Research Interests and Latest Publication

English

• Thom's fiction has appeared in various journals, including Landfall, Sport, the New England Review, Prairie Schooner, and the Alaska Quarterly Review. He is currently at work on a novel and a second collection of short fiction.

Doreen D’Cruz
Doreen's current research is on the poetics of isolation in New Zealand fiction, which is the subject of new publication co-authored with John C Ross. Doreen's current supervision includes topics on post-modern and post-colonial writing, the femme fatale in detective fiction, and the fiction of Rohinton Mistry.

• Doreen D’Cruz and John C. Ross. The Loneliness and the Alone: The Poetics of Isolation in New Zealand Fiction. ISBN:978-90-420-3474-7. Amsterdam- New York: Editions Rodopi B.V., 2012.

Lisa Emerson
Lisa’s research and supervision interests include all aspects of academic writing/literacy, information literacy and plagiarism, science writing, writing centres, and writing across the curriculum. She has published 6 books on academic writing (The Writing Guidelines series) plus many articles on academic writing, writing across the curriculum, writing and technology, plagiarism, writing centre/student learning centre pedagogy, and online writing labs (OWLS).

• Tan, B.H., Emerson, L., & White, C. (2006) Reforming ESL Writing instruction in tertiary education: The writing center approach, The English Teacher Association (MELTA), XXXV.

Angie Farrow
Angie is a specialist in Drama and Creative Processes. She is a playwright, having written numerous plays for theatre and radio in Britain, New Zealand, and Australia. Her second volume of plays, Plays for Physical Theatre II, was published in July 2010. She is currently writing a full-length community play about the Manawatu River.

• Farrow, Angie. Plays for Physical Theatre II: Six plays for young adults, with production notes (Dunmore Press, 2010).

Ingrid Horrocks
Ingrid has published a travel memoir, Travelling with Augusta, 1835 & 1999 (VUP, 2003), and has recently published a second collection of poetry, Mapping the Distance (VUP, 2010). In her scholarly work, she is working on a book project funded by a Marsden Fast-start Award on eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century wanderings; as well as an edition of Mary Wollstonecraft's travel memoir, A Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark for Broadview Press.

• Mapping the Distance (Victoria University Press, Wellington, 2010).

Jenny Lawn
Jenny's current research project examines the ways in which New Zealand writers have responded to the era of neoliberalism as a cultural and economic phenomenon. Jenny has supervised or co-supervised student research on Janet Frame, Gothic literature, lesbian cinema, the fantasy genre, contemporary fiction, Freudian psychoanalysis, and cultural policy.

• (2010, December). "Soft-Boiled in Ponsonby: The Topographies of Murder in the Crime Fiction of Charlotte Grimshaw and Alix Bosco." 11 Views of Auckland. Ed. Jack Ross and Grant Duncan. 105-119. [Social and Cultural Studies 10, ISSN 1175-7132]. 

Mary Paul
Supervision topics at Massey have included NZ writing and the environment, masculinity in NZ film and literature, representation of Aboriginal and Maori culture, neo-liberalism and recent NZ fiction, life writing topics, Janet Frame; and currently New Zealand metafiction.

• ‘Your Unselfish Kindness’. Editor. Dunedin: Otago University Press, 2012.

Jack Ross
Jack's research interests are in contemporary poetry (local and international), translation studies, and traditional and popular forms of fiction (from the 1001 Nights to modern Fantasy and SF). Supervision topics at Massey have included NZ poetry, historiography, metafiction and settler writing, as well as international poetry.

• Scenes from The Puppet Oresteia. Artwork by William T. Ayton. ISBN 978-0-473-18881-8. Rhinebeck, NY: Narcissus Press / Auckland: Perdrix Press, 2011.

Sarah Ross
Sarah researches in British literature and culture, 1500-1700, and particularly in poetry, the intersections between religion, politics and literature, and writing by women. She is interested in supervising in any of these areas or in Shakespeare studies.

• The Contemporary British Novel, edited with James Acheson (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005).

Philip Steer
Philip has research interests in New Zealand literature, culture and politics, as well as Victorian literature and imperialism, and colonial Australian literature. He is particularly interested in the novel, and his current research focuses on the role played by literature in the colonial relationship between New Zealand, Australia and Britain, and the role of literary form in mediating and theorising settler colonisation and imperial identity. He has published articles on the intersection between nineteenth century utopian fiction and the invasion novel, as well as on colonial nonfiction and the historical novel in New Zealand. He has also written biographical essays on several New Zealand authors for the online journal Kō­­tare, and contributed introductions to works hosted by the New Zealand Electronic Texts Centre.

• "Greater Britain and the Imperial Outpost: The Australasian Origins of The Riddle of the Sands (1903)." Victorian Review 35, no. 1 (2009).

Bryan Walpert
Bryan's poems, stories or essays have appeared in journals or magazines in New Zealand, Australia, the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. He has published two books of poems, Etymology (Cinnamon Press) and A History of Glass (Stephen F. Austin State UP), a collection of short fiction, Ephraim’s Eyes (Pewter Rose Press) and a monograph, Resistance to Science in Contemporary American Poetry (Routledge). His research interests include 20th century American poetry and poetics.

• Ephraim's Eyes. Pewter Rose Press. 2009.

Emma Willis 

Emma is based on the Wellington campus where she teaches Modern Drama (139.303) and Making Plays for Theatre (139.224). Emma is a professional theatre-maker with an interest in the collaborative practices, site specific work, and the interface of dance and theatre. Recent works include dance theatre projects body / fight / time (2011) and Dark Tourists (2008). Emma’s research interests include contemporary theatre, performance theories, memorial practices, travel and performative representations of the body (particularly in relation to illness and health).

