Professor Julian Murphet

• Biography/ Background

  I completed my undergraduate work in English at the University of Sydney, before heading to Cambridge for my PhD (1994-8). I then went to Oxford for a postdoc (1998-2002), during which time I also worked as a visiting professor at the University of California at Berkeley (African-American Studies, 2001). I took up my first academic position back at the University of Sydney (2002-7), where I worked until UNSW offered me a professorship. From 2007-2020 I was at UNSW, eventually appointed as a Scientia Professor in 2015. I served as a Fellow of the Academy of the Humanities in Australia from 2013-2023, and on the Australian Research Council's College of Experts, 2019-2022.
  
  In 2020 I took up the position of Jury Chair of English Language and Literature at the University of Adelaide.

• Qualifications

   

  Doctor of Philosophy	University of Cambridge, Faculty of English, Trinity College conferred July 18, 1998
  Master of Philosophy	University of Sydney, English Literature conferred April 1996
  Bachelor of Arts (Honours)	University of Sydney, English Literature (First Class, University Medal) conferred February 1993

• Awards & Achievements

  ·        Scientia Professor, UNSW, 2015-2020

  ·        Fellow of the Academy of the Humanities in Australia, 2013-2023

  ·        Member of the Australian Research Council College of Experts, 2020-2022

  ·        Membership of Editorial Boards: Modernism/modernity (2019- ), The Faulkner Journal (2018- ), Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Critique (2013- )

  ·        Junior Research Fellow, St John’s College, Oxford, 1998-2002

• Research Interests

  I have a book project well underway on the terrible year of 1919 in the USA.

  My research interests, broadly stated, are:

  • Marxism, communism, and the radical imagination
  • Antifascism
  • Cultural and literary theory
  • American literature and culture
  • Modernism in the arts and literature
  • Film theory and history
  • Riots in writing
  • Race and racialization
  • Logistics and Culture
  • Genetics and literature
  • Character
  • Utopia

  Specific authors: William Faulkner, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, Samuel Beckett, James Joyce, Ursula LeGuin, Thomas Pynchon, Keston Sutherland

   

• Research Funding

  ARC Discovery Grant, ‘Rioting and the Literary Archive’, 2019-21 ($199,000)

  Research Collaboratives Seed Grant, A&SS, UNSW, 2019 ($15,000)

  School of the Arts and Media Research Grant, UNSW, 2018 ($5,000)

  Arts and Social Sciences Distinguished Visitor Grant, UNSW, 2019 ($10,000)

  School of the Arts and Media Research Grant, UNSW, 2018 ($4,000)

  ARC Discovery Grant, ‘William Faulkner Between Cinema and Literature’, 2009-2011 ($165,000)

  Research-only Professorship, UNSW, 2007-2010 ($150,000 per annum)

  Faculty of Arts Research and Discovery Grant, University of Sydney, 2006 ($20,000)

  Faculty of Arts Seed Funding Grant, University of Sydney, 2005 ($5,000)

  ARC Discovery Grant, ‘Cinematic Imaginations’, 2004-2005 ($75,000)

   Faculty of Arts Start-Up Grant, University of Sydney, 2003 ($5,000)

  Junior Research Fellow, St John’s College, Oxford, 1998-2002 (£21,000 per annum)

  Senior Rouse Ball Scholar, Trinity College, Cambridge, 1997-98 (£8,000)

• Publications

  Published Monographs:

   

  • Modern Character, 1888-1905 (Oxford University Press, 2023), 288 pp.
  • Prison Writing in the Twentieth Century: A Literary Guide (Edinburgh University Press, 2023), 232 pp.
  • Todd Solondz, Contemporary Film Directors Series (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2019), 186 pp.
  • Faulkner’s Media Romance (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 282 pp.
    • Paperback edition: January 2020.
    • Winner: Dean’s Research Award, Best Monograph, 2018
    • Runner-Up: Australian University Heads of English prize for literary scholarship
  • Multimedia Modernism: Literature and the Anglo-American Avant-Garde (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 220 pp.
  • Narrative and Media, with Helen Fulton, Rosemary Huisman and Anne Dunn, ed. Helen Fulton (Melbourne & New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005)
  • Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho (New York: Continuum, 2002), 94 pp.
  • Literature and Race in Los Angeles, Cultural Margins Series (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 207 pp. 

