School of English, Media and Performing Arts
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Current Research Projects

These are some of the Research Projects that members of Staff are working on at the moment:

English

  • Affect & Artificial Intelligence (Elizabeth Wilson)
  • An Edition of the Letters of Alan Paton (Peter Alexander)
  • Culture and Climate in Nineteenth-Century Literature - English and Amercian Writing about Southern Europe (Roslyn Jolly)
  • Early Modern English Lives (Philippa Kelly)
  • Neogoitating Whiteness: Reading Australian Indigenous Literature (Anne Brewster)
  • The Embodiment of Melancholy: A Feminist Analysis of Depression (Elizabeth Wilson)
  • The Theory and Practice of Early Modern Autobiography (Philippa Kelly)
  • Twenty-first Century Omniscience: Fiction After Postmodernism (Paul Dawson)

Media

Music

Theatre and Performance

  • A DVD-CD_Rom series examining the staging strategies of the Sydney Front (Clare Grant)
  • An architectural history of the Hotel de Bourgogne, France's first public theatre (John Golder)
  • Rehearsal practice in European theatre, c1590-c1850 (Joint project: John Golder (UNSW), Tiffany Stern (Oxford), Tim Fitzpatrick & Laura Ginters (Sydney))
  • A Work Table of Australian plays as part of the AusStage Gateway to the Australian Performing Arts (John McCallum)
  • A study of the work of director Barrie Kosky's theatrical work on the classics, Ovid and Euripides (John McCallum)
  • A new guide in the Routledge Performance Practitioners series on Bertolt Brecht’s theories and practices of performance making (Meg Mumford)
  • A study of Brecht’s approach to empathy, sympathy and identification (Meg Mumford)
  • A joint research project on contemporary Reality Theatres in Australia and Germany (Meg Mumford and Ulrike Garde)
  • Durational Aesthetics. On Time and Performance – a study of aspects of time and recurrence in media and video art, performance and installation. A book-length study of Australian Mike Parr's performance art entitled The Infinity Machine, which explores durational aspects of his work, is to be published by Schwartz City in April 2009 (Edward Scheer)
  • Multimedia Performance co authored with Rosie Klich (Palgrave, forthcoming 2009). Part of an ARC-funded project, this book examines various representational systems operating within Multimedia Performance and the creative potential for the use of digital technologies in performance (Edward Scheer)
  • The Performance Of Emotion In Media Art History. Part of an ARC-funded project, this research explores photographs by Oscar Rejlander and Guillaume-Benjamin Duchenne de Boulogne in his study, Mécanisme de la Physiognomie Humaine of 1862, and their resonances in different contexts, including the work of Charles Darwin (Edward Scheer)
  • A research network investigating the topic Performing the Future: new sites, institutions and organizations in world performance (Edward Scheer)
  • A research project on the ethnographies, performances and practices of contemporary cultural memory (Bryoni Trezise)
  • A research project on the dramaturgies and practices of contemporary Euro-American and Australian postdramatic performance (Bryoni Trezise)

Theatre and Performance Studies Research Profile

Theatre and Performance Studies is a centre for research into both Australasian and European performance, offering particular expertise in:

  • performance art
  • media art
  • contemporary performance
  • cultural memory
  • acting and rehearsal
  • Australian and European theatre history

It also specializes in creative practice-as-research, a field spearheaded by performance practitioner Clare Grant together with the Creative Practice and Research Unit – an innovative research laboratory supported by a team comprising technical, production and design staff and multi-purpose (including multi-media) spaces.

As well as holding 2 large ARC grants – one in Media Art, and the other in Australian Theatre – in 2009 TPS staff will publish 4 significant research outcomes, including books on the theatre of Bertolt Brecht (Routledge), Australian playwriting (Currency Press), and multi-media performance (Palgrave), and a DVD/CD-Rom series on the work of The Sydney Front. TPS staff also play a key role in the dissemination of research through their considerable contributions to national publishers, press and journals. Several staff write for the national performance publication RealTime. Two staff members are currently key players on the Currency House Editorial Board, and John Golder is editor of Currency House’s Platform Papers, a quarterly publication addressing pressing issues affecting the health of the contemporary performing arts
and arts industry. John McCallum, the award-winning and longest serving theatre critic in Australia, is an occasional critic on ABC radio and principal Sydney theatre reviewer for The Australian. TPS also co-manages Performance Paradigm, an interdisciplinary refereed journal that reflects contemporary performance research across a range of cultures and contexts, primarily in Asia and Australia. One member of staff, Edward Scheer has recently become the first Australian to be elected president of Performance Studies International, the largest conference and research network in performance studies in the world.

Film

  • Contemporary Black American cinema and on theories of time and the image (Jodi Brooks)
  • Hou Hsiao-hsien and Taiwan film history (Darrell Davis)
  • Survey of East Asian screen industries (Darrell Davis)
  • Staging and framing of comic performance in the 19th and early 20th centuries (Lisa Trahair)
  • Vision in cinema (Lisa Trahair)

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