Keynote speakers
Fiona Kelly McGregor is a writer, essayist, and art critic. She has published eight books, including her most recent novel, Iris, which has been nominated for prestigious awards such as the Miles Franklin Award, the NSW Premier's Award, and the Stella Prize. Notably, her novel Indelible Ink won the Age Book of the Year and was published in French by Actes-Sud. McGregor's non-fiction works include the essay collection Buried Not Dead, which was shortlisted for the VPLA, the groundbreaking photo-essay A Novel Idea, and the travel memoir Strange Museums. In addition to her literary achievements, McGregor is known for her involvement in performance art and event curation. Her commentary on literature and art can be found in publications such as The Saturday Paper, Sydney Review of Books, Sydney Morning Herald, Art Monthly, and more. When in Sydney, McGregor lives and works on Gadigal country.
Kate Mitchell (ANU) is Director of the ANU Research School of Humanities and the Arts and Professor of Literary Studies, in the School of Literature, Languages and Linguistics, ANU. Her research is focused on neo-Victorian fiction and film and contemporary historical recollection in literature and film more generally, including fiction and creative non-fiction. Her work examines the role of fictional narratives in creating public memory of contested, marginalised or occluded pasts; the ways that 'memory' travels through time and space, especially via novels, film and television; and the ethics - and creative possibilities - involved in fictionalising past lives and events. How can fiction be used to speak the unspeakable, in the past and today? She is author of "History and Cultural Memory in Neo-Victorian Fiction: Victorian Afterimages"; co-editor of Reading Historical Fiction: the revenant and remembered past; and her articles on historical fiction have appeared in journals including Neo-Victorian Studies, Australian Literary Studies, Victoriographies, College Literature and in a number of edited collections. Her current work examines the use of art and the figure of the artist in contemporary fiction about the Victorian period, including the representation of the Pre-Raphaelites, Impressionists and other artists and their work.
Ronan McDonald (Melbourne University) holds the Gerry Higgins Chair of Irish Studies at the University of Melbourne. He has research interests in Irish and Irish-Australian literature, the history of criticism and the value of the humanities and has published widely in these areas. He is Chief-Investigator, with Maggie Nolan and Kath Bode on an ARC Discovery Project, 2023-25 entitled ‘Close Relations: Irishness in Australian Literature,’. He is the series editor for Cambridge Themes in Irish Literature and Culture.
Maggie Nolan (University of Queensland) is the Director of AustLit and an Associate Professor of Digital Cultural Heritage in the School of Communication and Arts at the University of Queensland. Her research interests include reading and reception, literary imposture, contemporary Indigenous literature and representations of race and ethnicity in Australian literary culture. With Kath Bode and Ronan McDonald, she is looking at Irishness in Australian literature using both traditional and computational approaches.
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Nicholas Birns (New York University) teaches at New York University, He is co-editor of The Cambridge Companion to the Australian Novel (Cambridge University Press, 2023). His previous books include (Broadview, 2010) and The Hyperlocal in Eighteenth and Nineteenth-Century Literary Space (Lexington, 2019). He has previously written on Anglo-Russian literary connections in Victorian Studies, Victorians Institute Journal, and the Brigid Rooney-edited anthology Scenes of Reading. He has published in journals including MLQ, Partial Answers, and Studies in Romanticism as well as in The New York Times Book Review and other general-interest periodicals. He co-edited the American Journal of Australian and New Zealand studies, Antipodes, from 2001 to 2018
Meg Brayshaw (University of Sydney) is the John Rowe Lecturer in Australian Literature at the University of Sydney. Her research interests include the twentieth and twenty-first century Australian novel, modernism, women's writing and literary engagements with place, environment and climate. At Sydney University Press she serves as editor of the Sydney Studies in Australian Literature series.
Kate Cantrell (University of Southern Queensland) is a Senior Lecturer in Writing, Editing, and Publishing at the University of Southern Queensland. Her research specialisation is contemporary representations of trauma in Australian literature and media, and narrative depictions of illness, immobility, and displacement, particularly in works of children’s and young adult literature. Her short stories, creative non-fiction, and poetry appear in highly esteemed magazines and journals, such as Overland, Meanjin, and Westerly, among others.
Paul Genoni (Curtin University) is an Adjunct Associate Professor with the School of Media, Creative Arts and Social Inquiry at Curtin University. He is the author and editor of several books on Australian literary and cultural studies, including co-author (with Tanya Dalziell) of Half the Perfect World: Writers, Dreamers and Drifters on Hydra, 1955-1964. He is a former President of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature.