   

  Edited Scholarly Collections:

   

  • Writing the Global Riot: Literature in a Time of Crisis, edited with Helen Groth and Jumana Bayeh (Oxford University Press, 2023)
  • The Edinburgh Companion to Literature & Sound Studies, edited with Helen Groth (Edinburgh University Press, 2024)
  • E. L. Doctorow: A Reconsideration, edited with Michael Wutz (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019)
  • Poetry and Communism: Writing against Capital, edited with Ruth Jennison (London: Palgrave, 2019)
  • Sounding Modernism, edited with Helen Groth and Penelope Hone (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017)
  • Rancière and Literature, edited with Grace Hellyer (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016)
  • Faulkner in the Media Ecology, edited with Stefan Solomon (Baton Rouge: Louisiana University Press, 2015)
  • Modernism and Masculinity, edited with Natalya Lusty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014): finalist MSA prize for best collection, 2015
  • Flann O'Brien and Modernism, edited with Ronan McDonald and Sascha Morrell (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014)
  • Styles of Extinction: Cormac McCarthy's The Road, edited with Mark Steven (London & New York: Bloomsbury, 2012)
  • Strong Opinions: J.M Coetzee and the Authority of Contemporary Fiction, edited with Chris Danta and Sue Kossew (London & New York: Continuum Press, 2011)
  • Literature and Visual Technologies, edited with Lydia Rainford (Houndmills: Palgrave Press, 2003)

   

  Edited Journal Issues:

   

  • Affirmations: of the modern (2013-2018)
  • Twentieth Century Literature, Special Issue: Late Coetzee, eds. Julian Murphet and Chris Danta, 57.1 (2012)

   

   

  Scholarly Book Chapters: 

   

