Subject: Poetry, Love, and DeathPoetry has always been about extreme experiences, above all in the realms of love and death. But poetry is not only about extremity; it is itself an extreme experience, not least of language. This subject focuses on great poetry about love and death, their continuities and mutations over time and place. Gay, straight, celebratory, condemnatory, strange, terrifying, obscene, beautiful, ambivalent: this subject will run the gamut of the poetry of love and death, introducing students to a wide range of poets from the classics to the present, and examining their accounts of love, death, being and affect through a variety of forms and techniques. Beginning with the great lyric poems of Sappho, the subject moves from ancient Greece and Rome to medieval and early modern Europe through to the present day. Each week will introduce new poets, new modes and new situations that bear upon the central theme; each week will be accompanied by secondary readings that provide salient formal, contextual and theoretical information about the poems.

I research and publish in the areas of contemporary poetry and history of photography. I am completing a book entitled The Beginning of the Poem, and recently completed a long-form research essay entitled 'Just Gold: The Mavis Walley Collection', which engages with one of the earliest known collections of Indigenous family photographs in Australia.

Malcolm Robertson Foundation Writing Residency

In my time as visiting research scholar at Lyon 2 I researched collections of photography from ex-colonies of France. I also undertook extensive research into the interrelation of francophone and anglophone poetics in anti-colonial discourse.

I teach foundations in critical thinking, argument, academic research and academic writing to first-year Arts students. This is part of a new, integrated transitional pedagogy program run by the Faculty of Arts

I facilitate access to key support services and facilities for graduate research students based at off-campus and affiliated research institutes of the University of Melbourne. I also liaise with Graduate Groups

I provide independent advice and advocacy to students pursuing research by higher degree as well as students engaged in coursework at a graduate level at the University of Melbourne

I taught numerous subject in literary studies to undergraduates enrolled at the School of Culture and Communication, University of Melbourne, with a particular focus on postcolonial writing and postcolonial theory