Biography
David is an international expert in Australian literary studies. His areas of speciality are autobiography and poetry. His Artful Histories: Modern Australian Autobiography was published by Cambridge University Press in 1996, the same year that the book was awarded a NSW Premiers Literary Award. His publications on poetry include the Contemporary Poetry chapter in The Cambridge Companion to Australian Literature (2000), the Poetry: 1970-2005 chapter in The Companion to Australian Literature (2007), and the 'Autobiography' chapter in The Cambridge History of Australian Literature. David has also written numerous essays and reviews for scholarly and general publications such as Criticism, Biography, Southerly, Meanjin, Westerly, Australian Book Review, The Age, The Australian, the Sydney Morning Herald and JASAL. David has also written Introductions to 30 Australian Poets (UQP, 2011) and Rosemary Dobson Collected (UQP, 2012).
David has been the co-recipient of a number of ARC Grants, including a Discovery Grant on 'Australian literature and the public sphere'. In 2004 he was invited to guest-edit a special issue of the refereed journal Life Writing on Life Writing and the Public Sphere. From 2003-2006 he was associate editor of the literary journal, Space: New Writing. He is an editorial board member of Life Writing and Antipodes: The North American Journal of Australian Literature. He has been a guest at a number of literary festivals, including the 2012 Melbourne Writers' Festival. In 2006 he was the co-recipient (with Professor Jill Roe and Professor Nicholas Jose) of an ARC Linkage Grant (of $240 000) for the project The Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature, of which David is the Deputy General Editor. The Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature was published in 2009 and in 2010 it won the 'Special Award' in the NSW Premier's Literary Awards. Thomas Keneally described the anthology as being 'Unprecedented in the breadth of what it offers from both the ancient and the recent literature of the country'.
David is also a poet. His first book of poetry, Blister Pack was published internationally by Salt Publishing in 2005. Blister Pack won the Mary Gilmore Award (for a first book of poetry) and was short-listed for four major awards, including The Melbourne Prize for Literature (New Writing Award), Australias richest literary award. A fine-press chapbook, Graphic: Two Sequences, appeared in 2010. His second full-length collection, Outside, was published by Salt Publishing in 2011. It was short listed for the Queensland Literary Awards and it was a Finalist for the Melbourne Prize for Literature's $30 000 Best Writing Award in 2012. His poetry has also appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including The Age, Southerly, Australian Book Review, The Best Australian Poems 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2011, 2012, 2013, and 2014 and The Best Australian Poetry 2007. In 2013 he was the first Poetry Editor of Australian Book Review.
Read more on David's profileResearch interests
Literature and the public sphere
Affiliations
Units taught
second-level literary studies (ALL201/ALL202), professional writing (poetry and creative non-fiction), honours research methods, honours and HDR supervision
Professional activities
Community Involvement
Awards
2012 Finalist, Melbourne Prize for Literature’s ‘Best Writing Award’ (triennial, all genres) (for Outside).
2012 Shortlisted, Queensland Literary Awards (Poetry) (for Outside).
2010 Winner, ‘Special Award’, NSW Premier’s Literary Award (for the Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature).
2010 Winner, the Australian Educational Publishing Awards, Tertiary (Wholly Australian) Scholarly Reference (for the Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature).
2010 Short-listed, Australian Book Industry Awards, General Non-Fiction (for the Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature).
