Dr. Louise D’Arcens
Louise is a Senior Lecturer in the English Literatures Program. She received a BA (Hons) specializing in medieval literature from the University of Sydney in 1990. Her 1997 PhD thesis, also completed at the University of Sydney, examined the concepts of political and literary authority in the writings of medieval women. Her two main current research areas are medievalism and medieval women’s writing. Medievalism examines post-medieval receptions and constructions of the Middle Ages, and considers the impact of these constructions on modern cultural, political, and social life. Louise’s work on Australian medievalism examines the cultural and ideological role played by medievalism in colonial and former-colonial societies. Her work on Christine de Pizan focuses on Christine’s political writings, examining how Christine deploys notions of gender and ethnicity to formulate models of political action and to authorize her own intervention into the late medieval political sphere.
Louise currently holds an Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Grant for the project “Medievalism in Australian Cultural Memory” (2008-2011). She is a Chief Investigator along with Professor Stephanie Trigg (University of Melbourne), Associate Professor Andrew Lynch (University of Western Australia), and Professor John Ganim (University of California, Riverside). She is also leader of the Cultural Memories research theme of the ARC-funded Network for Early European Research, and is co-ordinator of the Network’s Australasian Medievalisms research cluster. She is also a member of the Advisory Committee of the Sydney Centre for Medieval Studies.
Louise has supervised, and continues to supervise, a number of PhD theses in the areas of medievalism, Australian literature, women’s writing, and drama.
Louise’s contribution to the teaching in the English Literatures Program is as follows:
• co-convenor, ENGL120, “Introduction to Literature and Screen Studies”
• convenor, ENGL230 “Page to Stage: Modes of Performance”
• convenor, ENGL337 “Sex, Power, and Chivalry”
• convenor, ENGL400/913 “Literature, Memory, and Forgetting”
A number of these subjects are taught to South Coast and Southern Highlands campuses as well as to the Wollongong campus, and make use of electronic and other flexible delivery methods.
Recent Publications
Books:
Medievalism in Nineteenth-Century Australian Literature (Long Histories Series, University of Western Australia Press, forthcoming)
Maistresse of My Wit: Medieval Women, Modern Scholars, eds. Louise D’Arcens and Juanita Ruys, Making the Middle Ages Series Vol VII (Turnhout: Brepols, 2004).
Refereed chapters and articles:
2008 forthcoming: “Deconstruction and the Medieval Indefinite Article: The Undecidable Medievalism of Brian Helgeland’s A Knight’s Tale”,, Parergon (accepted April 2008)
2008 forthcoming: “’The last thing one might expect’: The Mediaeval Court at the 1866 Intercolonial Exhibition”, The La Trobe Journal (81), pp.26-39
2008 forthcoming: “The Past is Another Country: Forms of Australian Medievalism”, Medievalismo/s. De la disciplina y otros espacios imaginados, ed. César Domínguez. Special Issue, Revista de poética medieval 20 (2008)
2008 forthcoming: “Most gentle indeed but most virile: The Pacifist Medievalism of G. A. Wood”, in Medievalism and the Post/colonial Perspective: Historical Foundations to Global Politics, eds Kathleen Davis and Nadia Altschul. (Johns Hopkins University Press)
2008: “‘"Nee en Ytale": Christine de Pizan’s Migrancy’, in What Nature Does Not Teach: Didactic Literature in the Medieval and Early Modern Periods, ed. Juanita Ruys (Turnhout: Brepols, 2008), pp.81-105
2005: “Petit Estat Vesval: Christine de Pizan’s Grieving Body Politic”, in Healing the Body Politic: Christine de Pizan’s Political Philosophy, eds. Karen Green and Constant Mews (Turnhout: Brepols, 2005), pp.201-26
2005: “Inverse Invasions: Medievalism and Colonialism in Rolf Boldrewood’s A Sydney-Side Saxon”, Parergon 22(2): 159-182.
2005: “‘Where No Knight in Armour Has Ever Trod’: The Arthurianism of Jessica Anderson’s Heroines” in Medievalism and the Gothic in Australian Culture, ed. Stephanie Trigg (Turnhout: Brepols, 2005), pp.61-80
2004: “Introduction”, in in Maistresse of my Wit: Modern Scholarship, Medieval Women, eds. Louise D’Arcens and Juanita Ruys (Turnhout: Brepols, 2004), pp.1-26
2004: “Her own Maistresse? Christine de Pizan the Professional Amateur”, in Maistresse of my Wit: Medieval Women, Modern Scholarship, eds. Louise D’Arcens and Juanita Ruys (Turnhout: Brepols, 2004), pp.119-45
2003: “Antipodean Idylls: An Early Australian Translation of Tennyson’s Medievalism”, in Postcolonial Moves in Medieval, Early Modern, and Baroque Studies, eds. Patricia Ingham and Michelle R. Warren (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave), pp.237-56.
