Staff Spotlight: Literature and Creative Writing

Welcome to Grapeshot’s newest subcategory: The Staff Spotlight! This will be a space for us as students to highlight our favourite staff members across the university. So for our first spotlight, join me in meeting some of the best minds of Macquarie’s Literature and Creative Writing department! 

Professor Louise D'Arcens, Discipline Chair of Literature and Creative Writing, (she/her)

Tell us a little about yourself both within and outside a university setting.

I am the current Discipline chair of Literature and Creative Writing. My PhD was on late medieval women's writing, but now I mostly work on the afterlife of the Middle Ages in modern society and culture - what 'The Middle Ages' means today. Outside of work, I love cinema, thrift shopping, and (unsurprisingly), reading; and last year I took up watercolour painting, but I struggle to make enough time to do it.

What is your favourite topic to teach?

Medieval literature and its afterlife today; but honestly, I like teaching all kinds of texts, and I love it when I see my students engaging with those texts. They don't even have to like them; understanding why they matter as cultural productions and expressions is the thing.

What's one myth about your discipline that you want to disprove? Or feed into!?

Medieval Studies is never just about the past. As a discipline it is deeply engaged with questions that are important to the present and the future - good and bad government, the environment, gender roles, work, health migration and cohabitation, constructions of nationhood - you name it! It prompts us to think about why the world is as it is today - what we've learned as well as what opportunities we've missed.

What are you currently working on?

I'm in the late stages of production of a book manuscript coming out at the end of the year on the BBC TV comedy Detectorists. It looks at how the show explores questions of amateurism, professionalism, love of the past, masculinity, and friendship in the context of Brexit-era Britain.

Where do you see your field going in the next few years?

My field of medieval studies has been increasingly interested in questions of global connection throughout the period, rather than just thinking of medieval cultures as insular and local, and I see that movement continuing. I also think my field a lot to learn about the way Indigenous scholarship thinks about time, tradition, and deep histories.

What’s one book you’d recommend? Either a personal favourite or one that connects with your field of study!

The fiction book I go back to when I want to read something beautiful and devastating is In a Strange Room by the South African writer Damon Galgut. My medieval recommendation is Pearl, a late 14th century post-plague meditation on faith in the face of loss (specifically child death). 

What advice would you give your university student self?

I would tell my university student self to seek support early from the university and teachers. My poor student self struggled alone trying to do her studies while experiencing personal crises, and only discovered in her final semester that people really wanted her to succeed if she would let herself be helped. I try to tell my students the same thing today - let us help you when you're finding things hard. I would also tell my student self NOT to hand in the first draft of her essays!

And lastly (but most importantly), red, green or black grapes?

Haha, I dislike all types of grapes - sorry! But I do like red and white wine.

Dr Stephanie Russo, Associate Professor of Literature, (she/her)

Tell us a little about yourself both within and outside a university setting.

Hi I'm Stephanie! I teach Literature here at Macquarie, as you know. My area of specialty is historical fiction, particularly historical fiction by and about women, and historical fiction that plays with time in some way. I started my career, however, working on 18th and 19th-century women writers, such as Jane Austen, and other less well-known writers. I really just love reading - I was always the nerd in the library borrowing all the books. And perhaps I research historical fiction because I imprinted on Back to the Future too hard or something. Outside of the uni, I go to Pilates, sleep, and endlessly rewatch Buffy. I am also Australia's most important member of the BeyHive.

What is your favourite topic to teach?

Has to be my unit ENGL2040 Historical Fiction and a Passion for the Past. It's my area, so it's obviously fun for me to teach material that I know really well. But I also think there's a great range of texts on the unit, including stuff that I don't think students expect to see, such as historical comedy (Dickinson! The Great!) and history games. Plus, I make students watch Bridgerton. I'm sorry, but this is not a hardship. We also do a bunch of really weird and interesting historical novels. I think everyone who is at all interested in history should take the unit!

What's one myth about your discipline that you want to disprove? Or feed into!?

The popular belief is that Literature and Creative Writing scholars are the most interesting and smartest. And that's true.

What are you currently working on?

I'm writing a book on counterfactual historical fiction. That basically means historical fiction in an alternate world; so, for example, a world where Hitler won the Second World War, or where JFK wasn't assassinated etc. It's really interesting to think about these what-ifs of history. Unfortunately, lots of the novels are very bad, but sometimes it is interesting to write about bad books. There are also some good books! It's not all terrible! The spate of men writing terrible novels about what might have happened had the Roman Empire never fallen was a particularly low point, however.

Where do you see your field going in the next few years?

