Recent Graduates

The following scholars have also recently graduated from the University of Queensland with Phds supervised by staff at CHED

Angi Buettner

• Past degrees: MA (Munich)
• Supervisors: Prof Graeme Turner, Prof Peter Cryle
• Area of research: The thesis is concerned with the experience of gazing at catastrophe, the idea of witnessing atrocious incidents by looking at their shocking but fascinating sights. Today this gaze is dictated by seemingly endless mediations and technological innovations. This raises concerns with the aesthetic and political implications of the gaze at catastrophe-with the politics of seeing. My interest in the politics of seeing lies in the forms and media that facilitate for us what we get to see and to know of world events via images. One such form is the aesthetics that functionalises the trope of the Holocaust. The Holocaust has become a cultural capital commodity of enormous scale. Not only has it provided excellent material for all kinds of cultural production (museums, film, or modern art are just the most obvious examples), but it is also functionalised in the development of an aesthetics of catastrophe-the ideas and underpinnings of how to think about, react to, and represent other catastrophic events-and thus influences and structures the contemporary production of representations of catastrophe as well as the critical discourse about catastrophic events. The media representations of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, or of modern-day genocides, such as Rwanda, are just two examples of this practice. The thesis examines the pragmatics of global Holocaust representations: why the Holocaust has been turned into such a dominant story, and what it means to read other historical events through the Holocaust.

Gary Foster

• Past degrees: BSocWk (Hons) (Queensland)
• Supervisors:Prof Peter Cryle, Dr Leseley Chenoweth
• Area of research: How male rape becomes organized in relation to the self governing moral subject and the homo-heterosexual, is a concern of this thesis. Foucauldian analytics are utilised to conduct an unnatural history of the present; examing legal and administrative arrangements currently operating in Queensland and the disciplined response to the problem of unnatural crime in the penal colony of Van Diemens Land

Nicky Jones

• Past degrees: BA(Hons) (Queensland), Licence es Lettres Modernes (Mention Français Langue Etrangère) Faculté des Lettres, Langues et Sciences Humaines, Université d'Orléans
• Supervisors: Prof Peter Cryle and Dr Reid Mortensen
• Area of research: Research on the 'affaire du foulard' in France, in which Muslim schoolgirls were prevented from attending classes in France's secular public school system because they were wearing the Islamic headscarf or hijab, and studying the convergence of a number of cultural, political, religious and legal factors in the 'affaire'.

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.

Andrew Munro

• Past Degrees: BA (Hons) ( Queensland )
• 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.

Dean Smith

• 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.

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.

Timothy Wong

• 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. 

On this site