Associate Professor Louise D’Arcens

Office: 19:1092
Phone: +61 2 4221 3689
Email: louised@uow.edu.au

Louise is an Associate Professor 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). In 2009 she was also awarded an Australian Academy of Humanities / British Academy Special Joint Project grant, with Dr Chris Jones (St Andrews), for the project “Fossil and Root: A Comparative Study of Anglo-Saxonism in Nineteenth-Century British and Australian Poetry”. She is a member of the Arts Faculty’s Institute for Social Transformation Research (ISTR), and is Chief Investigator on the ISTR project, “Literarary Impact and Social Transformation”.

She has been leader of the Cultural Memories research theme of the ARC-funded Network for Early European Research (2007-09), and co-ordinator of the Network’s Australasian Medievalisms research cluster (2006-09). 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:

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 

Searchable Research Information System publications database >>

Books:

Old Songs in the Timeless Land: Medievalism in Nineteenth-Century Australian Literature (Brepols / University of Western Australia Press, 2011)

Unsociable Sociability in Women’s Lifewriting, eds. Anne Collett and Louise D’Arcens (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010)

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).

Journal special issues:

Editor of Screening Early Europe, Special Issue of Screening the Past (forthcoming November 2009)

Editor, with Helen Dell and Andrew Lynch, of The Medievalism of Nostalgia, special issue of Post/Medieval (forthcoming 2011)

Editor, with Stephanie Trigg and Andrew Lynch, of Medievalism, Colonialism, Nationalism, special issue of Australian Literary Studies (forthcoming 2011)

Refereed chapters and articles:

2011 forthcoming: “Laughing in the Face of the Past: Satire and Nostalgia in Medieval Heritage Tourism” Post/Medieval 2 (2).

2011 under consideration: “Meta-medievalism and the Future of the Past in the ‘Australian Girl’ Novel”, Australian Literary Studies

2010 forthcoming: “The Middle Ages in Australia: Colonialism, Nationalism, and the Antiquarian Imagination” in Florilegium: journal of the Canadian Society of Medievalists/Société canadienne des médiévistes, vol 27.

2010: “From “eccentric affiliation” to “corrective medievalism”: Bruce Holsinger’s The Premodern Condition”, Post/Medieval 1 (3), 299-308.

2010: “Introduction” (with Anne Collett) in Unsociable Sociability in Women’s Life Writing, ed. Anne Collett and Louise D’Arcens (Palgrave MacMillan), pp. 1-17

2010 forthcoming: “The Prison of Human Life”, in Unsociable Sociability in Women’s Life Writing, ed. Anne Collett and Louise D’Arcens (Palgrave MacMillan), pp. 18-36

2009: “Most gentle indeed but most virile: The Pacifist Medievalism of G. A. Wood”, in Medievalisms in the Postcolonial World: The Idea of “The Middle Ages” Outside Europe, eds Kathleen Davis and Nadia Altschul. (Johns Hopkins University Press), pp.80-108

2009: Iraq, the Prequel: Historicising Military Occupation and Withdrawal in 300 and Kingdom of Heaven”, Screening the Past (electronic journal: to be released online November 2009)

2009 ““She ensample was by good techynge”: Hermeine Ulrich and Chaucer under Capricorn”, in Eminent Chaucerians? Early Women Scholars and the History of Reading Chaucer, special issue of Philologie im Netz, (Beiheft | Supplement 4/2009)

2008: “Deconstruction and the Medieval Indefinite Article: The Undecidable Medievalism of Brian Helgeland’s A Knight’s Tale, Parergon 25 (2), 80-98

2008: “’The last thing one might expect’: The Mediaeval Court at the 1866 Intercolonial Exhibition”, The La Trobe Journal (81), 26-39

2008: “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 21, 319-356

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:

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 Review of Gail Ashton and Louise Sylvester, eds. Teaching Chaucer (Palgrave, 2007), Studies in the Age of Chaucer 30: 337-340

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 (online).

Conferences:

Louise has delivered numerous conference papers at many local, national, and international conferences, including plenary addresses at “Nation, Terroir, Territoire”, the annual conference of the Canadian Society of Medievalists, Carleton University, Ottawa, June 2009, “The Medievalism of Nostalgia” conference, University of Melbourne November 2009, and the “Once and Future Medievalism” conference, University of Melbourne, September 2004.