Members

Biography

Chelsea Avard holds a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Adelaide. Her thesis consisted of a novel and fictocritical exegesis exploring the relationship between narrative structure, point of view and ekphrastic strategies in the production of literary fiction. Chelsea co-edited the Wakefield anthology The Body, and her short fiction and poetry have appeared in publications including The Sleepers Anthology. She has taught across the Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Adelaide since 2009.

Current research

Chelsea's central research interests focus on the relationship between word and image; she is currently working on a project exploring the ekphrastic drive in contemporary Australian literary fiction.

Research interests

Collaborative writing and research; contemporary Australian literature; creative non-fiction; fictocritical writing; interdisciplinary research; ekphrasis and interart relations; exegetical writing; experimental fiction; quantum mechanical models for the reading and production of literary fiction; the representation of time, identity, sexuality, perspective and perception; representations of suicide and suicide bereavement.

Publications

Biography

Professor Mark Carroll is Associate Dean (International & Engagement) for the Faculty of Arts, University of Adelaide. An active classical and pop music performer, his research activities range from music and politics (Music and Ideology in Cold War Europe [Cambridge: CUP, 2003]) to Percy Grainger (Self-Portrait of Percy Grainger, with Malcolm Gillies and David Pear [New York: OUP, 2006) and studies in contemporary popular music. Mark is a noted authority on Jean-Paul Sartre’s literary and political uses of music, which have appeared in OUP’s flagship journal Music & Letters. Mark is series editor of the Ashgate Library of Essays on Music, Politics and Society (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2012).

Mark works closely with The Australian Ballet, and was Chief Investigator for a large Australian Research Council Linkage project that brought together the Elder Conservatorium, The Australian Ballet and the National Library, in order to trace the impact of tours to Australia by the Ballets Russes during the 1930s. More recently, Mark has secured ARC funding for Beyond the Stage Linkage project, which brings together the State Library of SA, Adelaide Symphony Orchestra, State Opera of South Australia, State Theatre Company and Adelaide Festival Centre, for the purpose of interrogating the impact of World War One on the South Australian performing arts.

Publications Staff Directory

Biography

(Brian was Co-Director of the Centre in 2011-2012, Director in 2013-2014 and committee member from 2015 to 2019.)
Brian Castro was educated at the University of Sydney and has worked in Australian, French and Hong Kong universities as a teacher and writer. He is the author of ten novels and a volume of essays on writing and culture.

His novels have won a number of state and national prizes including the Patrick White Literary Award, the Australian/Vogel Literary Award, The Age Fiction Prize, the National Book Council Prize for Fiction, four Victorian Premier's awards, two NSW Premier's awards and the Queensland Premier's Award for Fiction. He has delivered keynote addresses at major conferences in Shanghai, Vienna, Paris, Toulouse, Hong Kong and Kyoto. He has been a Literature Board member on the Australia Council.

For many years he was the literary reviewer for Asiaweek magazine. In 2006 he held the position of Macgeorge Fellow at the University of Melbourne. In 2007-8 he was the Professorial Research Fellow in Creative Writing at the University of Melbourne. He is currently on the management committee of Creative Writing at the University of Adelaide.

PUBLICATIONS STAFF DIRECTORY WEBSITE 

Anne Cawrse is a composer of solo, chamber, orchestral and vocal works. She completed her PhD in Composition in 2008 at the University of Adelaide, studying primarily with Graeme Koehne. Anne’s penchant for text setting has made her the most commissioned composer of the Adelaide Chamber Singers (five commissions since 2005) and a highly revered art song composer, with notable performances by Greta Bradman, Lorina Gore, Katie Noonan and the Australian Vocal Ensemble, Robert Macfarlane, Cheryl Pickering, Kate Macfarlane and Bethany Hill. Her orchestral and chamber commissions include works for the Adelaide, Tasmanian and Melbourne Symphony Orchestras, the Australian String Quartet, Plexus Ensemble, the Benaud Trio, Zephyr Quartet, Sharon and Slava Grigoryan, Alex Tsiboulski, Claire Edwardes and the Adelaide Wind Orchestra. Anne’s works receive regular performances by Adelaide new music champions Various People Inc. and The Firm New Music series.

