hume Nisbet’s Savage Queen (1891) represent love as what Elizabeth Povinelli has called an ‘intimate event’ that privileges individual freedom over collective tribal love, thereby consolidating a construction of personhood that hinges either on the abjection of Indigenous collectivities or on their limited recognition by the state. Within this construction of autonomous personhood, Indigenous Australian women are represented as deviant, inassimilable, and/or disposable subjects, who are unable to embody ideas of autonomous selfhood or attain the status of grievable lives. The paper closes by reflecting on how settler writing dismisses, deflects, ventriloquises, and/or commodifies Indigenous grief, as well as considering how contemporary novels by Anita Heiss, Melissa Lucashenko, and Richard Flanagan re-write narratives of Indigenous women's lives by moving beyond the Pocahontas Perplex.
About the Presenter
Professor Fermanis is an internationally recognised scholar of nineteenth-century literature. From 2016 to 2021, she was principal investigator of the European Research Council-funded SouthHem project and is co-editor of the Bloomsbury Academic book series The New Nineteenth Century. Her latest monograph, Settler Fiction from the Southern Hemisphere, 1820–1890, was published by Oxford University Press in 2026.
2025: Professor Sally Shuttleworth, University of Oxford
Travels for Health in the Alps and Riviera: Literary and Medical Cultures
During the pandemic, we were all urged to isolate, to lock ourselves away and remain at home when ill. In the nineteenth century, by contrast, invalids were urged to travel, to find the best location to treat their illness. As a result, many invalids led peripatetic lives, moving from place to place, often to ‘English colonies’ which arose in European resorts. This talk focuses on the development of two such colonies, Menton, on the French Riviera, and Davos in the Swiss Alps, and the intertwined lives of invalids who took up residence.
According to James Henry Bennet, the ‘creator’ of Mentone as a health resort, the British should take their cue from the swallows, and travel south in the winter. Sufferers from consumption, clergyman’s throat, or general overwork and the pressures of modern life, followed his siren call. Yet by the 1880s Mentone was supplanted as the health destination of choice by the rise of Davos. Basking in the sun in a natural winter garden was to be replaced, one commentator grumbled, by the refrigeration of invalids. The talk will explore the medical, and cultural dimensions of these developments, and the lives of some of the more famous invalids who wintered in these resorts, from Robert Louis Stevenson and John Addington Symonds, to Aubrey Beardsley and Katherine Mansfield.
About the Presenter
Sally Shuttleworth is Senior Research Fellow at St Anne’s College, and the English Faculty, University of Oxford, where she was previously Head of the Humanities Division. Her research is on the interface between science, medicine and the humanities, particularly in the nineteenth century.
Her books include Charlotte Brontë and Victorian Psychology (1996) and The Mind of the Child: Child Development in Literature, Science and Medicine, 1840-1900 (2010). Between 2014-19 she ran two large research projects, Diseases of Modern Life: Nineteenth-Century Perspectives (ERC) and Constructing Scientific Communities: Citizen Science in the 19th and 21st Centuries (AHRC), the latter in partnership with the Natural History Museum, London, the Royal Society, and the Royal College of Surgeons of England.
Joint research works from these projects include Anxious Times: Medicine and Modernity in Nineteenth-Century Britain (2019); Sleep and Stress: Past and Present, a Special Issue of the Royal Society Journal, Interface Focus (2020); Progress and Pathology: Medicine and Culture in the Nineteenth Century (2020) and Science Periodicals in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Constructing Scientific Communities (2020). She has recently completed a book on travel for health, In Quest of a Cure: Literary and Medical Cultures of the Health Resort, which will be published in 2026 by Oxford University Press.
2024: Professor Kate Newey, University of Exeter
Making Theatrical Empires: Nineteenth Century Women
Popular theatre in Western Europe at the start of the nineteenth century changed the world. It was out of the turmoil of the French Revolution and the huge expansion of industrialising London, that our contemporary popular culture emerged. Melodramas of the ‘illegitimate’ theatres in London, and the theatres of the boulevards – what Pixérécourt called his ‘plays for those who cannot read’ – are the foundation of a global popular culture which works on strong feeling, a driving and sometimes violent sense of right and wrong, and a desire for visible justice. Think of the popular television formats of soap opera, reality television, crime drama and fiction, Hollywood and Bollywood romcoms – these genres have melodrama and the melodramatic at their centre. This seems so normal now, that we don’t realise just what a radical innovation it was. For the last thirty years, theatre historians have undertaken a scholarly revision of this period, rejecting earlier judgements of this cultural revolution as ‘trash,’ and coming to recognise its importance, both in the nineteenth century and now.
About the Presenter
Kate Newey is Professor of Theatre History at the University of Exeter. Her work focuses on women’s writing and nineteenth century British popular theatre. Her publications include a co-edited collection of essays, Politics, Performance and Popular Culture (Manchester UP, 2016), and the monographs Women’s Theatre Writing in Victorian Britain (Palgrave, 2005) and John Ruskin and the Victorian Theatre co-authored with cultural historian, Jeffrey Richards (Palgrave, 2010). Kate has published widely on nineteenth century theatre and popular culture, and led several Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded projects. From 2024, Kate is leading a large-scale project funded by the European Research Council, ‘Women’s Transnational Theatre Networks, 1789-1914.’ She has held research Fellowships at Harvard University, the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington DC, and the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Centre, University of Texas (Austin).
2023: Professor Jason Rudy, The University of Maryland
Land Claims: Painting, Poetry, and Indigenous Resistance
The enormous canvases of Gordon Syron, the contemporary Indigenous Australian painter, make claims to post-Mabo land rights in Australia. They also help reframe earlier literary works that, in their own way, lay claim to Indigenous land rights. This talk will shift between Syron's paintings and an 1848 Sydney newspaper publication by the Irish immigrant Eliza Hamilton Dunlop, using each to show how genre and medium have been used as tools for anticolonial resistance.
