Centre academic staff are supervising a number of doctoral candidates. To contact the postgraduates on the list below, click on the appropriate name. Under 'More Information' above is a list of recently graduated Phds.
Past Degrees: B.Th and M.Th (with merit), both through the Australian College of Theology.
Supervisor: Prof Philip Almond
Area of Research:
My topic is "The Origin of Left Behind Eschatology". The "Left Behind" books by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins are novels about the end of the world that have been extremely popular, especially in America. Though these books are fiction, they are based upon a specific Christian understanding of the end of the world. The most striking feature of this system of belief is the "rapture"
in which Christians will be suddenly taken to up to heaven, leaving behind a world in chaos. Antichrist then takes control and his reign is marked by a seven-year period of "tribulation". My thesis explores the origins of the various main elements of these beliefs and seeks to discover when they came together to form a system.
Past Degrees: BA (TTU, Chattanooga, USA), BTh (Aust. Coll. Theology), BMin (QBCM/Malyon, Brisbane), BA (Hons) (Queensland)
Supervisor: Prof Philip Almond
Area of Research:
My thesis explores mainly Christian interpretation of the creation story in Genesis 1:1-2:3 of the Hebrew/Christian Bibles, specifically in its seven-day structure. The paradigmatic nature of this defining Jewish/Christian origins account makes this text pivotal in not only Christian theology but in Christian views of history, time, nature and humanity across two millennia. Its interpretation both reflects the great currents of thought across that period, and up until recent centuries, helped to create and guide those currents. As such, this study offers a profound case study of the rise and dominance of the worldview of Christendom, followed by the rise of Modernity and the emergence of the dominant scientific way of viewing the world.
Jeannette Granfar
Past Degrees: BA (Queensland), PGDipEd (Queensland)
Supervisors: Prof. Ian Hunter and Dr. Larry Duffy
Area of Research:
The thesis uses the 'Islamic Headscarf Affair' in order to investigate the role of French ‘secularism’ and republicanism. By investigating a corpus of original texts (newspaper articles, editorials), the thesis challenges received views of the affair by uncovering the rhetorical organisation of ‘staged’ positions in the media.
Anne Le Guinio
Past Degrees: BA (Griffith), GDipTeach (BCAE), MLitt (New England), MA (Queensland)
Supervisors: Prof Peter Cryle and Dr Tiphaine Samoyault (Université de Paris VIII)
Area of Research:
Questions of canonicity: The example of post-colonial Francophone literature My work is concerned with the status of post-colonial French literature in contemporary French writings. The questions, which I will attempt to answer, are as follows: What are the criteria of canonicity for literature in general? How does a text become a canonical text? (Cultural/social/ context, influence, contraints.) To establish the parameters of my inquiry, I will look at both American and French theories. Having done this, I will attempt to apply those theories to post-colonial texts: How they are classified, reviewed (in magazines), used (in school textbooks), what literary prizes they may win. I will more precisely focus on one successful Francophone writer and one less well known. I will seek to outline the causes of these differences. In some ways I will question the European tradition of literary canonicity. I will see how, if applicable, it can integrate a "different" writing.
Martyn Lloyd
Past Degrees: BA (QUT), BA (Hons)(Queensland)
Supervisors: Prof. Peter Cryle & Dr. Aurelia Armstrong
Area of Research:
My dissertation will examine the Enlightenment foundations of the philosophy of the Marquis De Sade. Sade’s thought is deeply embedded in that of the French Enlightenment a fact which was overlooked by the twentieth century avant garde who used Sade’s oeuvre for to their own purposes and generally without considering its historical situation. My project will therefore entail a close reading of eighteenth century philosophy including: Condillac, Helvétius, Diderot, d’Alembert, d’Holbach, La Mettrie and Voltaire. It will also entail a major study of Rousseau who was arguably both Sade’s principal inspiration and antagonist. Critical to this project will be an investigation of the genre of the conte philosophique and the manner in which it can be understood to operate as a nexus between philosophy and literature.
Tangential to my dissertation is research on the philosophy of Michel Foucault with a focus on the “middle” and “late” periods.
Louise McCuaig
Past Degrees: BHMS(ed) (UQ)
Supervisors: Professor Richard Tinning, Professor Ian Hunter
Area of Research:
The bulk of my doctoral work comprises two foucauldian genealogical studies which endeavour to map the practices and teachers of the 'art of living' from the exalted academies of antiquity to the humble contemporary health and physical education classroom. Drawing extensively upon Foucault's ethical fourfold, I attempt to map those who, across the history of western civilization, have been responsible for teaching the proper use of pleasure, particularly the pleasures of food, drink and sex.