Anne’s first opera, Innocence, was developed with Singular Productions and the State Opera Company of South Australia with support from an Arts SA Major Commission grant. Anne has three times been a finalist in the APRA/Australian Music Centre Art Music Awards, most recently in 2021 for her John Bishop Memorial Commission work A Room of Her Own, composed for the Australian String Quartet. In 2018 she won the State award for Work of the Year for her choral work On Earth as in Heaven. In 2021, Anne made her curatorial debut with ‘She Speaks’, an all-female composer mini-festival presented by the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra.

Anne is currently a casual lecturer in composition at the Elder Conservatorium, and tutor for the 2021 and 2022 Australian Youth Orchestra Composition programs.

Website

Biography

Carl Crossin is well known and respected throughout Australia as a choral conductor, educator and clinician. A graduate of the Sydney Conservatorium of Music and the University of Adelaide, he has also undertaken specialist choral conducting studies in the United States and Britain.

As an educator, Carl has taught music extensively at both secondary and tertiary levels of education. Following fourteen years at Brighton High School Special Music Centre and nine years at Flinders Street School of Music, he joined the staff of the Elder Conservatorium in 2002, where he has served as Head of Choral Music, Conductor of several choirs including the Elder Conservatorium Chorale, Head of Academic Studies, Deputy Director and Acting Director of the Conservatorium. Carl served as Director of the Elder Conservatorium of Music from 2010-2014.

Carl is Founder/Director of Adelaide Chamber Singers, with whom he has toured Britain, Europe, North America and South-East Asia, won several awards for performance and CD recordings, and represented Australia and major international choral and music education symposia and festivals. He has had extensive experience as a choral conductor and clinician throughout Australia and has been the conductor of a wide variety of choirs in Adelaide over the past 30 years, including the Elder Conservatorium Chorale, Voiceworks and the Adelaide Symphony Chorus. Carl has also guest conducted the National Youth Choir of Australia on several occasions (with whom he toured New Zealand), the Sydney Philharmonia and the Melbourne Chorale.

As a composer and arranger, Carl has written mostly for voices, and his choral works have been performed by a number of Adelaide based ensembles including, Eve Vocal Trio, Syntony, Adelaide Voices, Elder Conservatorium Chorale and Adelaide Chamber Singers. Many of his choral arrangements have found their way into the repertoire of a wide variety of local, interstate and overseas choirs. Requiem is his first work for orchestra, chorus and soloist.

Carl was awarded an OAM for his services to music in 2007.

Publications Staff Directory

Luke Dollman is Senior Lecturer in Conducting and Deputy Director at the Elder Conservatorium of Music, The University of Adelaide. He has conducted throughout Europe and Australasia, working with orchestras such as the London Philharmonic, Netherlands Radio Philharmonic, Royal Scottish National Orchestra, BBC National Orchestra of Wales, Helsinki Philharmonic, Monte Carlo Philharmonic, Nordwestdeutsche Philharmonie, Halle Staatskapelle, Lausanne Sinfonietta, and all professional orchestras in Australia and New Zealand. In the field of opera he has been a regular guest at the Finnish National Opera, and has also worked for Opera Australia, the State Opera of South Australia, and the Netherlands Opera. Luke is a graduate of the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki and furthered his studies at the Aspen Festival of Music and Accademia Chigiana.

Biography

Dorothy Driver was born in South Africa and now resides in Australia. She is Professor of English at University of Adelaide, and Emerita Professor at University of Cape Town, where she taught for twenty years, and where she retains an Honorary Research Associateship. She has also held visiting positions at University of Chicago and Stanford University.

Her research area covers the constructions and representations of gender and race in South African writing.