2006 Winner, Mary Gilmore Award (for the best first book of poetry in the preceding two calendar years, Blister Pack).
2006 Short-listed, The Melbourne Prize for Literature (New Writing Award, Blister Pack).
2005 Short-listed, WA Premier’s Book Awards (Poetry: Blister Pack).
2005 Short-listed, NSW Premier’s Literary Awards (Poetry: Blister Pack).
2005 Short-listed, The Age Book of the Year Award (Poetry: Blister Pack).
1997 Short-listed, Colin Roderick Award for Best Australian Book (Artful Histories).
1996 NSW Premier’s Literary Award (for Artful Histories).
1993 Eva Veronka Vidak Memorial Prize (Sydney University, award for PhD thesis).
Publications
No publications found
Funded Projects at Deakin
No Funded Projects at Deakin found
Supervisions
Maria Jones (nee Vella)
Thesis entitled: Representations of Liminality in Videopoetry and Graphic Memoir
Doctor of Philosophy, School of Communication and Creative Arts
Charlotte Guest
Thesis entitled: A Feminist Response to Catullus: A Creative Artefact and Exegesis
Doctor of Philosophy, School of Communication and Creative Arts
Christopher Cody
Thesis entitled: Bustard: Confronting the Wounded Male in the (Post) Realist Short Story
Doctor of Philosophy, School of Communication and Creative Arts
Michelle (Shelly) Beamish
Thesis entitled: Poetry and the Trauma of Child Abuse: A Creative Thesis and Exegesis
Doctor of Philosophy, School of Communication and Creative Arts
Heather Cameron
Thesis entitled: Cancer Poetry: Responding to loss through autopathography and elegy
Doctor of Philosophy, School of Communication and Creative Arts
Dipak Singh
Thesis entitled: Transforming Memory into Art: Stories from Fiji and the Indo-Fijian Diaspora
Doctor of Philosophy, School of Communication and Creative Arts
Autumn Lace Royal
Thesis entitled: Poetry and the Elegiac Self: A Creative Thesis with Exegesis
Doctor of Philosophy, School of Communication and Creative Arts
Andrew Lindsay Gaylard
Thesis entitled: Poetic Neologism in English from the Renaissance to Modernism
Doctor of Philosophy, School of Communication and Creative Arts
Craig Sherborne
Thesis entitled: Tested on Humans: The Opportunistic Self in Life Writing
Doctor of Philosophy, School of Communication and Creative Arts
Emma Jayne Dyson Hayes
Thesis entitled: 'Betwixt-and-Between': Liminality in Golden Age Children's Literature
Doctor of Philosophy, School of Communication and Creative Arts
Ruth Cumberland
Thesis entitled: Revealing the Open Wound: Body Metaphors in Literary Representations of Grief
Doctor of Philosophy, School of Communication and Creative Arts
Janine Gibson
Thesis entitled: Australian Elegy: Landscape and Identity
Doctor of Philosophy, School of Communication and Creative Arts
Robert Bruce Thomson
Thesis entitled: Sir Walter Scott in the Western District: 1836 - 1851
Doctor of Philosophy, School of Communication and Creative Arts
Grant Caldwell
Thesis entitled: Intention and Unintention or Hyperconscious in the Contemporary Lyric Impulse
Doctor of Philosophy, School of Communication and Creative Arts
Adam Graham Brown
Thesis entitled: Representation and Judgement: 'Privileged' Jews in Holocaust Writing and Film
Doctor of Philosophy, School of Communication and Creative Arts
Anne Bishop
Thesis entitled: The Work of Death in Bronte's and Dickinson's Poetry
Doctor of Philosophy, School of Communication and Creative Arts
Toby Daniel Davidson
Thesis entitled: Born of Fire, Possessed by Darkness: Mysticism and Australian Poetry
Doctor of Philosophy, School of Communication and Creative Arts
Julie Lee Fletcher
Thesis entitled: Witnessing Tibet: Life Narrative as Testimony in the Tibetan Diaspora
Doctor of Philosophy, School of Communication and Creative Arts
George Raitt
Thesis entitled: Alchemy & Ambiguity: Poetic Responses to Visual Art, Primary Portraiture
Master of Arts, School of Communication and Creative Arts
Kristen Lang
Thesis entitled: Creative Redemption: Uncertainty in Poetic Creativity
Doctor of Philosophy, School of Communication and Creative Arts
Anne Wilson
Thesis entitled: The Picture Boys: Biography, Community and Travelling Picture Shows
Master of Arts, School of Communication and Creative Arts
Jennifer Anne Herbert
Thesis entitled: Revisionist historicism theory and practice: challenging national metanarratives
Doctor of Philosophy, School of Communication and Creative Arts
Ella O'Keefe
Thesis entitled: Mobile Image: Reading Modes of Vision in Forrest-Thomson and Guest
Doctor of Philosophy, School of Communication and Creative Arts
Liam Guilar
Thesis entitled: Anhaga: An exploration in poetry of narrative, memory and identity
Doctor of Philosophy, School of Communication and Creative Arts
Zoe Dzunko
Thesis entitled: On the Edge: Tracing the Liminal in Labour Narratives
Doctor of Philosophy, School of Communication and Creative Arts
Libbie Chellew
Thesis entitled: Uncanny Suburbia and Australian Fiction
Doctor of Philosophy, School of Communication and Creative Arts
Ilona Urquhart
Thesis entitled: Diabolical Literature: Questioning the Morality of Modernism
Doctor of Philosophy, School of Communication and Creative Arts
Jo-Anne Langdon
Thesis entitled: Working title: Magical realism as elegy
Doctor of Philosophy, School of Communication and Creative Arts
Paul Venzo
Thesis entitled: Achipelago: a journey across poetic islands of the self
Doctor of Philosophy, School of Communication and Creative Arts
Alexandra Elizabeth Watkins
Thesis entitled: Problematic Identities in Women's Fiction of the Sri Lankan Diaspora
Doctor of Philosophy, School of Communication and Creative Arts
George Douglas Raitt
Thesis entitled: Visualising Literature: Screen Adaptation and the Process of Reading/Viewing
Doctor of Philosophy, School of Communication and Creative Arts
Alyson Miller
Thesis entitled: Scandalous Texts: The Anxieties of the Literary
Doctor of Philosophy, School of Communication and Creative Arts
Susan Tanya King-Smith
Thesis entitled: A Wordless Horizon: Towards A Politically Engaged Poetic
Doctor of Philosophy, School of Communication and Creative Arts
Robert James Keay
Thesis entitled: The Animation of Psychology: Cultural Poetics and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein
Doctor of Philosophy, School of Communication and Creative Arts
Katarina Tomas
Thesis entitled: Displaced Self: The Impact of Language-migration on Self-identity
Master of Arts, School of Communication and Creative Arts
Antonina Lewis
Thesis entitled: Renegade Judgement: A Study of Madness in Medicine and Literature
Doctor of Philosophy, School of Communication and Creative Arts
Kim Waters
Thesis entitled: Fiction in Oils
Master of Arts, School of Literary & Communication Studies
George Michael Duke
Thesis entitled: Fictional Endstates
Doctor of Philosophy, School of Literary & Communication Studies