About the Presenter
Jason Rudy is Professor of English at the University of Maryland (USA), and author of Imagined Homelands: British Poetry in the Colonies (2017) and Electric Meters: Victorian Physiological Poetics (2009). His research has been supported by both the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS). Since 2007 he has brought American students to Australia to study Australian literature, history, and culture, and his current book project is an authorized biography of the Indigenous Australian painter Gordon Syron.
2022: Professor Ann Vickery, Deakin University
Golden Penda Unhedged: Lyric, Care, and the Ecology of Dementia
How can lyric make us reconceptualise the language and cultural systems through which we approach and understand dementia? How might it challenge dominant metaphors that cast dementia as a site of spectrality, fear, and burden? Extending the bioethical approach of Michael Chapman, Jennifer Philip and Paul Komesaroff, this lecture considers how poetry challenges dementia as an external disease and can provide insights into it as a complex ecology involving institutions, individuals, language and meaning. Focusing on Queensland-based examples, it explores how poets have been attentive to the contexts and challenges of language in navigating a dementia ecology, including among First Nations and culturally and linguistically diverse communities.
About the Presenter
Ann Vickery is Professor of Writing and Literature at Deakin University. She is the author of Stressing the Modern: Cultural Politics in Australian Women’s Poetry (Salt, 2007) and Leaving Lines of Gender: A Feminist Genealogy of Language Writing (Wesleyan University Press, 2000). She is co-author of The Intimate Archive: Journeys through Private Papers (National Library of Australia, 2009) and co-editor of Poetry and the Trace (Puncher and Wattmann, 2013). She is the author of three poetry collections, with Bees Do Bother: An Antagonist’s Care Pack (Vagabond, 2021) being the most recent. She is currently editing The Cambridge Companion to Australian Poetry and co-editing The Cambridge History of Australian Poetry.
2021: Professor Frances Babbage, University of Sheffield
Playful Contestation: Classic Texts in Contemporary Performance
In this talk world leading adaptation theorist, Professor Frances Babbage who will be discussing Adaptation and the Australian Novel.
About the Presenter
Frances Babbage is Professor of Theatre and Performance in the School of English, University of Sheffield (UK). Her interest in practices and forms of theatrical adaptation has developed across her career. In her keynote address, she will discuss how theatre's full vocabularies (i.e. physical, scenographic, spatial, interactional, as well as verbal) are deployed to tackle and re-present literary texts, exploring the ways in which all such elements can be articulate in a voicing of – or a challenge to – the works that productions have appropriated. She will also examine the balancing act in adaptations that aim to deconstruct or critique aspects of their source text while often still upholding and celebrating some elements. The keynote will draw on a variety of examples, and in particular consider multiple contemporary treatments of Austen’s Pride & Prejudice. In so doing, she will place the concerns of the symposium in the wider context of the global adaptation industry.
2019: Cherry Smyth, University of Greenwich
Famished
Cherry Smyth's public lecture will take the form of a one-hour performance of Famished, with accompanying soundtrack of music by composer Ed Bennett and expanded singing by Lauren Kinsella to draw on the power of collective lament. Famished presents an innovative understanding of the Irish Famine and the postcolonial legacy for the Irish in Ireland and the diaspora. The polyvocal performance tackles how colonialism was instrumental in starving the Irish people and the silence generated by trauma and shame that ensued. Famished is dedicated to the Earl Grey Orphan Scheme of the late 1840s through which 4,114 Irish workhouse girls were sent to Australia. Only two ever returned. The performance will be followed by a Q&A.
About the Presenter
Cherry Smyth has been a poet for over twenty years, with a strong track record of award-winning publications.
Four key poetry collections have been published: Famished, Pindrop Press, 2019, Test, Orange, Pindrop Press, 2012, One Wanted Thing, Lagan Press, 2006 and When the Lights Go Up, Lagan Press, 2001. Cherry has also published one novel: Hold Still, Holland Park Press, London, 2013. In 2014-16 she held a Royal Literary Fund Fellowship; other awards include the Bundanon Artist’s Residency, Australia, 2010; followed by a residency at Chateau de Lavigny, Switzerland, 2008 and a Hawthorden Writing Fellowship, 2005. She received an Arts Council England Award and an Arts Council Northern Ireland Award to research and tour Famished in the UK and Ireland in 2019.
Historic List of S.W. Brooks Fellows
- 2026: Professor Porscha Fermanis, University College Dublin.
- 2025: Professor Sally Shuttleworth, University of Oxford
- 2024: Professor Kate Newey, University of Exeter
- 2023: Professor Jason Rudy, The University of Maryland
- 2022: Professor Ann Vickery, Deakin University
- 2021: Professor Frances Babbage, University of Sheffield
- 2020: Not awarded in 2020
- 2019: Cherry Smyth, University of Greenwich
- 2018: Professor Laura Levin, York University, Canada
- 2017: Professor Karen Manarin, Mount Royal University, Calgary
- 2016: Dr Alice Te Punga Somerville, Macquarie University, Sydney
- 2015: Not awarded in 2015
- 2014: Dr David Malouf, Australian Author
- 2013: Professor Deidre Shauna Lynch, University of Toronto
- 2012: Professor Sidonie Smith, University of Michigan
- 2011: Professor Valerie Traub, University of Michigan
- 2010: Professor Rita Felski, University of Virginia
- 2009: Professor Donald Sassoon, Queen Mary University of London
- 2008: Professor Stephen M. Fallon, University of Notre Dame
- 2007: Professor Derek Attridge, University of York
- 2006: Dr Tiffany Stern, University College, Oxford