She is currently writing a book on Bessie Head for the Writers and their Work series (Northcote Press) and co-writing with Meg Samuelson of University of Cape Town a literary study entitled Land, Sea and City in South African Writing (Oxford University Press).

Publications Staff Directory

Biography

Natalie Edwards is Associate Professor/Reader in French. She holds a PhD from Northwestern University, USA, and specialises in contemporary French and Francophone literature. She focuses on the work of minority authors, including female, migrant, exiled and refugee writers, and on the genres of life writing and testimony. Her work engages with transnational, transcultural and translingual representations of identity. She has written two monographs: Shifting Subjects: Plural Subjectivity in Francophone Women's Autobiography (2011) and Voicing Voluntary Childlessness: Narratives of Non-Mothering in French (2016). She has edited 10 volumes on French and Francophone literature, including Textual and Visual Selves: Photography and Film in French Autobiography (2011) and Migration and Mobility in the French-speaking World (2018). She is currently completing her third monograph, Bilingual Writing by French Women Writers: Translingual Selves and is working on an ARC Discovery Project DP190102863, Transnational Selves: French Narratives of Migration to Australia.

Researcher profile

Patrick Flanery is Chair of Creative Writing at the University of Adelaide and Professor Extraordinary at the University of Stellenbosch. Prior to joining Adelaide, he was Professor at the University of Reading, and subsequently Professor and Director of the Creative Writing Pathway at Queen Mary University of London. He holds a BFA in Film and Television Production from New York University's Tisch School of the Arts and a DPhil in Twentieth-Century English Literature from the University of Oxford. Patrick is the author of the novels Night for Day (Atlantic, 2019), I Am No One (Atlantic, 2016), Fallen Land (Atlantic, 2013) and Absolution (Atlantic, 2012), which was shortlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and the Royal Society of Literature’s Ondaatje Prize, amongst others. In 2019 he published a volume of creative nonfiction, The Ginger Child: On Family, Loss and Adoption (Atlantic). He has also published scholarly work in the fields of Film Studies and Book History. His creative work has been supported by fellowships at MacDowell, the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center, the Santa Maddalena Foundation, and the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study. 

Publications Staff Directory

Biography

Jean Fornasiero completed her Honours degree in French Language and Literature at the University of Adelaide before being awarded a French Government Scholarship to study at the Université de Grenoble III (France). After completing a Maîtrise (thesis on Romantic poet Gérard de Nerval) and a doctorate on the social thought of philosopher Pierre-Simon Ballanche, she returned to Australia, where she took up a lectureship at the University of New England in 1984. She returned to the University of Adelaide in 1991 and is currently Professor of French Studies and Head of the School of Humanities. She has published widely on nineteenth-century French literature and history. Her work includes an award-winning book, with John West-Sooby and Peter Monteath, entitled Encountering Terra Australis: The Australian Voyages of Nicolas Baudin and Matthew Flinders, 1800-1803. This work is related to her interest in French-Australian cultural and creative connections, including translation. Current translation projects include the journals of the Baudin expedition and the poems and short stories of Existentialist writer Boris Vian. She was awarded the title of Chevalier dans l'Ordre des Palmes académiques by the French Government in 2003 and elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities in 2012.

Research interests

History of ideas in nineteenth-century France; Romanticism; French utopian socialism; Fourierism; the Baudin expedition to Australia, 1800-1804; Translation studies; French crime fiction; Biography.

Research areas

Jean Fornasiero was a chief investigator on an ARC funded project on French explorer, Nicolas Baudin, and has published studies on the artwork, the historiography and the scientific results of his voyage to Australia. With John West-Sooby, she has just completed a book on a French plan to invade Australia in the wake of Baudin's voyage, 1803-1810, and is part of a team funded by the French government to prepare a series of events around this expedition in 2015. She has worked on many published translations associated with this project, including the biography of the expedition's artist, Charles-Alexandre Lesueur.

