English and Creative Arts experts

Dr Olivia Murphy

Jane Austen, English literature

Dr Olivia Murphy is a specialist in English literature of the Romantic period (roughly 1780-1830) and its legacies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and into the present.

She has a special interest in writing by women from that period, and in particular, Jane Austen. Austen is her area of greatest expertise, and she has published extensively on Jane Austen's writing, life and present-day adaptations of her novels.

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. Her publications include the monograph The Female Crusoe: Hybridity, Trade and the Eighteenth-Century Individual (2010); book chapters in Ulla Grapard and Gillian Hewitson, Robinson’s Crusoe’s Economic Man (2011) and Rosamund Dalzeill, Selves crossing cultures: autobiography and globalisation (2002); several academic articles and various short stories and poetry.

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

Theatre production and design, actor training

Associate Professor Tampalini has produced a diverse body of theatre productions that has spanned more than 30 years. His work has been seen in all Australian capital cities as well as Morocco, Malta and Canada.

His body of work includes the design and direction of the Peking Opera inspired production of Manuel Puig’s play The Kiss of the Spider Woman (2006), the first professional WA production of Howard Barker’s Gertrude the Cry (2008).

Collaborative projects have included the theatre production, Witness - which featured inter-disciplinary work of devised and improvised theatre (2010) and a joint project with Dr Ralf Rauker from ECU to produce Bertolt Brecht’s Baal (2011).

A comprehensive documentation of Associate Professor Tampalini's work may be seen here.

As well as working in the commercial theatre industry, Serge currently teaches Theatre Studies and Design, where he specialises in performance theory; aesthetics and theatre semiology; theatre direction and design; and actor training.

Professor Vijay Mishra

Salman Rushdie, Cinema and Film theory, English and Postcolonial literatures, Comparative Literature, Bibliography and Textual Criticism, Diasporas

Professor Mishra is currently working on two books – one on cinema and another on Salman Rushdie.

He is the author of a large number of refereed articles and book chapters in many areas of literary and cultural studies.

His scholarly monographs include Dark Side of the Dream: Australian Literature and the Postcolonial Mind, The Gothic Sublime, Devotional Poetics and the Indian Sublime, Bollywood Cinema: Temples of Desire, The Literature of the Indian Diaspora: Theorizing the Diasporic Imaginary, and What Was Multiculturalism?

Vijay Mishra is Professor of English Literature and Australian Research Council Professorial Fellow. He is also a Fellow of the Australian Humanities Academy (FAHA).

Associate Professor Helena Grehan

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

Associate Professor Helena Grehan is a Senior Lecturer in English and Creative Arts, specialising in the study of performance art, particularly the ways politically-inflected works impact, or have potential to impact, on spectators.

Associate Professor Grehan has written on a range of international performance and installation works that deal with provocative social and political issues.

She is currently working with her colleagues Associate Professor Peter Eckersall (Melb) and Professor Ed Scheer (UNSW) on an ARC funded project on New Media Dramaturgy. She is also continuing her work on ethics, ambivalence and responsibility in and in response to theatre and performance projects.

Her publications include: Mapping Cultural Identity in Contemporary Australian Performance, and Performance, Ethics and Spectatorship in a Global Age.