• body/fight/time (2011).

Kim Worthington
Kim's research interests are in 19th Century, 20th Century and contemporary literature, and literary theory (especially narratological and ethical approaches).

• Worthington, Kim L. “‘Suturing the Wound’: Derrida’s ‘On Forgiveness’ and Schlink’s The Reader.” Comparative Literature. 62:2 (Spring 2011). 203-224.

Media Studies

Rebecca Bishop
Rebecca’s research interests are in identity and visual culture, new media and cyberculture, and the history and philosophy of the human/animal divide. Current projects include research on zoontology and cultural histories of animality, figurations of the posthuman and media/cultural representations of biotechnology, and scientific and media accounts of the transgressive body and gendered 'madness' in Aotearoa and Australia. Rebecca has published in cultural and media studies journals and is currently working on a book called "Animal Natures: embodiment and being human".

Scott Eastham
Scott serves on the editorial boards of the tri-lingual Canadian journal InterCulture and Explorations in Media Ecology. His latest book, published in 2007, is called American Dreamer: Bucky Fuller & the Sacred Geometry of Nature. He has previously published titles such as The Media Matrix, Biotech Time-Bomb, Nucleus, The Way of the Maker, Paradise & Ezra Pound, and EyeOpeners. Scott’s research and graduate supervision interests are in technology and human values, cross-cultural communications, modernism and literature, and media history.

• American Dreamer: Bucky Fuller & the Sacred Geometry of Nature. Cambridge: The Lutterworth Press, 2007.

Ian Goodwin
Ian's research is focused on new media studies, media policy analysis, and media and community development (principally in the field of Community Informatics). He is particularly interested in exploring the ways in which newly developing virtual spaces interact with 'real' places.

• Goodwin, I. (2009) Evaluating Community Informatics as a Means for Local Democratic Renewal. In K. Howley (Ed.) Understanding Community Media, pp. 106-115. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Joe Grixti
Joe's research interests span modern and postmodern literature, film, and media, as well as interdisciplinary approaches to personal and cultural identity, youth media, and globalisation. His publications include a book on horror fiction, two field-based studies of young people’s interactions with local and global media, and several journal articles and book chapters on popular fiction, cultural identity, children’s media consumption, indigenous media values, and screen adaptations of literary classics. He has supervised projects on children’s literature, film adaptation, audience studies, youth media, fantasy, popular fiction, and the question of cultural value in the postmodern era.

• "Indigenous Media Values: Cultural and ethical Implications" Blackwell Handbook of Global Communication Ethics edited by Robert Fortner and Mark Fackler: New York: Wiley Blackwell (in press).

Hannah Hamad
Hannah's research interests include feminism and postfeminism in film and television cultures, particularly postfeminist masculinity; stardom and celebrity in contemporary popular culture; and gender and reality TV.

• "'Hollywood’s Hot Dads’: Tabloid, Reality and Scandal Discourses of Celebrity Postfeminist Fatherhood", Celebrity Studies, Vol. 1, No. 2 (July 2010), pp. 151-169.

Ian Huffer
Ian's research is focused upon the role of film in the mediation of social and cultural life, examining issues of representation, identity and power. He also utilises a methodology that combines qualitative audience research with textual and contextual analysis. His previous research has investigated audiences’ gendered engagements with Sylvester Stallone, and the representation of masculinity in the films of Orlando Bloom. He is currently examining the social/cultural relations and aesthetic pleasures that are articulated through the space of arthouse cinemas in New Zealand, and the economic conditions shaping this exhibition sector. Possible supervision topics include film/media audiences, film cultures, stardom, Hollywood cinema, and film and cultural representation/identity.

• 'I wanted to be Rocky, but I also wanted to be his wife!: Heterosexuality and the (Re)Construction of Gender in female film audiences' consumption of Sylvester Stallone' in Participations: Journal of Audience and Reception Studies, Vol 4, Issue 2, November 2007.

Brian McDonnell 
Brian is a specialist in Hollywood Cinema, New Zealand Cinema, auteur studies, genre studies, censorship, and American Film Noir.

• Chapter on 'The adaption of New Zealand literature to film: a case-study approach' for Contemporary New Zealand Cinema, I.B. Tauris, London, forthcoming publication 2008.

Allen Meek
Allen's research is currently focused on issues of trauma and representation and on the influence on media studies of Walter Benjamin, the Frankfurt School, and French poststructuralism. He has published numerous journal articles and book chapters on media theory and on media texts produced in Aotearoa New Zealand and is the author of Trauma and Media: Theories, Histories and Images (2009). His recent graduate supervision has been focused on trauma studies and critical theory.

• Trauma and Media: Theories, Histories and Images. Routledge, 2009.

Simon Sigley
Simon's research involves cinema, history, aesthetics, culture, and politics. A current research project is a book-length cultural history of New Zealand’s National Film Unit (1941-1990). He also works on the symbolic role and function of film in the cultural imaginary, focussing on notions of memory and representation. An experienced screen media practitioner, he has worked in a variety of programme formats in France and New Zealand, and can also supervise research projects in French.

• 2011, ‘Rites of Passage in Post-WW2 New Zealand Cinema: Migrating the Masculine in Journey for Three (1950)’, in New Zealand Cinema: Interpreting the Past, Grant, B.K., Fox, A., Radner, H. (eds.), Bristol & Chicago: Intellect..

Graham Slater
Graham's research interests are in TV News and Current Affairs, Media History, Computer Games, Film Sound, and Documentary Film.

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Page authorised by Head of School, School of English and Media Studies
Last updated on Thursday 17 May 2012