Nicole Moore is Professor in English and Media Studies at UNSW Canberra. From September 2022 to July 2023 she was the Visiting Professor of Australian Studies in the Centre for American and Pacific Studies at the University of Tokyo. From 2018-2022 she was Associate Dean for UNSW Canberra's Special Collections, fostering research, curation and partnerships utilising world-class manuscript materials and rare books.

Her main research interests include Australian literature broadly, comparative literature, the cultural Cold War, and book history, with a special interest in censorship. Her 2012 book The Censor's Library: Uncovering the Lost History of Australia's Banned Books won the Walter McCrae Russell award from the Association for the Study of Australian Literature and was shortlisted for a Queensland Literary Award, the Penny Pether prize from the Australian Law, Literature and the Humanities Association, and the Prime Minister's Literary Award in Australian History. Recent edited collections pursue the topics of global literary censorship, Australian literature in the German Democratic Republic, and teaching Australian and New Zealand literature. Her research pursues issues at stake in the political cultures of reading and writing, and the complex relations of literature, governance and history within and across national boundaries.  

Current Projects

An ARC Future Fellowship enabled her biography of the prominent Australian writer Dorothy Hewett, which she is currently completing for Melbourne University Press. 

A new ARC Discovery Project with Dr Christina Spittel funds a history of the mid-century publisher the Australasian Book Society, exploring the exceptional impact of this breakthrough literary endeavour in the broader context of Australia's cultural Cold War.

Nicole edits the Studies in Australian Literature and Culture book series at Anthem Press (London). She is a member of the editorial boards of Australian Literary Studies, Hecate: A Journal of Interdisciplinary Women's Studies, the Journal of Australian Studies, the Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature (JASAL) and Studies in Australasian Cinema, and acts as a referee for various national and international presses, journals, and research funding bodies. Prof. Moore has held visiting fellowships at the Menzies Centre, Kings College London; the Faculty of English, University of Cambridge; the National Archives of Australia, and the Humanities Research Centre at the Australian National University.

Research Supervision

To inquire about supervision of higher degree research, please contact Professor Moore on n.moore@unsw.edu.au. 

Recently awarded PhDs: 

Dr Sandeep Singh - Poetry, postcolonialism and the Cold War in South East Asia: Four case studies

Dr Gayani Ranawake - Effective communication in contemporary science writing

Dr Priyanka Shivadas - A comparative study of contemporary Indigenous literature in Australia and India

For her Engagement story please click