30 Oct ECR Profile – Megan Mooney Taylor
The ASAL ECR Profile series highlights the work of our early career researchers. For this instalment we present the work of Megan Mooney Taylor.
Since completing my PhD at Deakin University on ‘Mythmaking and Masculinity in the Fiction of Norman Lindsay’ in 2017 my research has become more archive-focused and, in a twist I hadn’t predicted, I have started considering Lindsay’s engagement with world events as inspiration around the writing of his Australian favourite children’s book, The Magic Pudding.
I presented at a forum hosted by the University of Technology Sydney Library, which has a large Lindsay collection and held a Magic Pudding exhibition in September 2018 to celebrate 100 years since the Pudding’s original publication. A question and my answer at that forum led to a possible archival collaboration with the State Library of NSW Rare Manuscript team on the origins of the ‘Puddin’ that I am very excited about.
For the last few months of 2018 and the first few months of 2019 I have been reading deeply into Australian literature and poetry published in 2018 for the Australian Literary Studies Gold Medal, with co-judges Michael Farrell and Kate Noske, which has been an incredibly enriching experience.
In a complete shift away from my previous research, I am writing a chapter for a University of Southern Queensland project Kindred Spirits: Reflections on our relationship with Anne of Green Gables titled ‘Reading Anne by the brown, dusty banks of the Murray River’.
I have an article, ‘Be men if you can’t be artists!’ Masculinity in the Fiction of Norman Lindsay’, forthcoming in Antipodes. I am currently working on redrafting an article linking an unpublished Lindsay novel held in the Mitchell Library with his attitudes towards censorship, sex, gender and freedom of expression. I have also been writing submissions to publish my thesis.
I presented a paper, ‘Considering the triangular masculine controlling gaze: gendered authorial intent in Norman Lindsay’s The Cousin from Fiji and Dust or Polish?’ at the Australian Women’s and Gender Studies Association conference in Melbourne in November 2018.
Most recently, my work on Norman Lindsay has appeared in the Conversation: New Norman Lindsay Novels: stitched together stories of friends and family seen for the first time.