English and Creative Arts experts

Dr Simone Lazaroo

Creative writing, author

Author of three prize-winning novels and anthologised short stories, Dr Simone Lazaroo’s fourth novel has recently been published.

Her published fiction explores individuals living at the interface between cultures. She is currently writing her fifth novel, with the assistance of a grant for established writers from the Australia Council for the Arts.

Dr Lazaroo teaches creative writing at Murdoch University.

Dr Christine Owen

Literature and creative writing

Dr Owen has published on eighteenth-century English literature and is also a current Australian Research Council OzReader for the Creative Arts.

She teaches literary studies and creative writing in Murdoch’s English program and is a member of Murdoch’s Institute of Social Research and a Research Fellow at the University of Melbourne.

Associate Professor Jenny de Reuck

Connecting theatre and young people

An expert in Shakespeare and Elizabethan performance art, Associate Professor Jenny de Reuck runs the Children's Theatre unit at Murdoch University.

She writes and directs a new play for primary school children each year, several of which have been published as e-books and are used by teachers across Australia, Hong Kong and Singapore.

Associate Professor de Reuck is currently working on her next e-book, which combines the performance of her most recent play, The Captive Carousel (2008), with commentary and images to help bring theatre into a contemporary context for young people.

Dr Serge Tampalini

New media and contemporary technologies in performance/theatre work: integrating virtual environments and alternative technologies

Dr Serge Tampalini specialises in how the aesthetic aspects of theatre such as sets, costumes, lights work together to create meaning. His expertise also covers performance theory and practice; actor training and theatre direction and design

Dr Tampalini’s research interest has been motivated by a cultural shift in the way we have come to recognise and use the power of media as active participants in our culture - evidenced in our use of mobile technologies and game platforms, and our participation in online communities such as youtube, facebook, LinkedIn, twitter and Second Life. His most recent research interest involves using the online Second Life virtual environment as an alternative space for art exhibitions and theatre performances.

Over the last thirty years of working in theatre and design studies Dr Tampalini has acquired specific areas of expertise in the use of new media and contemporary technologies that he has been able to critically deploy in his teaching practice and motivate and inspire students.

He has built strong active networks in these fields, and is now part of a vibrant network of international researchers working in these areas.

Professor Vijay Mishra

Diasporas; multicultural theories; books on cinema and Salman Rushdie

Vijay Mishra is Professor of English Literature and Director of the Krishna Somers Foundation for the study of diasporas at Murdoch University.

Author of more than 60 refereed articles and book chapters, Professor Mishra has won two Large ARC (Australian Research Council) discovery grants, and writes the annual survey of multicultural theory for the Year’s Work in Critical and Cultural Theory.

He is currently working on a book on cinema and another on Salman Rushdie.

Professor Mishra's publications include Dark Side of the Dream: Australian Literature and the Postcolonial Mind with Bob Hodge, The Gothic Sublime, Devotional Poetics and the Indian Sublime, Bollywood Cinema: Temples of Desire, and The Literature of the Indian Diaspora: Theorizing the Diasporic Imaginary.

Dr Helena Grehan

Performance theory, spectatorship, ethics and performance, interculturalism, race and representation.