Publications Staff Directory

Biography

Peter Goldsworthy is an author, poet, short story writer and librettist who divides his time equally between writing and medicine. He has won many literary awards across various genres - for poetry, novels, short stories, in opera, and most recently in theatre. He wrote the libretti for the Richard Mills operas Summer of the Seventeenth Doll and Batavia, and his novels have been translated into many languages, five of which have been adapted for stage and four are currently being adapted for film.

He was appointed Chair of the Australia Council's Literature Board in 2001 and has also chaired the Libraries Board of South Australia. In 2010 he was awarded a Medal of Australia.

His most recent book is the short story collection, Gravel, shortlisted for the 2011 ASA Gold Medal.

Publications Website

Biography

Nicholas Jose is a novelist, essayist and playwright. After gaining his doctorate at Oxford University, he taught in the Department of English at the ANU 1978-1985. His monograph Ideas of the Restoration in English Literature was published in 1984.

Professor Jose taught in China 1986-87, and served as Cultural Counsellor in the Australian Embassy Beijing 1987-1990. A full-time writer from 1991, he resumed his academic career as Chair of Creative Writing at Adelaide University [2005-2008]. A past president of International PEN Sydney, he is general editor of the Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature (also published as The Literature of Australia).

He was Visiting Chair of Australian Studies at Harvard University 2009-2010 and taught there again in 2011. He is Adjunct Professor with the Writing and Society Research Centre at the University of Western Sydney, and Professor of English and Creative Writing in the School of Humanities at The University of Adelaide.

Publications Staff Directory Website

Biography

Graeme Koehne is Professor of Composition at the University of Adelaide. He was Chair of the Australia Council Music Board and a member of the Australia Council from 2002 to 2009.

His orchestral works Rainforest, Unchained Melody, Powerhouse and Elevator Music have been performed numerous times internationally, as have Inflight Entertainment (a concerto for amplified oboe or soprano saxophone) and High Art (for trumpet).

In recognition of his contribution to Australian music, Koehne was awarded the Australian Government's Centenary Medal in 2001 and the Sir Bernard Heinze Award from the University of Melbourne in 2004.

Compositions & media Staff Directory Website

Biography

Lisa Mansfield is an art historian who completed her studies in Melbourne. She is a specialist in Renaissance and Mannerist art, society and culture, especially Northern European, with a passion for portraiture. Her research on the communicative power of the face and body forms the basis for her forthcoming book on royal portraiture in sixteenth-century France, Representing Renaissance monarchy: Francis I and the image-makers, which will be published by Manchester University Press in 2015. In addition, Lisa's research interests extend beyond early modern Europe to the construction of image and identity in virtual environments (the making and meaning of avatars in Second Life), and issues and ideas concerning art censorship in past and present historical contexts from Renaissance to contemporary art and visual culture.

Research interests

Lisa's research interests in early modern European art and visual culture include:

• Portraiture (representations of Renaissance masculinity and authority, especially of King Francis I, via the performative power of the face and body)
• Representations of charisma in early modern portraiture
• Virtual environments (experimental engagement with images and objects as a tool for teaching and research)
• Italian and Northern Renaissance art and visual culture
• Censorship and iconoclasm of art and visual culture (past and present).

Publications Staff Directory

Biography

Jennifer A. McMahon is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Adelaide, Australia. She is the editor of Social Aesthetics and Moral Judgment: Pleasure, Reflection, and Accountability (Routledge 2018); and author of Art and Ethics in a Material World: Kant's Pragmatist Legacy (Routledge 2014) and Aesthetics and Material Beauty: Aesthetics Naturalized (Routledge 2007). She provided the entry on Beauty for the Oxford Bibliographies Online and wrote the entry on literary beauty for the forthcoming Oxford Encyclopedia of Literary Theory. She edited the inaugural issue of the Australasian Philosophical Review (March 2017) on “The Pleasure of Art”; and is currently editing a Focus Issue on The ancient quarrel between art and philosophy in contemporary visual art exhibitions currently under review with the highly regarded Curator: The Museum Journal.

