Philip Mead

Biography

Philip Mead is a graduate of ANU (BA Hons), of La Trobe University (MA) and of The University of Melbourne (Ph.D, Dip.Ed.). From 1987 to 1994 he was Lockie Fellow and Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing and Australian Literature in the English Department, University of Melbourne, and from 1995 to 2009, Senior Lecturer, then Associate Professor in English, at the University of Tasmania.

From 2009 to 2018 Philip was Winthrop Professor and inaugural Chair of Australian Literature at the University of Western Australia, and Director of the Westerly Centre. In 2009-2010 Philip was also Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mack Visiting Chair of Interdisciplinary Australian Studies, at the Free University, Berlin. In 2015-2016 he was Gough Whitlam and Malcolm Fraser Visiting Professor of Australian Studies at Harvard University and DAAD Visiting Fellow, University of Tübingen, Germany. He is currently Emeritus Professor and Senior Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Western Australia and Honorary Professorial Fellow in the Faculty of Education, University of Melbourne.

Philip has been co-editor of JASAL, the Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature and is on the editorial advisory boards of Australian Literary Studies and the Australian Journal of English Education. In 2015 he designed and taught a MOOC, ‘Australian literature: a rough guide’ for the Coursera platform.

Philip’s research is at the intersections of national and transnational literary studies, cultural history and theory, poetics, literary education, and digital humanities. He has received and led numerous nationally competitive research grants including the ALTC funded project, ‘Australian Literature Teaching Survey’ (2009) and the ARC Discovery Project grant for 2010-2012 (with Gordon McMullan, King’s College, London), ‘Monumental Shakespeares: an investigation of transcultural commemoration in 20th-century Australia and England’. Philip was also a CI on the ARC Discovery Project grant for 2016-19, ‘Investigating literary knowledge in the education of English teachers’ (with Larissa McLean Davies and Lyn Yates, University of Melbourne, Brenton Doecke, Deakin University, and Wayne Sawyer, Western Sydney University). Philip has been a member of the Australian Research Council’s College of Experts (2017-2019) and has been a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities since 2012.

In 2009 his book Networked Language: History & Culture in Australian Poetry (Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2018) was shortlisted for the Association for Australian Literature’s Walter McRae Russell Award, and in 2010 it won the New South Wales Premier’s Prize for Literary Scholarship. In 2011 he co-edited, with Brenton Doecke and Larissa McLean Davies, Teaching Australian Literature: from classroom conversations to national imaginings (AATE/Wakefield).

In 2017 Philip published three literary critical studies: Antipodal Shakespeare: Remembering and Forgetting in Britain, Australia and New Zealand, 1916-2016 (with Gordon McMullan, London: Arden/Bloomsbury); The Social Work of Narrative: human rights and the cultural imaginary (ed. with Gareth Griffiths, Hannover: Ibidem/Columbia University Press); and The Literature of Tasmania (AustLit Resource: St Lucia: University of Queensland).