A/Prof Elizabeth McMahon

Teaching

Elizabeth teaches Australian literature, women's writing and contemporary critical and cultural theory.

She has supervised eight PhD theses to successful completion and is currently supervising six PhD theses. In 2011 she received a Dean's Award for Learning and Teaching for Postgraduate Supervision.

Successful completions
• Laura Joseph, Brimstone Flowers: Towards and Antipodean Poetics of Space, UNSW 2011.

• Kate Mason, Paradoxes and substitutions: charting patterns in the American novels of 9/11, UNSW 2010

• Heather Moritz, "You are will to power and nothing besides": Nietzsche, Foucault, Yoga, and Feminist s/Self-Actualisation, UNSW 2010

• Helen O’Reilly, Time and Memory in the Novels of Eleanor Dark, UNSW 2009

• Sandra Knowles, The Performances of a Psychic Privacy: Waiting for the Real Miles Franklin, UNSW 2007

• Diana Jenkins, Don DeLillo’s Promiscuous Fictions: the Adulterous Triangle of Sex, Space, and Language, UNSW 2005

• Marita Bullock, Timely Figurations: The Metaphorics of Trash in Four Recent Australian Artists' work UNSW 2004 (joint with Dr Brigitta Olubas)

• Angela Rockel ReFraming: Transformations of Subjectivity through Writing, UTAS 2000

Current PhD supervisions
• Lorraine Burdett, Gossip and Surveillance in Patrick White.
• Sophie Clarke, Autobiographical Fictions of Langley, Hyde and Palmer.
• Jaimee Edwards, Shame and the Representation of Australian Vietnam Veterans
• Joseph Cummins, Australia’s Musical Landscapes (joint with Dr John Napier Music)
• Gabrielle Dixon-Ritchie, Ecocriticism and Postmodernism
• Naomi Riddle, Anderson, Harrower, Hazzard: The Interiority of Modernity (joint with Brigitta Olubas).

Publications

BOOKS
McMahon, E and B. Olubas (eds) (2010). Remembering Patrick White: Contemporary Critical Essays. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi.

McMahon, E. and B. Olubas (2006) Women Making Time: Contemporary Feminist Critique and Cultural Analysis. Perth: University of Western Australia Press.


JOURNAL ARTICLES AND BOOK CHAPTERS FROM 2000

McMahon, E, (2013) (forthcoming, accepted February 2013) 'Reading the Planetary Archipelago of the Torres Strait." Island Studies Journal, 8.1.

McMahon, E. (2013) (forthcoming, accepted February 2012) "Australia’s Ugly Adolescence: the Film Adaptation of Puberty Blues is Released", Telling Stories: Australian Literary Cultures 1935-2010. Monash University Press, Melbourne.

McMahon, E. (2012) 'Mary Gaunt and the Modern Waning of Affect,' JASAL 12.1, http://www.nla.gov.au/openpublish/index.php/jasal/issue/view/210/showToc

McMahon, E. (2012) 'Continental Heartlands and Alex Miller’s Geosophical Imaginary,' The Novels of Alex Miller: An Introduction, Sydney: Allen & Unwin.

McMahon. E. with Elaine Stratford, Godfrey Baldacchino, Carol Farbotko and Andrew Harwood (2011) 'Envisioning the Archipelago,' Island Studies Journal, 6.2 (November 2011) 113-130.

McMahon, E. with Elaine Stratford, Mark Jackson, Carol Farbotko, Suvendrini Perera,(2011) 'Monstrous symmetries: Australia’s alignment of space and nation' as part of 'Reading Suvendrini Perera’s Australia and the Insular Imagination' Political Geography 30.6, (August 2011), 329-338.

McMahon, E. (2010) 'The Lateness and Queerness of The Twyborn Affair: White’s Farewell to the Novel,' Remembering Patrick White, Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi.

McMahon, E. (2010) 'Australia, the Island Continent: How contradictory geography shapes the national imaginary,' Space and Culture 13.2, 178-187.

McMahon, E. (2010) 'The Proximate Pleasure of Eve Sedgwick: A Legacy of Intimate Reading' Australian Humanities Review 48 (May 2010). http://www.australianhumanitiesreview.org/archive/Issue-May-2010/mcmahon.html

McMahon, E. (2010) 'Author, Author! The two faces of Kate Grenville.' Lighting Dark Places: Essays on Kate Grenville, ed. S. Kossew, Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi 2010, 39-54.

McMahon, E. (2009) 'Homesick: Cloudstreet and the Death Drive.' Teaching the Curriculum, Sydney: English Association.

McMahon, E. (2008) 'Longing and Belonging: Emily Dickinson’s poetics of distance.' New Directions, Sydney: English Assocation.

McMahon, E. (2007) ‘Judith Wright and the Temporality of Composition’, Australian Literary Studies 23.2, October 2007, pp 15-26.

*McMahon, E. (2007) “The Centaur and the Cyborg: Abject Becoming on the Colonial Frontier.” Southerly 67.1-2, pp 211-225.

McMahon, E. (2006) 'Wasted Memory and Generational History: Tasmania’s Abandoned Places.' Women Making Time: Contemporary Feminist Critique and Cultural Analysis Eds Elizabeth McMahon and Brigitta Olubas. Perth, UWA Press. pp 43-61.

McMahon, E. (2005) “Encapsulated Space: The Paradise-Prison of Australia’s Island Imaginary.” Southerly 65.1, 20-29

McMahon, E. (2005) “’False as Eden’: Constituting the Female Subject in Time.” Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature, vol 4. 173-184.

McMahon, E. (2005) “Puberty Blues takes Feminist Generationalism to the Beach.” Australian Feminist Studies 20.48, 281-289.

McMahon, E. (2004) “The Sculpture of Donna Marcus.” Art Monthly. ANU School of Art. February. pp. 29-31.

McMahon, E. (2003) “The Gilded Cage: From Utopia to Monad in Australia’s Island Imaginary”, Islands: Histories and Representations, Eds Rod Edmond and Vanessa Smith, London: Routledge.

McMahon, E. (2001) "Tasmanian Lilliputianism: Miniature Village and Model Citizens on the Tourist Trail", Southerly, 61:2, pp. 70-84.

McMahon, E. (2001) " Tasmania: Island or Archipelago; Trinket or Chain”, Changing Geographies: Essays on Australia Ed. Susan Ballyn et al Barcelona: Universitat de Barcelona.

McMahon, E. (2000) "Lost in Music: Music and Dance in Loaded and Head On", Meanjin 166-175.

Contributions

Editorial roles

Since 2007 Elizabeth has co-edited Southerly, Australia's oldest literary journal. Southerly includes peer-reviewed scholarly essays, new creative fiction and poetry, and is funded by the Australia Council for the Arts and the NSW Ministry for the Arts. Issues edited exclusively by Elizabeth include :
The Sister Arts, 68.2 (2008) 248 pp.
Southerly at Seventy, 69.3 (2009) 252 pp.
Romance, 70.2 (2010) 224 pp.
Modern Mobilities, 71.1 (2011) 256 pp.

From 1997-2007 Elizabeth edited Australian Humanities Review, an AVCC-funded initiative to take Australian debate in the humanities online and showcase research to an international readership.

Other Information

In 2009 Elizabeth received an ARC Discovery grant for her project Australia, Our Island Home.
From 2009 she has also been a Chief Investigator on the AUSTLIT project, which has received ARC LIEF each year.