24 Jul Event
Australian literature, literary history, and the environmental humanities: Current perspectives, future possibilities
4–5:30pm AEST, Wednesday 30 July 2025,
Online, please register here: https://jcu.zoom.us/meeting/
You are warmly invited to attend an online Public Seminar by Dr Keyvan Allahyari (University of Jena) and Dr Meg Brayshaw and Dr Dashiell Moore (University of Sydney), supported by the Roderick Centre for Australian Literature and Creative Writing.
Associate Professor Roger Osborne speaks to Roderick Centre Fellows, Dr Keyvan Allahyari, Dr Meg Brayshaw and Dr Dashiell Moore about how the projects they are undertaking at James Cook University speak to the present and future of Australian literary studies. Working on water and borders, the literary history of mining, and carceral sites and narratives, Keyvan, Meg and Dashiell will respond to questions that unite their research and animate key disciplinary debates today, including: How does attention to the agency of the non-human augment Australian literature’s traditional preoccupation with place? How do we maintain attention to the specifics of the local and regional while also ensuring we speak to and engage with the global? How does archival work contribute to research-led teaching? Is literary history still the dominant methodological mode of Australian literary studies, and how does a commitment to decolonisation augment that approach?
About the presenters
Keyvan Allahyari (PhD Melbourne, 2019) is Junior Professor in Global Anglophone Literatures at the University of Jena. Previously, he held Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Oslo, Humboldt Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Tübingen, Fryer Library Fellowship at the University of Queensland, and Emerging Critics Fellowship at Sydney Review of Books. He is the author of Peter Carey: The Making of a Global Novelist (Palgrave, 2023), and the forthcoming Liquid Objects: Abdulrazak Gurnah and the Material Ecologies of Water (Routledge). He writes about borders and water.
Meg Brayshaw is the John Rowe Lecturer in Australian Literature at the University of Sydney. Broadly interested in the intersection of literary cultures and forms with history, politics, and the environment, she has published on a range of topics including Australian modernism, urban literature, melodrama, crime fiction, and the Anthropocene as narrative form. She is currently working on two projects: a literary history of mining in Australia, and a monograph on Dymphna Cusack and Australian realism during the Cold War. At Sydney University Press, she is academic editor of the Sydney Studies in
Australian Literature series.
Dashiell Moore is an ARC DECRA Fellow in English at the University of Sydney. His research is in the fields of world literature, island studies, and postcolonial theory, with a particular geographical concentration in Australia, the Caribbean and Oceania. A key focus of his work is on inter-colonial intersections in literary production, which was the subject of his recent monograph, The Literary Mirroring of Aboriginal Australia and the Caribbean (OUP 2024). He is currently exploring further research in literary representations of the carceral archipelago as a DECRA Fellow.
Proudly supported by the Roderick Centre for Australian Literature and Creative Writing.
