Photo: Jessica White
I have been a researcher for twenty years, exploring deafness and disability studies, life writing, Australian literature, climate fiction, and the environmental humanities. Below I outline my research interests and my creative and critical writing on each subject.
GEORGIANA MOLLOY
I have been researching botanist Georgiana Molloy (1805 - 1843) since 1999, when I encountered William Lines’ biography An All Consuming Passion, and I have written about her writing, scientific endeavours, and the way plants changed her life. My work in progress, From the Miniature to the Momentous, is an ecobiography of Georgiana Molloy, due to be published in 2026.
‘Shaping Spaces and Selves.’ Transcultural Ecocriticism: Indigenous, Romantic and Global Perspectives. Ed. Peter Denney and Stuart Cook. Bloomsbury, 2021.
‘“The proud & haughty Rocks": Gender, Botany and Archipelagic Travel Writing in Scotland’, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, vol. 43, no. 3, 2021, pp. 309–327.
‘“The Most Formidable Teeth”: Gardening, Collecting and Violence in Nineteenth Century South-West Western Australia’. Tamkang Review, vol 51, no. 1, 2021.
‘‘The Inexhaustible Properties of a Lady’s Pen’: The Literary Craft of Georgiana Molloy’. Claiming Space for Australian Women's Writing. Ed. Devaleena Das and Sanjukta Dasgupta. Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-50400-1_10.
‘Georgiana Molloy, Botanical Networks and Naming in 19th Century Western Australia’. Australasian Journal of Ecocriticism and Cultural Ecology. 5 (2015). 1-10.
‘From the Miniature to the Momentous: Georgiana Molloy and the Craft of Collecting.’ Island. 135 (2013): 34-39.
‘The Native Seeds of Augusta.’ Griffith Review, ‘Looking West’, 2015.
‘Intimacy and Distance across the Globe: The Literary Relationship between Georgiana Molloy and Captain James Mangles.’ In Intimate Explorations: Reading Across Disciplines. Ed. Alejandro Cervantes-Carson and Beatriz Oria. Inter-Disciplinary Press, 2009.
‘Efflorescence: The Letters of Georgiana Molloy’. Hecate: A Women's Interdisciplinary Journal. 28.2 (2002): 176-190.
The interview below with Dr Prudence Gibson outlines my ideas on my ecobiography of Georgiana Molloy and the importance of plant life, particularly in south-west Western Australia.
ECOBIOGRAPHY
While a biography chronicles a person’s life, an ecobiography details how a person’s sense of self is shaped by their environment. My forthcoming essay collection, Silence is my Habitat: Ecobiographical Essays, details how deafness shapes my relationship with different environments, such as the bush, bodies of water, archives, and institutions.
Silence is my Habitat: Ecobiographical Essays. Upswell Publishing, 2025.
‘Edges and Extremes in Ecobiography: Amy Liptrot's The Outrun.’ Ed. Ina Batzke, Lea Espinoza Garrido and Linda Hess. Life Writing in the Posthuman Anthropocene. Palgrave, 2021.
“Botanically Adrift: Writing Ecological Estrangement in Two Trees Make a Forest-On Memory, Migration and Taiwan”. Tamkang Review, vol 51, no. 2, 2021, pp. 45-62. doi: 10.6184/TKR.202106_51(2).0003
Life Writing in the Anthropocene. Edited with Gillian Whitlock. Routledge, 2021.
‘From the Miniature to the Momentous: Writing Lives Through Ecobiography’. Auto/Biography Studies: Life Writing in the Anthropocene, 35.1 (2020) 13-33.
With Gillian Whitlock. ‘“Desperation for Life”: Writing Death in the Anthropocene.’ Auto/Biography Studies: Life Writing in the Anthropocene, 35.1 (2020) 231-235.
‘I felt this landscape knew I was there’: The Lake’s Apprentice and Ecobiography.’ Offshoot: Contemporary Life Writing Methodologies and Practice. Ed. Donna Lee Brien and Quinn Eades. UWA Publishing, 2018.
The video below, of a presentation at the Rachel Carson Center, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, outlines some of my ideas and research on ecobiography.
DEAFNESS
My award-winning hybrid memoir Hearing Maud details my experiences of deafness and how they intertwined with the story of Maud Praed, the deaf daughter of 19th century expatriate writer Rosa Praed. Although Maud and I were born almost a century apart and our lives went in radically different directions, many of our experiences were the same. I have also written about deaf Australian writers and about deafness and sound.