Supervisors: Prof. Peter Cryle and Prof. Anne Freadman
Area of Research:
I am looking at the role of discursive uptake. My thesis examines some intrications of rhetoric, semiotics, speech act and genre theories. It explores some ways in which postulates of intention, linking and agency are put to work in rhetoric and communication theories.
Brad Nitins
Past Degrees: BA (Hons) (Griffith)
Supervisors: Prof. Ian Hunter and Dr. Alex Cook
Area of Research:
This thesis complicates received ideas on the nature of a professional ‘ethos’ and a business ‘ethos’ during the mid-Victorian period in England. Specifically how the former has been seen to consist in an ideal of disinterestedness, and the latter of self-interestedness. Conceiving of ‘disinterestedness’ as a moral ideal of social interaction entailing public-spirited behaviour it links this to certain deeply rooted Christian ethical conventions, such as self-abnegation, ‘love thy neighbour’, righteousness, and the practice of good works. In doing this it elucidates how a moral obligation of disinterested conduct was seen by a number of mid-Victorians to equally underpin right engagement in the world of commerce and business. It bases this argument on a textual analysis of a range of mid-Victorian sources, from popular works of mid-Victorian success literature, to the ‘social gospel’ of Samuel Smiles, to formally religious works and sermons on the relations of Protestant Christianity to commerce.
Past Degrees: BFA (Creative Writing Production) (Hons) (QUT)
Supervisors: Dr. Michelle Boulous Walker and Dr. Elizabeth Stephens
Area of Research:
My project is an examination of constructs of contemporary heterosexuality through queer theory. More specifically, it examines the current order of sex/gender/desire as a series of binaries, and seeks to deconstruct these binaries by critically examining the 'unmarked terms' of heterosexual masculinity and femininity. In doing so, I will examine psychoanalytic accounts of heterosexual subjectivity as well as phenomena such as slash fiction (in which heterosexual women write and consume works of male-male erotica) and girl-on-girl pornography (produced for and consumed by heterosexual men). The overall aim of the thesis is to 'queer' heterosexuality-that is, to demonstrate the ways in which heterosexuality is structurally determined by non-normative sexualities supposedly external to it.
Past Degrees: BA (UQ 1995) GradDipTh (BCT 1998) MTh (BCT 2000)
Supervisor: Prof Philip Almond
Area of Research:
My thesis focuses on the Church's understanding of the Incarnation as confirmed at the council of Chalcedon in 451. I am arguing that Classical Christology is in crisis due to the ongoing failure to explain the union of the Divine and Human natures in Jesus Christ. I go on to argue that this problem reflects the more fundamental problem of explaining God's relationship to the World. I seek to explore ways of overcoming the dualism at the heart of Classical Christology by considering fresh approaches to the modelling of God, and drawing out the implications for a non dualistic Christology.
Michelle Styles-Dargie
Supervisor: Peter Cryle
Annabel Temple-Smith
Past Degrees: BA (Hons) (Queensland), LLB (Hons) (Queensland)
Supervisors: Prof. Peter Cryle, Dr Alan Corkhill
Area of Research:
I am doing a thematic history of happiness. This history will focus on how the telling of happiness has changed in a selection of French novels from the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries. In studying shifts in metaphors and other textual features, the research project will tell a micro history that puts modern representations of happiness in context.
Past Degrees: BA Hons.(UQ)
Supervisors: Dr Peter Holbrook (EMSAH; Dr Benjamin Myers (CHED)
Area of Research:
My thesis will examine the art and prose writings of Milton and Blake by uncovering and examining the utopian aspects of their work. I will to turn this utopian moment in their work as a way of examining the relationship between their political world-views and their religious beliefs, meditations and writings. Milton’s late epics and Blake’s long prophetic poems are both grounded in poetic myth-making and the mythopoeic consciousness. It is the juncture or inter-relation between the political, religious and mythological aspects in Milton and Blake’s work which I describe as the “utopian”. My main theorist of utopia and the utopian will be the philosopher Ernst Bloch whose “philosophy of hope” will provide a theoretical background to my critical readings. As a Marxist theorist whose work has also been influential in theology, Bloch’s system put forth the relation between the religious and the political dimensions of human action as a problematic explored in terms of political revolution and of Christian messianism which I will employ in my examination of the utopianism of Milton and Blake.