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.
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
- 2022: Professor Ann Vicery, Deakin University
- 2021: Professor Frances Babbage, University of Sheffield
- 2020: Not awared 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