2000: “From Holy War to Border Skirmish: The Colonial Chivalry of Sydney’s First Professors” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 30(3): 519-45.
2000: “Europe in the Antipodes: Australian Medieval Studies”, Medievalism and the Academy II: Cultural Studies. Studies in Medievalism X, ed. David Metzger (Cambridge: D.S, Brewer), pp.13-40.
Biographical Essay:
2006: “Andrew McGahan”, in The Encyclopedia of Literary Biography: Australian Literature Vol IV, ed. Selina Samuels (USA: Bruccoli Clark Layman/Thomson/Gale), pp. 226-230
Reviews
2008 forthcoming: Review of Gail Ashton and Louise Sylvester, eds. Teaching Chaucer (Palgrave, 2007), Studies in the Age of Chaucer
2007: Review of Fotheringham, Richard, ed., Australian Plays for the Colonial Stage 1834-1899 (Australian Academy of the Humanities, 2006), Theatre Research International, (2007), 32: 336-337
2006: Review of Theresa Coletti, Mary Magdalene and the Drama of the Saints: Theatre, Gender and Religion in Late Medieval England (Penn, 2004), Journal of Religious History
2005: Review of Wilson, Katharina M., and Nadia Margolis, eds. Women in the Middle Ages: An Encyclopedia, 2 vols. (Greenwood Press, 2004), The Medieval Review
2004: Review of Levy, Allison, ed., Widowhood and Visual Culture in Early Modern Europe (Aldershot, Ashgate, 2003), Parergon
2003: Review of Forhan, Kate Langdon, The Political Theory of Christine de Pizan (Aldershot, Ashgate, 2002), Parergon
2000: Review of Medievalism and the Modern World: Essays in Honour of Leslie Workman, eds. Richard Utz and Tom Shippey (Turnhout: Brepols, 1998), Prolepsis: The Tübingen Review of English Studies, Jan 2000.
Selected conference papers from the past five years
“Deconstruction and the Medieval Indefinite Article: Tracing the Undecidable Medievalism of Brian Helgeland’s A Knight’s Tale”, Annual Conference of the Australian Network for Early European Research, University of Western Australia, July 3-8, 2007.
“The Drivel of our Fathers: Or What Counts as Medievalism in Australian Poetry”, Sixth conference of ANZAMEMS, University of Adelaide, Feb 6-10, 2007.
“The Round Table and Other Furniture: Medievalism on the Australian Popular Stage”. Delivered at the Cultural Translations symposium, State Library of Victoria, November 2-3, 2006.:
“Old wine in new goblets? Anglo-Saxonism, Nation, and Race in Colonial Australia, 2nd Annual Conference of the Australian Early Medieval Association, Australian National University”, September 2005
“Most gentle indeed, but most virile”: The Medievalist Pacifism of G. A. Wood”. Delivered at Old Worlds, New Worlds: the Fifth Conference of ANZAMEMS, University of Auckland, Feb 2005
“Amateurs or Orators? Early Australian Medievalists in the Public Sphere”. Delivered at the “Intellectual Diasporas” Symposium, University of Auckland, Feb 2005
“A white man born a slave”: Saxons, Normans, and Aborigines in A Sydney-Side Saxon”. Delivered at the 19th Annual Conference on Medievalism, University of New Brunswick, Fredericton, NB, Canada, October 2004
Plenary address “Inverse Invasions: Australian Fiction, Allegory and the 'real' Middle Ages”, Delivered at the Once and Future Medievalisms conference, University of Melbourne September 27-29, 2004
““She ensample was by good techynge”: Hermeine Ulrich and Chaucer under Capricorn”. Delivered at the 19th New Chaucer Society conference, University of Glasgow, July 2004
“Petit Estat Vesval”: Christine de Pizan’s Grieving Body Politic”. Delivered at Christine de Pizan's Political Philosophy: Context, Content and Consequences, Monash University, February 2003
“Christine de Pizan and Autodidacticism”, Delivered at the International Medieval Congress, Univ. of Leeds, July 2002
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