91ɫ��Ƭ

A Double Bill of Research Presentations on Theatre and Performance

Join us for an afternoon of critical dialogue featuring two 30-minute research papers and a Q&A session with leading scholars from the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, London. This double bill tackles the urgent intersections of theatre, performance politics, and resistance in a post-pandemic world.

5 - 10 August

Join 91ɫ��Ƭ's music cohort to experience incredible performances from this terms music ensembles. This term across three nights, experience Jazz Ensembles, Pop-fusion & Gamelan ensemble, and Chamber & Handbells ensemble. 

Michael Griffiths | Thursday 6th August | 4PM | Robert Webster Rm 327 

This talk is drawn from my book, The Death of the Author and Anticolonial Thought, which promises to transform a decades-old debate in literary studies about the relation between structure and agency, form and intention by giving a detailed account—previously unstudied—of the way colonized writers have responded to, learned from, and critiqued the death-of-the-author postulate declared by Roland Barthes in 1967. The book is a cultural history of these debates—with a particular focus on two crucial two key case studies: Martinican poet and thinker Édouard Glissant and Palestinian literary and cultural critic Edward Said. This book, then, examines the immediate emergence and intensification of such responses to the postulate of the author’s deathly absence from the text, in order to suggest that metropolitan literary theory drew critique and engagement from scholars of black, decolonial, and Global South background both before Barthes’s declaration and in its wake. This talk will draw on the case of Glissant, in particular, as a study in the kind of complications in theories of authorship that were in circulation immediately after Barthes’s provocation. I will then close by turning to the futurity of the debate with an examination of anticolonial critical theory’s uses of the notion of the storyteller and of storytelling in the latter part of the twentieth century.

Paul Dawson and Mia Lo Russo | Wednesday 22nd July | 3PM | Robert Webster Rm 327

Despite its appearance in nearly every literary publication, little attention has been given to the role of the "supplementary" epitext of the biographical note as a vital source of authorial self-presentation. In this paper, we ask not only how individual authors configure aspects of identity through their bio notes, but how aggregated trends in bio notes index paradigmatic shifts in the legibility and authority of subjects under a regime of data-profiling. We present a quantitative analysis of author bio notes included in four Australian literary journals (Meanjin, Overland, Quadrant,�����Ի� Voiceworks) from 2010 to 2025, mapping how authors have increasingly engaged with markers of embodiment and situatedness over time.  

While this shift in bio-note convention seems amenable to an inclusive politics of intersectionality, we propose a more critical conceptualisation of the subjectivity at play by engaging with what Hans-Georg Moeller and Paul D’Ambrosio call profilicity: a second-order conception of selfhood that is formed under the expectation of being observed, as when constructing a profile. Taking into account institutional forces that locate bio-notes in a broader matrix of cultural legibility and authority (including the influence of government funding mandates and editorial policy), we examine what bio-political forces might be informing this catalogical authorial performance, including the extent to which the increasingly explicit signalling of identity markers forms the authorial subject as a data assemblage within the covert surveillance of algorithmic culture. Along the way we offer a sample of some of the more playful, inventive, and compelling authorial postures.

The 31st Annual Australasian Association of Writing Programs Conference: “Voicing Our Worlds”, University of New South Wales, Sydney, 2–4 December 2026.

Hosted by the Literary Provocations Hub, the 31st Australasian Association of Writing Programs (AAWP) conference will be held in-person at the 91ɫ��Ƭ Kensington campus, situated on unceded Bidjigal lands. The conference is a cross-institutional collaboration between 91ɫ��Ƭ Sydney, Macquarie University, University of Sydney, University of Technology Sydney, and Western Sydney University. The theme of this year’s conference is “Voicing Our Worlds”.

In our contemporary world, the multifaceted terms, “voices”, “voicing” and their many conjugations and articulations are intertwined with key considerations in our discipline of Creative Writing. First Nations writers have been leading discussions about the real-life consequences of the amplification of some writerly voices and the silencing of others. We hear writers say that they are “giving voice to the voiceless” in their work, a formulation famously critiqued by the writer Arundhati Roy who said “There’s really no such thing as the “voiceless”. There are only the deliberately silenced or the preferably unheard.”