Publications Staff Directory

Biography

Ian North is an artist who is also a widely published writer on the visual arts. He employs photography and painting, sometimes combined, addressing considerations of place, identity and the post-conceptual. Has exhibited in Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide (thirteen solo exhibitions), and in group exhibitions in London, Asia and the United States. His work is represented in fifteen Australian public collections.

His writing includes books on the pioneer modernists Dorrit Black and Margaret Preston in the 1970s, a range of essays on the impact of the Indigenous art revolution in the 1980s, and, later, the intellectual relationship between art and neuro-aesthetics.

North was Director of the Manawatu Art Gallery, Aotearoa/New Zealand 1969-71, immigrating to Australia to become Curator of Paintings at the Art Gallery of South Australia 1971-80 and Foundation Curator of Photography at the National Gallery of Australia 1980-84. He subsequently served on the National Gallery's Council, working with curators on a comprehensive acquisition policy for the gallery. His qualifications include MA and MFA degrees in photography from the University of New Mexico. He held a personal chair at the University of South Australia where he was Head of the South Australian School of Art (1984-1993).

He is currently Adjunct Professor of Visual Arts at the University of Adelaide, since 2001 contributing to the postgraduate art history program offered by the University of Adelaide and the Art Gallery of South Australia. In 2014 he was awarded a medal of the Order of Australia and an honorary Doctor of Arts degree from the University of Adelaide.

Publications Staff Directory

Biography

Professor Anne Pender holds the Kidman Chair in Australian Studies at the University of Adelaide. Anne is a recent Fulbright Senior Fellow at Harvard University, formerly Professor of English and Theatre Studies at the University of New England, and Australian Research Council Research Fellow 2012-2016. A Menzies scholar to Harvard and graduate of the Australian National University and the University of New South Wales, Anne was Visiting Distinguished Professor in Australian Studies at the University of Copenhagen in 2011-2012 and lectured in Australian Literature at King’s College London in 2002-03. Anne’s books include Seven Big Australians: Adventures with Comic Actors (2019), Players: Australian Actors on Stage, Television and Film (2016), From a Distant Shore: Australian Writers in Britain 1820-2012 (2013), One Man Show: The Stages of Barry Humphries (2010), Nick Enright: An Actor’s Playwright (2008) and Christina Stead: Satirist (2002).

Biography

Dr Rosslyn Prosser is currently Senior Lecturer in the Department of English and Creative Writing, School of Humanities at the University of Adelaide. Between 1994 and 1998 she was Lecturer in Communications and Writing at Monash University, Victoria. Between February 2009 and February 2013, Ros served as Associate Dean Information Technology for the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, representing the Faculty on the University of Adelaide Technology in Education Committee and the Associate Dean’s Information Technology committee convened by Technology Services.
Areas of disciplinary and interdisciplinary research, teaching and prior education include Communications and Media, Creative Writing, English, Cultural Studies, Critical Theory, Memory, Gender and Sexuality and fictocriticism.She has also curated a number of exhibitions, including Transit Lounge (SASA Gallery, UniSA) and Showgirl: The Costumes of an Iconic Adelaide Diva for the South Australian History Festival in May 2016.

Publications

Professor Jennifer Rutherford was the Director of the J. M.Coetzee Centre for Creative Practice from 2015 to 2021.

Jennifer is an interdisciplinary scholar working broadly in the field of psycho-social poetics. Her works and research interests explore narrative, memory and place-making, the slowness of cultures and subjects in times of great change, the way individuals and communities dwell in and through the traumas that shape them, and the role that artists and writers play as conduits for change. Psychoanalysis informs much of what she does, as does the troubled history of colonial race-relations.

Jennifer holds undergraduate degrees in sociology and social anthropology from Newcastle and Macquarie Universities, a DEA in the Sciences of Language from the EHESS Paris, a PhD in Sociology from UNSW and she trained in psychoanalysis with the Ecole de la Cause Freudienne. She has held posts teaching literature, creative writing, cultural studies and social theory at universities including the Australian National University, the University of Melbourne and Macquarie University. Jennifer has held research fellowships at the Universities of Sydney and Macquarie and most recently served as the foundation Director of the Hawke European Union Centre for Mobilities, Migrations and Cultural Transformations at the University of South Australia.

