School of English, Communications and Performance Studies

Our research units

Our school undertakes world-class research in the following research units:

• Film Culture and Theory
• Research in Literary Studies
• Media Studies
• Performance
• Centre for Australian and Postcolonial Writing
• Centre for The Book
• European Philosophy

Research outside of our research units

• Social Aesthetics Research Network

• Cultural Tsunami Research Network

• Cultural Typhoon Melbourne is a group of Melbourne-based (but not exclusive of those based outside Melbourne) scholars, students and activists, interested in exploring media and cultural studies in Asian contexts. In solidarity with the Association for Cultural Typhoon based in Japan, Cultural Typhoon Melbourne will hold monthly seminars intended to create a space for the free and vigorous exchange of ideas and intellectual discussion based on an equal relationship among individuals. All are welcome to attend and participate.

The first gathering will feature two speakers, Koichi Iwabuchi (Monash University) and Fran Martin (Melbourne University), who would like to share with participants their research projects, concerns, predicaments, and plans for collaboration, focusing on the issues of entrapped relations of “here” and “there”. What is the significance and difficulty of doing critical studies of Asia in Melbourne/Australia (and in English)? How should we do research “here” on “there” (cultural issues in Asian regions), “here and there” (inter-Asian connections), “there in here” (migrants from Asia/Asian Australians)? Can critical studies of culture enable us to rethink “here” and “there” theoretically, imaginatively, collaboratively beyond a bipolar view? We invite you to join with us in attending afresh to long-standing questions of researchers’ positionalities, approaches to transnational ethno-cultural movements/connections, the de-Westernization of knowledge production, and cross-border collaboration.

Light food and drinks will be provided. We would like to ask the participants for a small contribution to cover costs ($15 for full-time employed persons and $5 for others).

The schedule of Cultural Typhoon Melbourne seminars up to June 2013 is as follows:

18 April (speakers: Audrey Yue & Jinna Tay)

16 May (speakers: Chris Healy & Olivia Khoo)

20 June (speakers: TBA)

Cultural Typhoon Melbourne Seminar Series #1

“I am not an Asianist, but…”

On entangled interactions of “here” and “there”

Time & Date: 19:00-21:00, 14 March 2013

Place: ACJC Seminar rooms, Building H, 8^th floor (H8.06),

Monash University, Caulfield Campus

• Until 2011, Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies was an important and lively centre of research. Many of its members are now to be found in the Research in Literary Studies Unit.

Archived content from the Centre’s research seminars may be found here.