Professor Leigh Dale

BA UWA, MA PhD Qld

Location: 19.2109
Phone: +61 2 4221 3621
Email: ldale@uow.edu.au

Biography

I am from Mudgee, in central west New South Wales, and have worked at the universities of Southern Queensland and Queensland. My main area of research and teaching interest is Australian/postcolonial literatures, and I edit the academic journal Australian Literary Studies. My other key area of research interest over the past decade has been the history of self harm in medical cultures and so I’m currently working on a book about that topic as well as revising The English Men (1997), a history of the teaching of literature in Australian universities and the project ‘resourceful reading’. 

Research Profile

Searchable RIS publications from 2000 to date »

Selected Publications

Enchantment of English: Professing Literature in Australian Universities. Sydney: Sydney UP, 2012. In press.

“New Literatures: Australia.” With Chris Tiffin. The Year’s Work in English Studies 90 (2011): 933-65.

“Quantification, Risk, and the Rhetoric of Higher Education Management.” Higher Education Review [UK]. Forthcoming.

‘Rereading Barbara Baynton’s Bush Studies.’ Texas Studies in Literature and Language 53.4 (Winter 2011): 369-86.

‘In a (New) Critical Condition: Accounting for Australian Literature.’ With John Bushnell. Literary Futures: Australian Writing and Secondary English Teaching. Ed. Brenton Doecke, Larissa McLean Davies and Philip Mead. Kent Town: Wakefield Press, 2011.

‘Books in Selected Australian Newspapers, December 1930.’ With Robert Thomson. Resourceful Reading: E-Research, the New Empiricism and Australian Literary Culture. Ed. Katherine Bode and Robert Dixon. Sydney: Sydney University Press, 2010. 119–41.

‘Did Reading Change? Postcolonial Criticism in Australia.’ Reading Down Under: Australian Literary Studies Reader. Ed. Amit Sarwal and Reema Sarwal. Cinema, Literature and Culture. New Delhi: SSS Publications, 2009. 95–105. Slightly revised as “Post-Colonialism and Literary Criticism in Australia.” Modern Australian Criticism and Theory. Ed. David Carter and Wang Guanglin. Quindao: China Ocean UP, 2009. 14-27.

Australian Literary Studies – editor.

Economies of Representation, 1790 – 2000: Colonialism and Commerce. Ed., with Helen Gilbert. Burlington and London: Ashgate, 2007.

On the Western Edge: Comparative Essays in Australian and Japanese Studies. Ed., with Masayo Tada. Fremantle: Network Books, 2007.

Current Research Programs

• Lessons from the Past: The Emergence of English studies, with Jennifer McDonell, University of New England;
• The history and historiography of self harm in western cultures;
• Resourceful Reading, with Katherine Bode (ANU), Robert Dixon (Sydney) and Gillian Whitlock (Qld). New archives for Australian literary study.