Key critical works include The Gauche Intruder: Freud, Lacan and the White Australian Fantasy (MUP), Zombies (Routledge), Ordinary People (Documentary: Film Australia), The Poetics of Australian Space (with Barbara Holloway, UWA Press). Curated events/exhibitions include The Poetics of Australian Space (with Lisa Slater, Art Gallery of NSW), Traverses: J.M. Coetzee in the World (Kerry Packer Civic Gallery) and The Future of the Book (with Daniel Chafee, SASA Gallery). Forthcoming works include Melancholy Migrations: Journeying with the Negative (with Brian Castro, Giramondo) and Traverses: J.M. Coetzee in the World; a mobile app (with Lisa Harms). Jennifer is currently working on an Encyclopedia of Lost Things.

Biography

Catherine Speck is Professor of Art History, and Coordinator of postgraduate programs in Art History and Curatorial & Museum Studies taught jointly with Art Gallery of South Australia. Prior to taking up her current post, she was coordinator of the Art History and Theory Department at the SA School of Art, University of South Australia, and Research Degrees Coordinator. She has published extensively on Australian art including Painting Ghosts: Australian Women Artists in Wartime (Craftsman House, 2004); Heysen to Heysen: Selected Letters of Hans Heysen and Nora Heysen (National Library of Australia, 2011) and Beyond the Battlefield: Women Artists of the Two World Wars (Reaktion, 2014). She is co-researcher on an ARC linkage Project, Australian Art Exhibitions 1960-2009, and joint author of Australian art exhibitions: A New Story; and she is a co-researcher on ARC LIEF Project: Design and Art Australia Online: Sustainable data sharing for Australian researchers and collections. She is on the Editorial Board of Design and Art in Australia Online; she serves on the National Executive of the Art Association of Australia and New Zealand (AAANZ), and she is a member of the Adelaide Critics Circle.

Research interests

Current research interests include cosmopolitanism and Australian artists in Paris and London 1880s-1960s; the representation of war and peace by women artists; the exhibitionary complex and Australian Art exhibitions from 1960; and performativity, the body and visual culture

Research areas

Areas of academic expertise include modern and contemporary art, Australian art and feminist art, artists’ letters, the nexus between exhibitions and art history.

Publications Staff Directory

Biography

Maggie Tonkin teaches nineteenth and twentieth-century literary studies in the English Discipline at the University of Adelaide. She also has a background in dance, and writes regularly for the leading industry magazine, Dance Australia. She is a member of the judging panel for the AusDance National Dance Awards and of the Adelaide Critics Circle.

Maggie has written substantially on Angela Carter, and has also recently been co-editing, with Dr Mandy Treagus, Dr Sharon Crozier De-Rosa and Madeleine Seys, a collection of essays on Victorian studies, Changing the Victorian Subject. Next in the pipeline is a book to be co-authored with Garry Stewart, Artistic Director of the Australian Dance Theatre, commemorating the company's 50th anniversary. She is also in the preliminary stages of researching the representation and influence of R.D. Laing and anti-psychiatry in and on late twentieth-century fiction.

