Dr Heather Kerr

Biography/ Background

2000 - Lecturer level C, English Discipline, School of Humanities, University of Adelaide

1991 Lecturer (B) Department of English, University of Adelaide

1990 Lecturer (half-time), Department of English,
University of Melbourne

1990 Lecturer (sessional) Department of Humanities,
Victoria University of Technology, Footscray Institute

1990 Tutor (sessional) Department of English,
Monash University

1986-1989 Tutor (full-time), Department of English,
University of Melbourne

1986 Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Department of English, University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand

Qualifications

PhD, ‘Texts as Object and Metaphor in Shakespeare's Timon of Athens and
Titus Andronicus' , The Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham, UK 1981-1984

BA (Hons, First Class) Flinders University, South Australia 1976-1980

Awards & Achievements

Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Associate Dean. Higher Degrees, 2010

Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Dean's Prize for Postgraduate Supervision, 2009

Head of English 2004-2006

Vice Chancellor's Advanced Leadership Development Program  2006

University of Adelaide, Stephen Cole, The Elder, Prize for Excellence in Teaching, 1993

Postdoctoral Research Fellow, English Department, University of Otago 1986

Commonwealth Overseas Scholarship 1981-1984

Teaching Interests

Course convenor:

"Introduction to English: Ideas of the Real" (level 1)

"Rennaissance Writing" (advanced level)

"Passions" (advanced level)

Honours English and Creative Writing (semester 2)

Honours Thesis Writing Workshop

Contributing lecturer:

"Landmarks of English Literature" (level 1)

"Shakespeare" (level 1)

"Modernisms" (advanced level)

"The Question of Postmodernism: texts and issues" (advanced level)

"World Literatures" (advanced level)

"Victorian Literature and Society" (advanced level)

 

Current PhD Supervision.

Carly Norman, "Rene Girard and the Modern American 'Tragic' Novel

Madeleine Seys, "Fashioned Fictions and Textured Texts: Femininity and Narrative in Victorian Popular Literature"

Fiona O'Brien, "English Poetry and Visual Culture of the Dutch Wars, 1650-1670"

Emily Cock , ‘"The whore text": discourses of prostitution and pornography in non-dramatic English texts, 1660-1714'

Damien Marwood, ‘Art and the commodity in fictions by William Gaddis and films by Jean-Luc Godard'

Heather Stuart, ‘A verse novel and an exegesis on HD, ‘Self-Remembering', and the poetics of the verse novel'. Creative Writing

Jessica Wallace, ‘"Breathing Water" (a novel) and an exegesis on narcissism'. Creative Writing (co-supervisor)

Current MA Supervision

Marion Jane Nelson, Christopher Marlowe

DOCTORATES CONFERRED

2010 Guy Carney, ‘The language of Cosmogony: Plato's Timaeus and Augustine's Confessions'

2009 Michelle Phillipov, ‘"A Nihilistic Dreamboat to Negation"?: The Cultural Study of Death Metal and the Limits of Political Criticism' (co supervisor)

2007 Lucy Potter, ‘Re-Reading Marlowe's Dido'

2007 Christine Knight, ‘"The Food Nature Intended You to eat": Nutritional Primitivism in Low-Carbohydrate Diet Discourse' (with co-supervision from CSIRO)
(Commendation)

2005 Brodie Beales, ‘Becoming-Dionysian: art, exploration and the human condition in the works of Rimbaud, Burroughs and Bacon'

2005 Moya Costello, ‘Harriet Chandler'. A novel and exegesis. Creative Writing

2004 Heather Thoday, ‘Lived Spaces of Representation: Thirdspace and Janette Turner Hospital' (co supervisor)

2003 Ray Tyndale, ‘Farmwoman', a poetic work and exegesis. Creative Writing

2001 Simon Robb, ‘Fictocritical Sentences' (Commendation)

2001 Paul Lobban, ‘Inhabited Spaces: Writing as a Practice in Early Modern England: Margaret Hobby, Eleanor Davies, Katherine Philips'

1999 Patrick Niehus, ‘Charting the Undiscovered Country : religious discourses and the articulation of Renaissance subjectivity'

1999 Linda Marie Walker, ‘Fictocriticism: Mata Hari'. External supervision panel member for University of Western Sydney, Nepean

