University of Melbourne

Post-Doc, English, School of Culture and Communication

ARC Postdoctoral Fellow

About

Michelle Smith is an Australian Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow on the project 'From Colonial to Modern: Transnational Girlhood in Australian, Canadian and New Zealand Print Cultures, 1840-1940'. This archival project with Professor Clare Bradford (Deakin University) and Dr Kristine Moruzi (University of Alberta) will examine how girlhoods were conceived in Australian, New Zealand and Canadian print cultures from their colonial infancy to the development of distinct national identities and literatures. It will interrogate representations of colonial girls as adaptations of British imperial femininity and will show how these print cultures formulate a transnational feminine ideal. It will then chart how these colonial girls were transformed into the girls of the 1920s and 1930s whose modernity was imbricated with independent nationhood.

Michelle's research on British girls' literature, culture and empire arising out of her doctoral dissertation has been published in journals including Victorian Periodicals Review, English Literature in Transition and The Lion and the Unicorn and in various edited collections. She also has articles forthcoming in Continuum (with Dr Elizabeth Parsons, on femininity and environmentalism in animated children's film), the anthology Girls, Texts, Cultures (Wilfrid Laurier Press, on Australian girls in late Victorian and Edwardian British fiction) and in Tarzan's Global Adventures: From King of the Jungle to International Icon (Routledge, on Tarzan of the Apes and boyhood).

Michelle's monograph Empire in British Girls'Literature and Culture: Imperial Girls, 1880-1915 was recently published by  Palgrave Macmillan (UK). She has also written articles about girlhood and literature for The Age, On Line Opinion and The  Conversation and maintains a blog called Girls' Literature and Culture.

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