Publications Staff Directory

Andrew van der Vlies is Professor in the Department of English, Creative Writing and Film at the University of Adelaide. Born and raised in South Africa, he is a graduate of Rhodes University in Makhanda (Grahamstown) and the University of Oxford, where he was a Commonwealth Scholar. Andrew has published widely on South African literatures, visual cultures, gender studies, and print cultures. He is the author of the monographs South African Textual Cultures (Manchester, 2007) and Present Imperfect: Contemporary South African Writing (Oxford, 2017), and editor of Print, Text, and Book Cultures in South Africa (Wits, 2012), Zoë Wicomb’s Race, Nation, and Translation: South African Essays (Yale, 2018), and South African Writing in Transition (Bloomsbury, 2019, with Rita Barnard). He is currently co-editing the Bloomsbury Handbook to J. M. Coetzee and a collection on Olive Schreiner’s literary influences and afterlives and preparing a scholarly edition of Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm. As a translator, he has published versions in English of work by the Afrikaans-language poet Sheila Cussons in Asymptote, The Denver Quarterly, and Modern Poetry in Translation. Andrew taught previously at the University of Sheffield and Queen Mary University of London. He has a research affiliation with the University of the Western Cape, where he is an Extraordinary Professor. He has held fellowships and grants from the British Academy and Leverhulme Trust in the UK, the Harry Ransom Research Center in the US, and the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study in South Africa. Andrew is currently co-investigator on a British Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) funded project on literary modernisms in South Africa. 

Publications Staff Directory

Biography

John West-Sooby has taught French language and literature at the University of Adelaide since 1991, having previously held posts at the University of New England and La Trobe University. He holds undergraduate degrees in Arts and Mathematics from the University of Newcastle (NSW) and a doctorate from the Université de Grenoble, in France, which he obtained with a thesis devoted to the exploration of the notions of chance and destiny in the novels of the nineteenth-century writer Stendhal.

The role of chance in the creative process has remained a cornerstone of his literary criticism, particularly with respect to nineteenth-century French fiction. One of his other interests is crime fiction – its mechanics, but also its evolution as a form, its connections with the literary traditon of social realism and the its role as a vehicle for national identity. This work has in more recent times extended to the study of translation, and in particular the ways in which the culturally specific characteristics exhibited in Australian crime novels are translated into French.

The French-Australian connection is also a feature of his research on French exploration in the Pacific. Together with Jean Fornasiero, he has published widely on the Baudin expedition to Australia. Their book, Encountering Terra Australis: the Australian Voyages of Nicolas Baudin and Matthew Flinders (2004), which they co-authored with Peter Monteath, from the History Department at Flinders University, received much public attention and was awarded the Frank Broeze Memorial Maritime History Prize in 2005. A revised edition was published in 2010.

The latest production from the Fornasiero/West-Sooby stable is a book entitled French Designs on Colonial New South Wales, published in 2013 by the Friends of the State Library of South Australia. In it, they present and analyse the confidential report on the British colony in Port Jackson compiled by one of the naturalists from the Baudin expedition, François Péron, following his visit there in 1802. This work in promoting awareness of the historical connections between France and Australia was recognised by the French Embassy in 2003 with the award of the Palmes académiques.

Publications Staff Directory

Biography

Stephen Whittington (b.1953) is a composer, pianist, writer and music critic. Born in Adelaide, he studied at the Elder Conservatorium of Music, and has performed and lectured in Asia, Europe and the Americas. He is head of Sonic Arts at the Elder Conservatorium of Music and teaches composition, music theory and sonic arts. As a pianist he enjoys an international reputation as an interpreter of  the music of John Cage, Morton Feldman, Erik Satie and many contemporary composers. His interest in the relationship between music and other art forms has led to the creation of a series of multimedia performances, beginning with the Last Meeting of the Satie Society at the Adelaide Festival in March 2000. This was followed in 2003 by Mad Dogs and Surrealists, incorporating music, poetry and film, and in 2006 Interior Voice: Music and Rodin. In June 2006 he appeared at the Sydney Opera House with Ensemble Offspring for the Sydney International Film Festival, presenting a program of live music for four classic silent movies. In 2007 The Wire (London) listed his performance of Triadic Memories by Morton Feldman as one of 60 Performances That Shook the World over the last 40 years. He performed the music of Morton Feldman and John Cage in China in 2008. He has presented performances at the 2009 and 2011 Adelaide International Film Festivals, at the Vienna International Dance Festival in 2009 and at the Printemps Musical d'Annecy (France) in 2010.