Researcher

My Expertise

Australian literature, Australian refugee and migrant writing

Keywords

Fields of Research (FoR)

Literary studies, Australian literature (excl. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander literature)

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Biography

Brigitta Olubas is Professor of English. Primary area of research: Australian literature including diasporic, migrant and refugee writing. Her authorised biography of Shirley Hazzard, Shirley Hazzard: A Writing Life (Farrar, Straus & Giroux / Virago / Hachette Australia, 2022 https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374113377/shirleyhazzardawritinglife) was shortlisted for the Prime Minister's Literary Award for Nonfiction (2022), the Nib Literary...view more

Brigitta Olubas is Professor of English. Primary area of research: Australian literature including diasporic, migrant and refugee writing. Her authorised biography of Shirley Hazzard, Shirley Hazzard: A Writing Life (Farrar, Straus & Giroux / Virago / Hachette Australia, 2022 https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374113377/shirleyhazzardawritinglife) was shortlisted for the Prime Minister's Literary Award for Nonfiction (2022), the Nib Literary Award (2022), the Magarey Medal for Biography (2023), and the National Biography Award (2024).

Her most recent publications were both funded by an ARC Discovery grant: Hazzard & Harrower: The Letters (NewSouth Publishing, 2024, co-edited with Susan Wyndham https://unsw.press/books/hazzard-and-harrower/) and Expatriates of No Country: The Letters of Shirley Hazzard and Donald Keene (Columbia University Press, October 2024 https://cup.columbia.edu/book/expatriates-of-no-country/9780231560344)

She is currently working on a new biography, provisionally titled "Revenant: The Caribbean Lives of Jean Rhys" for Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

 


My Qualifications

BA (Hons 1) DipEd Tas, MA (Hons 1) Syd, PhD UNSW


My Research Activities

Other recent publications include a essays on Behrouz Boochani's No Friend But the Mountains for JASAL https://openjournals.library.sydney.edu.au/index.php/JASAL/article/view/13455and Columbia University Press's PublicBookshttps://www.publicbooks.org/we-forgot-our-names/, the edited Collected Stories of Shirley Hazzard (Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2021 https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374126483/collectedstories) an edition of Shirley Hazzard's non-fiction writings (Columbia University Press, 2016 https://cup.columbia.edu/book/we-need-silence-to-find-out-what-we-think/9780231173261 and two collections of essays, one on Elizabeth Harrower (Sydney University Press, co-edited with E McMahon https://sydneyuniversitypress.com/products/94710 and Antigone Kefala and New Australian Modernities (UWA Press 2021, co-edited with E McMahon https://uwap.uwa.edu.au/products/antigone-kefala-new-australian-modernities?srsltid=AfmBOor-m9sLUmXVDWtD9dV569j-ANq3Evq9BOwmGNePMl22xs3gqY-n).


My Research Supervision


Areas of supervision

Successful completions as primary or joint supervisor:

Penelope Stavrou, "'Redefining Yourself in some other terms': Reading/Weaving Self, Space and Art in the Oeuvre of Antigone Kefala"

Bonaventure Muzigirwa Munganga, "The Pollinating Mesh: The Ecological Thought in Indigenous Australian Speculative Fiction (2023 - joint supervisor)

June Owen, “A Biography of Marjorie Barnard” (2018 - primary supervisor)

Shaun Bell, “Writing the Hyphen: Queer Masculinities, Nationalism, and Literary Transnationalism” (2017 - primary supervisor)

Jacinta Kelly, “Counting bodies: the untempered spaces of Mina Loy” (2015 - primary supervisor)

Naomi Riddle, “‘A Pale Expectancy' - female mobility and the post-war space in the novels of Jessica Anderson, Shirley Hazzard and Elizabeth Harrower” (2015 - joint supervisor)

Marina Mihova, “Reading In-between Language, Image, and Things in the Writing of Lyn Hejinian” (2013 - primary supervisor)

Suzanne Stuart, “Steven Phone Home: the Cultural Ambivalences of Family in the Cinema of Steven Spielberg” (2012 - primary supervisor)

Darien Rozentals,”Monumental Amnesia: Reading the spatial narratives of contemporary urban landscapes” (2008 - primary supervisor)

Kate Livett, “Subjects, Objects and the fetishisms of modernity in the works of Gertrude Stein” (2006 - primary supervisor)

Paula Abood, “The Arab as Spectacle: Race, Representation and Gender in Popular Culture” (2007 - joint supervisor)

Rebecca Curran, “‘Internal Difference / Where the Meanings Are': A Theory of Productive Mourning” (2007 - joint supervisor)

Anthea Taylor, “Stones, ripples, waves: Refiguring The First Stone media event” (2005 - primary supervisor)

Marita Bullock, “Timely figurations: the dialectics of trash in the work of four Australian artists of the nineties” (2004 - joint supervisor)

Matthew Cleveland, “The Substrates of Transgression: A Žižekian Account of four Iceberg Slim novellas” (2001 - primary supervisor)

 Amanda Fernbach, “Synthetic selves, techno idols and the dominatrix : cultural fetishisms from decadence to the post-human” (2000 - joint supervisor)

 


My Engagement

Association for the Study of Australian Literature
Australian Universities Heads of English (AUHE)
Modern Language Association 
Editor, Live Crossings (magazine of creative practice by Indigenous and refugee practitioners)
Executive of the NSW English Association


My Teaching

Course Convenor:
ARTS1030 Forms of Writing: Literature, Genre Culture
ARTS2031 Australian Literature
ARTS2038 Popular Fictions: Novels and Their Afterlives

Areas of HDR supervision:
Currently supervising Honours and PhD research in the following areas: Australian literature, literary modernism, feminist theory and women's writing, literary and visual culture, transnational literary cultures and nineteenth-century fiction.

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Location

225, Level 2 Robert Webster

Contact

+61 2 9385 2303