I think people will increasingly stop rating historical fiction against the notion of "historical accuracy"; nobody can define what that means anyway. I think people will be more interested in what historical fiction can do and how it might challenge our ideas about the past and the present. At least, I hope so, because that's way more interesting than tiresome "here's what this show gets wrong" listicles.

What’s one book you’d recommend? Either a personal favourite or one that connects with your field of study!

The Beheading Game by Rebecca Lehmann. It features Anne Boleyn sewing her head back on. You're welcome.

What advice would you give your university student self?

Appreciate the time to read and write and think before your career starts. You'll never get that time back. It is a lot different for students now, though, which makes me sad - you all deserve to have that real student experience. I fell asleep in every building on campus.

And lastly (but most importantly), red, green or black grapes?

Nutella

Dr Veronica Alfano, Senior Lecturer in Literature, (she/her)

Tell us a little about yourself both within and outside a university setting.

My research specialty is nineteenth-century British poetry; I love to teach both literature and writing. Off campus, you'll find me singing soprano with the Sydney Philharmonia Choirs, playing a surprisingly fierce game of soccer, and spending time with my husband and pet rabbit. I'm originally from the States, I lived in the Netherlands for some years, and I'm very happy to call Australia home.

What is your favourite topic to teach?

I can't possibly choose! I'll jump at any opportunity to have lively tutorial discussions.

What's one myth about your discipline that you want to disprove? Or feed into!?

People sometimes assume that poetry represents a writer's attempt to make personal emotions directly accessible to readers. This is certainly true at times—but great poetry can also be impersonal and evasive. It's incredibly rewarding to engage with a dense and cryptic poem in order to figure out what makes it tick.

What are you currently working on?

I'm writing a book about neologisms (that is, newly invented words) in Victorian poetry—as well as an essay about Thomas Hardy's depictions of animals.

Where do you see your field going in the next few years?

I think the influence of ecocriticism will grow, especially as scholars continue to connect it with (for instance) feminist, Marxist, and postcolonial theory.

What’s one book you’d recommend? Either a personal favourite or one that connects with your field of study!

Cormac McCarthy's The Road. Heartbreaking and beautiful.

What advice would you give your university student self?

Start your essays one day earlier and stop pulling all-nighters!

And lastly (but most importantly), red, green or black grapes?

Green all the way!

Dr Toby Davidson, Senior Lecturer, (he/him)

Tell us a little about yourself both within and outside a university setting.

I've been teaching/researching at Macquarie since 2010. I'm also a published poet and Fremantle Dockers supporter in the AFL, hailing originally from Perth.

What is your favourite topic to teach?

Australian literature, which is my research speciality, but honestly all literature and film can be discussed or analysed in an enlivening manner if it's approached with enthusiasm and dedication, so that's what I am for in every class.

What's one myth about your discipline that you want to disprove? Or feed into!?

For Australian literature, the stubborn myth of the 'cultural cringe' from the 1960s, that we aren't as gifted in the arts as other countries and that anything Aussies produce is inherently inferior. The rest of the world doesn't think this about us! Yet somehow it persists, especially amongst Anglophiles and Europhiles. It's silly, really, especially as our literature grows exponentially with every generation and our national population approaches 30 million.

What are you currently working on?

I continue to publish research on North Sydney poet Francis Webb (1925-73), who was a young prodigy who later became the first Australian writer to openly depict life inside mental institutions which he personally experienced after he was diagnosed with schizophrenia. The stigma around this in the 1950s-70s was immense, yet he courageously continued to publish poems which took Australian readers where they had never been before. Now that mental health is discussed far more openly and its importance better known, Webb's achievement can finally be properly acknowledged, along with his profound influence on the writers of today. 

Where do you see your field going in the next few years?

It's a golden age of First Nations writing and scholarship at the moment, so this will undoubtedly continue. The impact of AI on Australian literature is still an open question, so this will be a chief concern for writers and scholars going forward.

What’s one book you’d recommend? Either a personal favourite or one that connects with your field of study!

I have to plug my recent book of poems The Grand Reopening (Puncher and Wattman Publishers). But I also think everyone in Northern Sydney in particular should read What the Colonists Never Knew: A History of Aboriginal Sydney by Gai-mariagal man Dennis Foley and Peter Read (National Museum Press) or the novels/plays/poems of Burruberongal Dharug woman Julie Janson. These can change your whole perspective in a single sitting.

What advice would you give your university student self?

You WILL get a girlfriend who will love poetry (and you)! And keep trusting your instincts and pursuing the written word regardless of what anyone else says about it. 

And lastly (but most importantly), red, green or black grapes?

Red all day - but occasionally green when watching the cricket over summer.

by Chantelle Mackintosh