Jessica Gildersleeve, FHEA (University of Southern Queensland) is Professor of English Literature and Associate Head of School (Research) at the University of Southern Queensland. She is the author and editor of several books, including The Routledge Companion to Australian Literature (2021), and is the current President of the Australian University Heads of English (AUHE).
Catherine Kevin (Flinders University) is an Associate Professor at Flinders University who teaches and researches in the fields of Australian history and feminist history, particularly Indigenous-settler relations, the politics and experience of the reproductive body and gendered violence. She has published widely on these topics, including her book Dispossession and the Making of Jedda: Hollywood in Ngunnawal Country which was published in 2020 (Anthem Press).
Julieanne Lamond (ANU) is Associate Professor of English and Head of the School of Literature, Languages and Linguistics at ANU, and co-editor of the journal Australian Literary Studies. Her research focuses on literary reception, especially in the Australian context. Her monograph, Lohrey, was published by Melbourne UP in 2022.
Brigid Magner (RMIT) is Associate Professor in Literary Studies and co-Director of the non/fictionLab at RMIT University. Born in Aotearoa, she has been writing about transtasman literature for the last two decades. Her book Locating Australian Literary Memory was published in 2020.
Dashiell Moore (University of Sydney) is an early career researcher with research interests in world literature, island studies, and postcolonial theory. He has published scholarly articles in the leading journals of these fields, including Textual Practice and ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies of Literature. His upcoming book, The Literary Mirroring of Aboriginal Australia and the Caribbean, examines the relationship between Indigeneity and creolisation in Aboriginal Australian and Caribbean literature, appearing with Oxford University Press in February, 2024.
Roger Osborne (James Cook University) is Associate Professor of English Literature at James Cook University, Cairns campus. He is co-author of Australian Books and Authors in the American Marketplace, 1840s–1940s and author of The Life of Such is Life.
Eva Phillips is an MCW student at University of Sydney. She is researching the poetics of printmaking in Australian print culture and was shortlisted for the 2023 Thomas Shapcott Award.
Nycole Prowse, AFHEA (University of Southern Queensland) teaches into the English Literature program at the University of Southern Queensland. She is a poet and playwright and has 30 years’ experience in teaching English Literature at tertiary level and in the creation and production of theatre and literary projects and festivals in Australia, Japan, China, the UK, and the Middle East. She is the author and editor of Intervening Spaces: Respatialisation and the Body (Brill 2018) and Heroin(e) Habits: Potential and Possibility in Female Drug Literature (Gylphi 2018).
Stacey Roberts is a PhD candidate in English and Theatre Studies at the University of Melbourne. Her thesis examines the representation of working-class women in twentieth-century Australian women’s fiction.
Brigid Rooney (University of Sydney) is an Associate Professor (Affiliate) at the University of Sydney where she taught Australian literature and Australian studies. Her research publications focus on the role of Australian literature in figuring space and place and in shaping cultural and national debate. She is the author of Literary Activists: Writer-Intellectuals and Australian Public Life (2009) and Suburban Space, The Novel and Australian Modernity (2018). She is co-editor with Fiona Morrison of Time, Tide and History: Eleanor Dark’s Fiction, forthcoming with Sydney University Press.
Monique Rooney (ANU) teaches literature, film and new media in the English Program, School of Literature, Languages and Linguistics, ANU. In 2023, she was Nancy Keesing Research Fellow at the State Library of New South Wales, and she is preparing to write a literary biography of Ruth Park.
Michelle J. Smith (Monash University) is an Associate Professor in literary studies at Monash University, Australia. Her most recent monograph is Consuming Female Beauty:British Literature and Periodicals, 1840–1914 (Edinburgh University Press). She is the author of two books on the history of children’s literature, including From Colonial to Modern: Transnational Girlhood inCanadian, Australian, and New Zealand Children’s Literature, 1840–1940 (2018; co-authored with Kristine Moruzi and Clare Bradford). She has also co-authored seven edited collections in the fields of children’s and Victorian literature, including The Edinburgh History of Children’s Periodicals (2024) and Literary Cultures and Nineteenth-Century Childhoods (Palgrave, 2024).
Eve Vincent is chair of anthropology in the Macquarie School of Social Sciences. Her books include Who Cares? Life on Welfare in Australia (MUP, 2023).
Jessica White (University of South Australia) is the author of the novels A Curious Intimacy and Entitlement, and a hybrid memoir about deafness, Hearing Maud. Her short fiction and essays have appeared in Australian and international literary journals, and she has won awards, funding and residencies. Jessica is currently a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing and Literature at the University of South Australia.