Temporary supervisions: PhD conferred

2005 Mark Caldicott, ‘The Post-Expressivist Turn : four American novels and the author-function' (co-supervisor for Dr Catherine Driscoll at University of Sydney in final year)

2000 Stephen Mc Kenzie, ‘Conquest landmarks and the medieval world image: a study in cartography, literature and mythology' (for Associate Professor Tom Burton during study leave)

1997 Jyanni Steffensen, ‘Queering Freud: Textual (re)configurations of lesbian desire and sexuality' (for Associate Professor Kay Schaffer, Women's Studies, during her study-leave)

1995 Cally Guerin, ‘Sara Maitland and Michele Roberts: religion and spirituality in contemporary British women's fiction' (final year only)

1994 Suzanne Roberts, ‘Representation of Chivalry: gender relationships and the roles of women in the plays of James Shirley's' (for Associate Professor Alan Brissenden, during his study-leave)

MASTERS CONFERRED

2008 Alison Wood, ‘The Poetics of Libretti: Reading the Opera Works of Gwen Harwood and Larry Sitsky' (Commendation)

1995 Mark Badger, ‘Maps, Method and Meaning: the problematics of interpretation in Eco's The Name of the Rose and Foucault's Pendulum'

1995 Pamela Illert, ‘Kristevan theory: meanings, contexts, feminist "uses"'

1993 Kym McCauley, ‘Another Kind of Love: the dynamics of love and power between men in the fiction of DH Lawrence'

Research Interests

I am an Associate Investigator in the "Change" program of the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions. I have been working in the area of passion, affect, emotion, feeling, and mood and their traditions of representation, since 2001, in various ways. I convene an advanced level  course called "Passions" that explores the representation of passions and emotions in the western literary tradition.

My work on sympathy and empathy in contemporary cross-cultural research in Australia sought to trace the afterlife of 18th Century Sentimentalism in the discourse of empathic mourning and elegiac regret that pervades an important and influential strand of fictocritical writing. My current fictocritical work is on fabric and feeling, especially the use of empathic fabric in visual art practices. My interest in cognitive schema and affect includes strands on Early Modern drama, for example, Shakespeare's Othello and The Winter's Tale. These strands are centred on the representation of complex or "mixed emotion", exploring the points at which feelings cannot be named and thus remain "complicated" and potentially multivalent.

I am interested in the different regimes of representation that make passion, emotion and feeling available to us in a number of cultural practices (drama, poetry, sculpture, photography, film and theory.) I am working on transparency and the early Modernist disparagement of "the chiffon of sentimentalism" for a collection of women's experimental writing. My essay draws on Early Modern materials to establish the spectrum of ideas around which Sentimentalism continues to cluster in contemporary life. I am interested in how feelings are enlisted in the service of moral ideas (ecology, emancipation, justice, etc).

I am broadly interested in interdisciplinary methodologies and have worked occasionally with ideas from architecture, especially around the representation of space and structure in literary texts (Early Modern poetry; 20th Century children's literature and the architectural toy.) My interest is in cultural investments in performative selves imagined in particular architectural spaces.

I maintain an active interest in the inter-relationships between rhetoric, drama and law in the Early Modern period, with special reference to the handling of circumstancial evidence, the subject of my PhD studies of Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus at the University of Birmingham, and of my Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Otago. A recent essay in this field is "Romancing the Handbook: Scenes of Detection in Arden of Faversham". I am currently working on an edited collection of essays about "Fama", gossip and rumour in the Early Modern period with Dr Claire Walker and Dr Helen Payne (History).

My work on the late 18th century English poet Charlotte Turner Smith makes special reference to changing representations and cultural perceptions of "melancholy" and forms of literary "elegy". A recent essay, on "Melancholy Botany: Charlotte Smith's Bioregional Imaginary" is forthcoming in a collection on the bioregional imagination, edited by Cheryl Glotfelty et al, with University of Georgia Press (2012).

This continues my interest in the interplay between sensibility and science, especially the problems of "scaling up" local and particular instances of feelings and facts in the service of, for example, shared "fellow feeling", cosmopolitan citizenship and affective communities that transcend geographic and political boundaries. My current project is about the function and effects of "Fancy" as a faculty of the 18th century imagination that performs some of the cultural labour of "scaling up", moving between the categories of particular and the general (in social and scientific discourses, especially the literary interest in inter-subjective empathy and sympathy and the practice of botanical taxonomy).

