Texas Christian University

Faculty Member, English

Instructor

Liberal Arts

Thesis Title: Between the City and the Bush: Suburbia in the Contemporary Australian Novel

About

I am a faculty member in the Department of English at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, TX. I was born and raised in Australia, where I attended Monash University and the University of Ballarat, graduating with a B.A. in 1995. I completed both my M.A. and Ph.D. in Literature from Western Michigan University. My dissertation, "Between the City and the Bush: Suburbia in the Contemporary Australian Novel," examined eleven Australian novels published from the 1960s to the present, including works by Patrick White, George Johnston, David Malouf, Gerald Murnane, Peter Carey, Tim Winton, Melissa Lucashenko and A.L. McCann. My criticism and poetry have been published in North America, Europe, Australia, Asia and the South Pacific. I serve as the President of the American Association of Australasian Literary Studies (AAALS). I co-edited (with Jean-Francois Vernay) a special issue of Antipodes (23.1) entitled Fear in Australian Literature and Film, published in June 2009. My edited collection of essays, Postcolonial Issues in Australian Literature, was published in 2010 by Cambria Press. With Rebecca Weaver-Hightower, I co-edited a special issue of The Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies, focusing on Australian literature (December 2011). I am the author of two poetry chapbooks, Symptoms of Homesickness (Picaro Press, 2010) and Suburban Exile (Picaro Press, 2011), and the recipient of a 2010-2011 Emerging Writers Grant from the Literature Board of the Australia Council for the Arts.