‘Driven.’ Growing Up in Country Australia. Ed. Rick Morton, Black Inc. Books, 2022.
‘“Silence is My Habitat”: Judith Wright, Writing and Deafness.’ The Routledge Companion to Australian Literature. Ed. Jessica Gildersleeve. Routledge, 2021.
‘How Deafness Shaped my Love of Music.’ Kill Your Darlings, 2020.
‘We Are All Deaf During the Pandemic.’ Griffith Review, 2020.
‘A Great Many Capital Foreign Things.’ Southerly, ‘Writing Disability’, 2016.
‘“Can I Do my Words?” On the Poetics of Deafness.” Cordite Poetry Review, 2015.
‘Ghostliness and Un/Belonging as a Hard-of-Hearing Writer’. New Scholar. 3.1 (2014): 109-118.
DISABILITY
I am the principal investigator on an Australia Research Council Discovery Project, ‘Finding Australia’s Disabled Authors: Community, Connection, Creativity.’ Postdoctoral Fellow Dr Amanda Tink and I have created a website to highlight disabled Australian authors, and are running a series of conferences to further explore disability, literature, and creative writing.
With Amanda Tink. ‘Writing Disability in Australia.’ Australian Literary Studies. 2021.
‘“Losing Sight of Billy”: Moving Beyond the Specular in Haxby’s Circus."’ Australian Literary Studies, vol. 37, no. 1, 2022, doi: 10.20314/als.3b221653fe.
‘In Our Own Voices: 5 Australian Books about Living with Disability.’ The Conversation. 2020.
‘The Cry of the Gull’. Disability Experiences. Ed. Susannah Mintz and Tom Couser. Gale, 2019, pp. 142-145.
‘“So Many Sparks of Fire”: Dorothy Cottrell, Modernism and Mobility. Queensland Review. 23.2 (2016): 164-177.
ENVIRONMENTAL HUMANITIES
I have an enduring interest in the way that environments are represented in the humanities. I am also interested in both writing and critiquing Australian climate fiction. In my role as an academic, I supervise a number of PhD candidates working on creative writing, the environment, and climate fiction.
‘Alternative Histories of the Anthropocene: Andrew McGahan's The Rich Man's House’, Social Alternatives, vol. 41, no. 3, 2022, pp. 37–42.
‘Uncertain Futures: Climate Fiction in Australian Literature.’ The Cambridge History of the Australian Novel. Ed. David Carter. Cambridge UP, 2022.
‘Gardening in the Anthropocene: Wilding, Eco-Memoir and Biodiversity’. The Politics and Poetics of Gardening in Hard Times. Lexington Books, 2019.
‘Eco-Memoir: Protecting, Restoring and Repairing Memory and Environment.’ Mediating Memory: Tracing the Limits of Memoir. Ed. Bunty Avieson, Fiona Giles and Sue Joseph. Routledge, 2017.
‘Fluid Worlds: Reflecting Climate Change in The Swan Book and The Sunlit Zone.’ Southerly. 74.1 (2014): 142-163.
SCIENCE
I am by no means an expert in science (I studied it up until Year 10 at school), but I love learning new things, and find that science generates creativity in my writing. In 2020, Dr Amanda Niehaus and I established the literary magazine Science Write Now. I have since stepped back from the magazine’s production and now lead an advisory board for the magazine.
ARCHIVES
I am happiest in an archive and have made significant historical finds. While working for Dr Fiona Paisley on her book about First Nations man Anthony Martin Fernando, I uncovered three original notebooks by Fernando, written in 1927-28 when he lived on the streets in London. In 2019, my archival research in the Battye Library, Perth, on the massacre of Wardandi Noongars instigated by Georgiana Molloy’s husband (subsequently published in JASAL) was used as corroborating data in the Colonial Massacres Map published by the Colonial Frontier Massacres in Australia project at the University of Newcastle.
My research on Maud Praed, the deaf daughter of Rosa Praed, in the John Oxley Library, National Library of Australia and the Surrey History Centre revealed the extent of Maud’s deafness and the impact of audism and eugenics on her life. I detailed this research in my hybrid memoir, Hearing Maud.