Dr. Tony Simoes da Silva

B.A. (Hons) (ECU), PhD (UWA)

Lecturer in Transcultural Studies

I joined the University of Wollongong in July 2007. Prior to that I taught at James Cook University (2005-07) and held a post in Postcolonial Studies at the University of Exeter, in the UK (2000-05). I gained my PhD in 1997, from the University of Western Australia and a BA Honours (First Class) from Edith Cowan University, Perth, Australia.

Research Interests

Postcolonial theory; Literary and cultural theories; contemporary Australian, Caribbean and African writing; postcolonial life writing (with an emphasis on African and Caribbean texts); 20th Century British literature and culture; African writing in Portuguese (Lusophone African writing); writing and subjectivity.

I am happy to discuss proposals for graduate supervision in most of the above areas.

Teaching

• Coordinator, ENGL376: Representing India (Autumn 2008) Coordinator, Honours / MA Research Development 903 (Autumn 2008) Tutor
• ENGL120 (Autumn 2008) Coordinator and tutor
• ENGL113 (Spring 2008) Coordinator, Honours / MA Research Development 903 (Spring 2008)
• Co-coordinator for Honours / MA Research Development 903 (Spring 2007).
• Coordinator, ENGL366: Black Writing (Spring 2007)
• Tutor, ENGL121 (Spring 2007).

Work in Progress

Redeeming Whiteness: Life Writing, History and Identity. Completed monograph on South African life writing.

Purple Bodies, Battered Nations. Comparative work on selected texts by Zimbabwean and Mozambican women writers.

Publications

Searchable RIS publications from 2000 to date

Books

• The Luxury of Nationalist Despair: The Fiction of George Lamming. Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 2000.
• Interactions: Essays on Literature and Culture in the Asia-Pacific. Associate Editor, with Dennis Haskell and Ron Shapiro. Centre for the Study of Australian Literature, University of Western Australia Press, 2000.

Contributions to Books

• “Redeeming Self: the Business of Whiteness in Post-Apartheid South Africa.” In Transnational Whiteness Matters, Eds. Maryrose Casey, Aileen Moreton-Robinson & Fiona Nicoll. Lexington Books, 2008. Forthcoming.
• “Embodied Genealogies and Gendered Violence in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s novels.” In Memories of Home: Generations and Genealogy in African Writing, Ed. Yianna Liatsos, Lexington Books, 2009.

Articles

• “Narrating Redemption: Life Writing and Whiteness in The New South Africa: Gillian Slovo’s Every Secret Thing”, ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature, forthcoming, 2008.
• “‘On your knees, White Man: African (Un)Belongings in Rian Malan’s My Traitor’s Heart”. Partial Answers: A Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas, 5.2, 2007.
• “Narrating a White Africa: Autobiography, race and history”, Connecting Cultures, ed. Emma Bainbridge. London: Routledge. 2007.
• “Narrating a White Africa: Autobiography, race and history”, Third World Quarterly, 26.3, 2005, 471-78.
• “Myths, Traditions and Mothers of the Nation: Some Thoughts on Efua Sutherland’s Writing”, EnterText, 4.2, 2005. 1-17.s
• “‘Playing with words’: politics, poetry and colonialism in José Craveirinha’ work”, Moving Worlds: A Journal of Transcultural Writings, 4.2, 2004. 4 – 21.
• “Rethinking Marginality: Class, Identity and Desire in Contemporary Australian Writing”, Life Writing, Inaugural issue, 1.1, 2004. 45 – 68.
• “’Clearing the horizon: science, social sciences and Africa’”: a response”, Mots Pluriels, No. 24, June 2003. http://www.arts.uwa.edu.au/MotsPluriels/MP2403tss.html
• “José Craveirinha”, Refereed author entry, Reference Guide to World Literature, Ed. Sara Pendergast and Tom Pendergast. Detroit: St. James Press, 2003.
• “Whose Bombay is it, anyway? A reading of Anita Desai's Baumgartner's Bombay”. Contemporary Literary Criticism, Vol. 175, 2003. Reprint; first appeared in ARIEL: A Review of International Literature in English, 28.3, July 1997, 63 - 77.
• “African Childhoods: Identity, Race and Autobiography”, Mots Pluriels, No. 22, August 2002. Special issue on ‘The Child in Africa”. http://www.arts.uwa.edu.au/MotsPluriels/
• “Raced Encounters, Sexed Transactions: ‘Luso-tropicalism’ & the Portuguese Colonial Empire”, Pretexts: Literary and Cultural Studies, 11.1, July 2002, 27–39.
• De/colonizing Tales”, Jouvert: A Journal of Postcolonial Studies, 6.1 & 2, 2001. Special issue entitled “Growing Up Elsewhere”. http://social.chass.ncsu.edu/jouvert/v6i1-2/con61.htm
• “Half-Home: A Reading of Sneja Gunew’s Framing Marginality". In Authority and Influence: Australian literary criticism 1950-2000, Eds Delys Bird, Robert Dixon and Christopher Lee, St Lucia: UQP, 2001, 359-363. First published in 1995 (see below).

Referee Work

Oxford University Press; Routledge UK; Hodder and Stoughton, UK; Israel Science Foundation; Partial Answers: A Journal of the History of Literature and Ideas (Israel); Auto/Biography (UK); Life Writing (Aust); Wadabagei: Caribbean Studies and Its Diaspora, (US); Critical Quarterly (UK).

Academic Consultant

Dicionário Terminológico de Crítica Literária Pós-Colonial, Coordinated by Dr. Maria Sofia Pimentel Biscaia, of the Universidade de Aveiro, Portugal, in collaboration with the University of Roskilde, Norway.

Advisory Board member of Partial Answers: A Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas.

Advisory Board member of LiNQ: Literature in North Queensland.

Awards Research:

• University of Wollongong Small Grant, $8110.00 (2007)
• James Cook University, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Grant, A$4209.00 (2007)
• British Academy Small Grant, UK £4650.00 (January 2005 – January 2006)
• University of Exeter University Research Grant; UK £10,000.00 (2004)
• British Academy Small Grant UK £2580.00 (July 2002 – May 2003)

Teaching:

• Certificate of Appreciation by James Cook University” for “Contribution during 2006 to the JCU Community of Teaching Scholarship”.
• “Inclusive Practice Award” in recognition of exceptional support for students with disabilities (Nominated by Students”), James Cook University, 2006.
• James Cook University, Teaching and Learning Grant, “Learning to Stay at University”, A$1500.00 (transition challenges for 1st year Indigenous Australian students, 2007).

Languages

• Portuguese—Native fluency
• French — fluent
• Italian / Spanish —Reading / Speaking / Comprehension

Email: tonys@uow.edu.au
Telephone: 61 (0)242215898

Last reviewed: 11 March, 2008