Research Interests
Dr Steve Collins
The impact of copyright law on new media technologies (and vice versa), fan fiction, film and music sampling; digital rights management; death of the CD; the fair use doctrine; discourses surrounding intellectual property theory; Music 2.0; free cultures.
Steve is currently researching Music 2.0 - digital music and distribution - with Sherman Young and researching the role of fairness in contemporary digital issues involving appropriation and copyright.
Dr Maree Delofski
Documentary History, Theory and Production, Cultural History, Screen Production & Screen Writing.
Dr Peter Doyle
Peter's PhD concerned renderings of virtual space in early popular music recording, and histories of twentieth century popular music remain among his research interests. As an author of historically-based Australian crime novels, Peter also retains a research interest in fiction and non-fiction crime writing in Australia and overseas. He has a strong (research and production) interest in comics and the graphic novel.
He also worked as a part time curator at the Justice & Police Museum in Sydney, for whom he curated the 'Crimes of Passion' exhibition (2002-2003) and 'City of Shadows: inner city crime and mayhem, 1912-1948' (November 2005-February 2007) which examined inner-Sydney in the first half of the twentieth century via police crime and accident scene photographs. He is currently working on a book project titled Crooks Like Us, based on material drawn from the Justice & Police Museum Forensic Photography Archive, to be published 2009 by Historic Houses Trust of NSW.
Mr Peter Higgins
Commercial Radio; writing for public communication; Australian media history and communications industry structure; textuality of film/television; the cultural significance of celebrity in contemporary life; the media’s role in shaping the contemporary public sphere and public debate; media ethics; and teaching pedagogies and learning methodologies for communication students.
Dr Susie Khamis
Consumerism in contemporary Australian culture; Australian advertising history; branding; culinary tourism; images of Australian national identity.
Dr Noel King
'Cultures of Independence': a study of small and/or independent trade and academic publishers in Australia, the UK, and the USA. My research into 'small, national cinemas' (eg Ireland, New Zealand, Scotland) is also gathered under this broad umbrella, as is an ongoing study of contemporary international crime fiction (in English) involving both English language works and translated works: a study of writers, publishers and critics in the UK (eg Serpent?s Tail, Bitter Lemon, Harvill) and the US (eg Akashic, Europa)
'Literary cinephilia'. This project updates some earlier work on cinephilia (Willemen/King, in Willemen 1994) and adds to recent books in the burgeoning field of 'histories of cinephilia' (Keathley; 2006; De Valck and Hagener, 2005) by assembling, and writing on, various examples of 'literary cinephilia' by novelists, poets, and filmmakers from Australia, the US and Europe.
Post 1960s US literature, film, photography, and the cultural criticisms that have attached to them. The topics for the most part concern landscape and travel (eg 'road movies', as it were, across each media form); American cinema since the 1960s; the history of film criticism as a form of cultural criticism.
Dr Virginia Madsen
Virginia’s academic research interests span sound and radio theory and history, auditory culture studies, new audio media and audio arts and the history of public broadcasting radio with a particular emphasis on ‘cultural radio’ forms and their specific development in Europe and Australia.
Dr Nicole Matthews
Nicole's research interests converge around the relation between media, practices of the self and formations of citizenship within neo-liberal political cultures. Her research areas include feminist cultural studies, Deaf and disability studies, popular genres and visual cultures. Along with Sherman Young and Jemina Napier and community partners the Deaf Education Network, in 2008 she was awarded Macquarie Research Grant funding for a project entitled "Participatory media and Deaf people: using digital storytelling to identify multimedia use and accessibility". Other recent research includes a project following the career trajectories of media and cultural studies graduates, and work tracing the outcomes of the UK BigLottery funded In the Picture project promoting inclusive children's media.
She has an active interest in researching learning and teaching, and has presented papers on inclusive curricula, employability, volunteering and problem based learning at a number of international conferences and colloquia. Her two most recent projects in this area, funded by the UK's Higher Education Academy subject networks, have involved exploring collaborative relationships between universities, their students and community organisations and charities.
Dr Willa McDonald
Creative non-fiction/literary journalism, biography and memoir, journalism ethics, travel writing, place and nature writing, race and the media.
Associate Professor Kathryn Millard
Screenwriting and Production (features, essay films, non-fiction, shorts), Script Editing/Dramaturgy, Theories of Creativity, Performance, Colour Theory, Photography, Media Psychology, Visual Culture.
Mr Alex Munt
New digital cinema; Screen theory; Language & aesthetics of the digital moving image; Film titles design; Screen|Writing models for the digital age.
Dr Renata Murawska
National and ?migr? cinemas, with a special focus on Eastern Europe and South America; film comedy; adaptations; authorship; propaganda, theories of persuasion and new concepts in branding.
Associate Professor John Potts
Culture and technology, digital media, audio arts, and intellectual history.
Dr Catherine Simpson
Catherine's main research focuses on gender and geography in cinema and media. She has a special interest in national cinemas, particularly Australian, Turkish and Middle Eastern cinemas. Her other research interests include socio-cultural studies of the body.
Dr Sherman Young
Sherman's interests include technology and society, new media technology and media policy issues. His focus is the social, cultural and political impact of the new media technologies and the effect of those technologies on existing media industries and infrastructures.
Sherman is the author of The Book is Dead, Long Live the Book, published by UNSW Press. He is a founding member of the editorial board of Scan, an online journal of media arts and culture and an editorial reviewer for Hyperrhiz: New Media Cultures. He blogs at http://reconfigure.org.
Sherman's current research project is Copyright Cultures involving qualitative and quantitative research into the attitudes of Australian musicians to the new technologies and their copyright implications. More details can be found here.