I am writing a commisioned essay on Charlotte Smith's Elegiac Sonnets (forthcoming 2012). A further essay, based on a recent conference paper, concerns the emotional geography of Beachy Head in Sussex, and Charlotte Smith's topographic poem about it: "Figuring Sympathy: Charlotte Turner Smith's 'Beachy Head'".  The research focussed on Beachy Head's  contradictory "emotion scripts" includes an essay on "Richard Jefferies''The Breeze on Beachy Head' and the Potent Medicines of Nature" in preparation. 

In September 2012 I will co-convene a research 'collaboratory' for the Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotion, with Professor David Lemmings and Associate Professor Robert Phiddian. The focus of the multidisciplinary event is 'The Authenticity of Emotions: Sceptical and Sympathetic Sociability in the 18th century british Public Sphere'.

The afterlives of 18th Century Sentimentalism.
Fictocriticism
Charlotte Turner Smith's poetry
Ecocriticism and its practices
Literature and architecture
Early Modern English drama and legal history 

Publications

Co-edited Books

Fama and Her Sisters: Gossip and Rumour in Early Modern Europe. Edited with Claire Walker and Helen Payne. Under contract, Brepols 2012.

Projections of Britain in the United States of America, Australia and New Zealand: 1900-1950. Edited with Dr Lawrence Warner. Lythrum Press, 2008. (50%)

The Space Between: Australian Women Writing Fictocriticism. Edited with Amanda Nettelbeck. University of Western Australia Press, 1998. (50%)

Shakespeare: World Views. Edited with Robin Eaden and Madge Mitton. Univ of Delaware Press, 1996 (40%)

Shakespeare and the World Elsewhere. Proceedings: Australian And New Zealand Shakespeare Association Conference 'Shakespeare Outside England', February 1992, Edited with Robin Eaden and Madge Mitton. Flinders University Press, 1993. (40%)

Edited Journals

Cultural Studies Review 12.1 (2006) Special issue on Ecologies, co-edited with Dr Emily Potter (50%)

Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 13. 3 (1999) ‘Postcoloniality/Cultural Studies: Representing Difference.' Guest editorship with Associate Professor Kay Schaffer (50%)

Southern Review, General Editor vols 26, numbers 1,2,3 (1993) and 27, numbers 1,2,3,4 (1994).

Refereed Articles

‘Fictocritical Empathy and the Work of Mourning'. Cultural Studies Review volume 9, number 1 (2003). 180-200.

 ‘Sympathetic Topographies' Parallax volume 7, number 2 (2001). 107-26.

‘Prosthetic Architectures,' Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies volume 15, number 1 (2001). 97-102.

‘Textual Politics in Titus Andronicus: "Record", Maxim and an Icon of Justice', AUMLA 81 (May 1994): 1-19.

‘Aaron's Letter and Acts of Reading: The Text as Evidence in Titus Andronicus', AUMLA 77 (May 1992): 1-19

‘Titus Andronicus: Models of Textuality and Authorship', Cahiers Elisabethains: Late Medieval and Renaissance Studies 41 (April 1992): 17-32.

‘Sir Thomas Elyot, "Marcus Geminus" and a Comedy for Elizabeth I at Oxford, 1566', AUMLA 73 (November 1990): 101-115

Thomas Garter's Susanna: "Pollicie" and "True Reporte"', AUMLA 72 (May 1989): 183-202

 Refereed Book Chapters

"Melancholy Botany: Charlotte Smith's Bioregional Imaginary". The Bioregional Imagination: Literature, Ecology, and Place. Edited by Tom Lynch, Cheryll Glotfelty, and Karla Armbruster. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Forthcoming March 2012.

"Romancing the Handbook: Scenes of Detection in Arden of Faversham"
'This Earthly Stage': World and Stage in Late Medieval and Early Modern England. Ed. Brett D. Hirsch and Christopher Wortham. Turnhout: Brepols, 2010. 173-192.  Print. Cursor Mundi, 13.

