Postgraduate Study

The Postcolonial Research Group welcomes postgraduate members and actively fosters their research and academic development through group activities and individual supervision and mentoring. A number of members are recognised as authorities in the general area of post-colonial literatures, and in specific national or regional literatures, such as Australian, Canadian and Caribbean. Click here for a list of members' current research interests.

Dissertation projects on colonial and postcolonial topics can be undertaken as part of honours, masters and doctoral programmes of study which are offered through the School of English, Media Studies and Art History.

• An Honours degree (1 yr full-time) requires completion of a 15,000 word dissertation plus a number of honours coursework options.
• A Master of Philosophy (1-2 yrs full-time) requires completion of a 30,000 word dissertation, a research methodology course and a graduate seminar option.
• A PhD (3-4 yrs full-time) requires completion of a dissertation of 80,000 words, a research methodology seminar and two graduate seminar options.

Financial assistance is available for Australian and international students. For more financial information, and general postgraduate information, see the Graduate School website. Deadlines for most scholarship applications are in September or October each year, with the exception of scholarships for international students for which the deadlines are in August. If you are interested in finding out more about postgraduate study in colonial or postcolonial topcs, email Gillian Whitlock (Director of Postgraduate Studies), Helen Gilbert, or Angela Tuohy.

Current Postgraduate Members and Theses Projects

• Claudia Brandenstein
  Imperial positions in nineteenth-century West Indian travel writing (PhD)
  
• Angi Buettner
  The aesthetics of catastrophe in a post-holocaust world (PhD)
• Robert Clarke
  The utopia of the senses: Australian travel writing 1980–2000 (PhD)
• Emma Cox
  Indigenous productions of Shakespeare's Plays in Australia and New Zealand (MPhil)
• Christine Dauber
  Australia's National Museum and the representation of indigenous people and their cultures (PhD)
• Sacha Gibbons
  Writing through trauma (PhD)
• Greg Hughes
  Exile and Aesthetics - Comparing the Gay Writing of Australian and Indian 'Exiles' (PhD)
• Shelley Kulperger
  Canadian gothic: spaces of discontent (PhD)
• Libby Macdonald
  A study of representations of the environment in recent fiction from the islands of the South Pacific (MPhil)
• Edouardo Marks de Marques
  Australian Historial Fiction (PhD)
• Paul Newman
  Are we there yet?: reconciliation and the end of colonialism (PhD)
• Mark Horgan
  Representations of Patagonia (MPhil)
• Victoria Kuttainen
  Allegories of Empire in Postcolonial Short Fiction (PhD)

Theses Completed since 1995

• Christy Collis
  Knights of empire: Sir John Franklin and the narration of Arctic space (MA 1995)
• Claudia Brandenstein
  'To the stranger's eye my world is a paradise':Jamaica Kincaid's Americas (MA 1997)
• Stephen Carleton
  Mr Hare's Seraglio: an analysis of the sexing of colonialism (MPhil in Creative Writing 2002)
• Annette Daly
  Women and religion in Caribbean writing (MA 2001)
• Carrie Dawson
  Imposture and the interpellation of 'Anglo'-settler subjectivities (PhD 1998)
• Paul Duthie
  Australian journalists in Asia (MPhil 2002)
• Jo Gibson
  Separate developments: technologies of the species (MA 1997)
• Catherine Howell
  In search of lost time: neo-colonial writing in the post-colonial era (MA 1999)
• Tseen Khoo
  'Pan-Asianism': the politics of transnational ethnicities (PhD 1999)
• Anna Johnston
  Adam's ribs: gender, colonialism and the missionaries, 1800–1860 (PhD 1999)
• Emma Nelms
  A national front?: masculinity and national identity in the writing of Hanif Kureishi (MPhil 2002)
• Miriam Lo
  Fusion and fission: tracing the dynamics of hybridity in selected novels by Asian-Australian migrants (MA 1999)
• Paul Newman
  Legitimising Racism: Howard, Hanson, and the 1996 'race debate' (MA 1998)
• Jo Robertson
  An investigation into the role of journalism in the re-emergence, control and eventual disappearance of leprosy in Queensland 1892-1959 (PhD 1999)
• Menakshi Sharma
  Representations of England, English literature and the English in Indian writing in English 1890s-1990s (PhD 1999)
  
• Totten, Christopher
  To be frank: Austral-Asian Performance Ensemble (MPhil 2003)
• Shirley Tucker
  Asian-Australian women's writing: literary re-orientations (PhD 1999)
• Chris Watson
  'My own eyes witness': Australian Aboriginal women's autobiographical narratives (PhD 2000)