Current Research Projects
International Projects
Other Worlds: Forms of World Literature
This major ARC funded discovery grant involves four novelists and two critics developing new conceptions of world literature. »Read More
The China Australia Literary Forum
The Writing and Society Research Centre is developing significant relationships between Chinese and Australian authors and critics that are producing important creative and critical research. »Read More
Publishing
The Sydney Review of Books
The Sydney Review of books (opens in a new window) is an online review site that focuses on Australian critics and writers. It is a vehicle for the Centre's ongoing research around importance of public literary criticism. »Read More
Giramondo Books
The Writing and Society Research Centre is home to the Giramondo book imprint which is run by centre member Professor Ivor Indyk. Giramondo is the means to engage in a practical form of research into the avenues open to Australian literature at a time of crisis in the book industry. »Read More(opens in a new window)
Australian Literature
Creating Literature in Western Sydney
The Crown Resorts Foundation and the Packer Family Foundation are supporting four projects led by award winning authors from Writing and Society Research Centre — Mohammad Ahmad, Felicity Castagna, Fiona Wright and Luke Carman. »Read More
Australian Indigenous Storytelling
Lead researcher Alexis Wright is working with Professor Ivor Indyk on this ARC project that examines how Aboriginal stories have been told in recent years, and which stories have been used in the creation of a national narrative for re-shaping Aboriginal Australia.»Read More
The Contours of 'Provincial Imagination'
Professor Ivor Indyk is researching this idea through essays on Les Murray, Murray Bail and Gerald Murnane, the expressive techniques of Patrick White, as part of a larger exploration of the expression of emotion and the baroque aesthetic in Australian Literature.
Literary Criticism
Spinoza and Literature for Life: a Practical Theory of Art
Professor Anthony Uhlmann and Professor Moira Gatens are working on this project that aims to work across literary and philosophical sources in order to construct a novel Spinozistic theory of art. »Read More
J. M. Coetzee and Making Sense in Literature
Professor Anthony Uhlmann leads this ARC Discovery grant. It is a French-Australian collaboration is considering level of 'translatability' of meaning in J. M. Coetzee's work. »Read More
Northern Ireland: Post-Conflict Literature
Dr Matt McGuire is examining why it is now fiction rather than poetry that is predominant in documenting and interrogating the reality of post-conflict Northern Ireland. His project considers what it is about the novel that makes it conducive to the critical examination of post-conflict society.»Read More
The Digital Lives and Archives of Irish Literature and History
Dr. Anne Jamison is collaborating on two major digital initiatives to reconfigure existing narratives of Irish literature and history and deepen and challenge scholarly research and research practices in this field. The projects further aim to enhance the ambitions of feminist historiographers in challenging the conventional linear narratives of women's literary history in Ireland. »Read More
Inter-Media and New Media Writing
Literature, Music, Voice, Technology
Adjunct Professor Hazel Smith is working on this project that focuses on a range of sonic/verbal intersections, and relationships between literature and music, in the growing field of musico-literary discourse. »Read More
The Writer's Best Friend: A computational assistant for creative writing
Adjunct Professor Hazel Smith, Professor Roger Dean (MARCS) and Dr Jason Shaw (MARCS) are the researchers on this project that seeks to augment human expressive capability in creative writing with computational agents that help writers extend their stylistic range.»Read More