‘Perverse Writing - Maternity and Monarchy: Fictocriticism and Exorbitant, Plural Bodies,' in Gender Reconstructions; Pornography and Perversions in Literature and Culture, Susan Bernardo, Cindy Carlson and Robert Mazzola, eds. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002. 148-66.

‘Trembling Hyphen/Shaking Hinge; Margaret Cavendish and Queer Literary Subjectivity,' in Women Writing 1550-1750. Jo Wallwork and Paul Salzman, eds. La Trobe: Meridian, 2001. 215-36.

‘Titus Andronicus: Models of Textuality and Authorship.' Shakespearean Criticism, volume 43, ‘Violence in Shakespeare's Works.' Michelle Lee and Kathy D. Darrow, eds. Detroit and London: Gale, 1999. 186-195.

 Refereed Review Essays

The “Real Lesson of an Education in Visual Culture”’ Postcolonial Studies volume 4, number 1 (2001) 91-104. Review of Nicholas Thomas and Diane Losche, eds, Double Vision: Art Histories and Colonial Histories in the Pacific. Cambridge: CUP, 1999, and Anne Maxwell, Colonial Photography and Exhibitions: Representations of the ‘Native’ and the Making of European Identities. London and NY: Leicester University Press, 1999.

‘Shakespeare ‑ Postcoloniality ‑ Adelaide, 1999.’ Postcolonial Studies volume 3, number 1 (April 2000): 441-449.  Review of Ania Loomba and Martin Orkin, eds. Post-Colonial Shakespeares (Routledge, 1998).

 

‘ “My Mother Resides in the Beating Artery”: Engendering Voices for Medieval and Early Modern Studies.’ Australian Feminist Studies vol 12, number 25 (April 1997): 15-2.  Review of Elizabeth Harvey, Ventriloquized Voices: Feminist  Theory and English Renaissance Texts (Routledge [1992], rpt. 1995) and Andrew Lynch and Philippa Maddern, eds. Venus and Mars: Engendering Love and War in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Univ of WA Press, 1995).

Commissioned work (unrefereed)

Catalogue Essay for Jam Factory exhibition ‘United Notions', jointly authored with Lisa Harms (July 2003)

‘Notes for an impossible electronic writing: no sublime "white despair", no "architectural object", no "irreplaceable china dogs" (Genette).' Installation and website for Lux: notes towards an electronic writing practice September 1999 at Contemporary Art Centre of South Australia. Archived on line Published as limited edition book (/50). Curator/editor Teri Hoskin.

‘Therapeutics.' Paper for Ensemble Logic project. Electronic Writing Research Ensemble. 2.9.98. Book and CD, ed. Teri Hoskin and Simon Robb.

‘Prosthetics'. Broadsheet 27.4 (Summer 1998): 10,11.

Un-refereed Conference Proceedings

‘Fictocriticism, the "Doubtful Category" and "The Space Between"'. Crossing Lines: Formations of Australian Culture. Eds. Caroline Guerin, Philip Butterss, Amanda Nettelbeck. Association for the Study of Australian Literature, 1996. 93-6

Recent reviews

Review of Imtiaz Habib, Black Lives in the English Archives, 1500-1677: Imprints of the Invisible. (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008). Parergon 2011.

Review of Jennifer C. Vaught, Masculinity and Emotion in Early Modern English Literature. (Women and Gender in the Early Modern World), (Aldershot, Ashgate, 2008) Parergon 25.2 (2008): 188-189.

Review of Sylvia Bowerbank, Speaking for Nature: Women and Ecologies of Early Modern England (London and Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004) Parergon 24.2 (2007): 165-167

 

Professional Associations

Co-convenor, Early Modern Reading Group, University of Adelaide

Association for the Study of Literature, Environment, and Culture -ANZ

Australian and New Zealand Association for Medieval and Early Modern Studies

Australian and New Zealand Shakespeare Association

Centre for British Studies

Cultural Studies Association of Australia

Network for Early European Research

2008- Editorial Board, Altitude

1995 - 2001 Member, Editorial Board, Southern Review.

1993 and 1994 General Editor Southern Review

1992-6 Editorial Committee Australian and New Zealand Shakespeare Association

1987 Editorial Committee Antithesis

Entry last updated: Friday, 4 Nov 2011