  • “The Birds: Trauma and the Right of Reply”, in Luke Robinson and Melanie Robson, eds., One Shot Hitchcock: A Contemporary Approach to the Screen (Oxford University Press)—forthcoming 2024
  • “Violence and Power in Kubrick’s Later Cinema,” Karen A. Ritzenhoff, Dijana Metlić, and Jeremi Szaniawski, Gender, Power and Identity in The Films of Stanley Kubrick (London: Routledge, 2022)
  • “New Visual Media,” in The Cambridge History of American Modernism, ed. Mark Whalan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023)
  • “Understanding Quad,” in Beckett and the Media, ed. Mark Nixon and Philipp Schweighauser (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2022)
  •  “Marx in the Modernist Novel,” in Understanding Marx, Understanding Modernism, ed. Mark Steven, Understanding Philosophy, Understanding Modernism Series (London & New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021)
  •  “Globalism’s Pre-History: Technologies of Modernism,” in The Cambridge History of World Literature, 2 Vols., ed. Debjani Ganguly (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021)
  • “‘Wide as Targes Let them Be’, or, How a Poem Is a Barricade,” in Jennison and Murphet, eds., Poetry and Communism: Writing against Capital, edited with Ruth Jennison (London: Palgrave, 2019), pp. 185-207
  • “‘A Rearrangement of Molecules’: On Doctorow’s Perpetual Motion Machines,” in Wutz & Murphet, eds., E. L. Doctorow: A Reconsideration (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019), pp. 132-147
  • “Modernism and Technology,” in The Bloomsbury Companion to Modernist Literature, eds. Ulrika Maude and Mark Nixon (London: Bloomsbury, 2018)
  •  “Character,” in Oxford Research Encyclopaedia of Literature, general editor Paula Rabinowitz (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017)
  •  “Noises of Modernism,” in Sounding Modernism, eds. Helen Groth, Julian Murphet and Penelope Hone (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017), pp. 19-34
  •  “Projecting the Sixties: mediation and characterology in The Catherine Wheel,” in Rediscovering Again: Elizabeth Harrower, eds. Elizabeth McMahon and Brigitta Olubas (Sydney: University of Sydney Press, 2017), pp. 107-16
  •  “Short Story Futures: New Modes of Transmission,” The Cambridge History of the English Short Story, ed. Dominic Head (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), pp. 598-614
  • “Poetry in the Medium of Life: Text, Code, Organism,” in Writing, Medium, Machine: Modern Technographies, eds. Sean Pryor and David Trotter (London: Open Humanities Press, 2016), pp. 208-223
  •  “A Desire Named Streetcar,” in Moving Modernisms, eds. Laura Marcus and David Bradshaw (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), pp. 275-88
  • “Ineluctable Modality of the Sensible: Form and Poverty in Ulysses,” in Rancière and Literature, eds. Grace Hellyer and Julian Murphet (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), pp. 207-25
  • “Lewis and Media,” in The Cambridge Companion to Wyndham Lewis, ed. Tyrus Miller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. 160-71
  • “King Kong Capitalism,” in Animal Life and the Moving Image, eds. Michael Lawrence and Laura McMahon (London: BFI, 2015), pp. 153-70
  • “Protecting the Nothing that Happens,” in The Values of Literary Studies: Critical Institutions, Scholarly Agendas, ed. Rónán McDonald (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. 105-19
  • “Media,” in Literature Now: Key Terms for Literary History, eds. Sascha Bru, Ben de Bruyn and Michael Delville (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015)
  • “In Theory: Stein and Film Philosophy,” in Gertrude Stein in Europe: Reconfigurations Across Media, Disciplines, and Traditions, eds. Sarah Posman and Laura Louise Schultz (London & New York: Bloomsbury, 2015)
  • “New Media Modernism,” in The Cambridge Companion to the American Modernist Novel, ed. Joshua L. Miller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. 210-226
  • “Cinematography of the Group,” in The Cinema of Theo Angelopoulos, eds. Angelos Koutsourakis and Mark Steven (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015), pp. 159-174
  •  “Modern Media Ecology,” in The New Cambridge Companion to William Faulkner, ed. John T. Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), pp. 14-29
  •  “Faulkner in the Histories of Film: ‘Where Memory is the Slave’,” in Faulkner and Film: Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha, 2010, eds. Peter Lurie and Ann J. Abadie (Jackson, MI: University Press of Mississippi, 2014), pp. 197-219
  • “Towards a Gendered Media Ecology,” in Modernism and Masculinity, eds. Natalya Lusty and Julian Murphet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), pp. 53-70
  • “Flann O’Brien and Modern Character,” in Flann O'Brien and Modernism, eds. Ronan McDonald, Sascha Morrell, and Julian Murphet (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014), pp. 149-162
  •  “A Loose Democracy in the Skull: Characterology and Neuroscience,” in Mindful Aesthetics: Literature and the Science of Mind, eds. Helen Groth and Chris Danta (London & New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), pp. 189-205
  •  “The Media of Diaspora,” in The Blackwell Companion to Diaspora and Transnational Studies, eds. Ato Quayson and Girish Daswani (Oxford: Blackwell, 2013), pp. 54-67
  • “France, Europe, The World: 1945-89,” Samuel Beckett in Context, ed. Anthony Uhlmann (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 126-138
  • “The Cave and The Road: Styles of Forgotten Dreams,” in Styles of Extinction: Cormac McCarthy's The Road, eds. Julian Murphet and Mark Steven (London & New York: Continuum, 2012), pp. 109-131
  • “The Novel amidst New Technology and Media,” in The Cambridge History of the English Novel, eds. Robert L. Caserio and Clement C. Hawes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 774-790
  • “Postcolonial writing in Australia and New Zealand,” in The Cambridge History of Postcolonial Literature, ed. Ato Quayson, Vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 446-483
  • “Diary of a Bad Year: Parrhesia, Opinion and Novelistic Form,” in Strong Opinions: J.M Coetzee and the Authority of Contemporary Fiction, eds. Chris Danta, Julian Murphet and Sue Kossew (Continuum Press, 2011), pp. 63-80
  • “Literature of Urban Rebellion,” in The Cambridge Companion to Los Angeles Literature, ed. Kevin McNamara (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 101-110
  •  “Film and (as) Modernity,” in Handbook of Film Studies, eds. James Donald and Michael Renov (London: Sage, 2008), pp. 343-360
  •  “Alain Badiou and Cultural Studies,” in New Cultural Studies: Adventures in Theory, eds. Gary Hall & Clare Birchall (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2006), pp. 147-160
  • “Postmodernism and Space,” in The Cambridge Companion to Postmodernism, ed. Steven Connor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 116-135
  • “Fiction and Postmodernity,” in The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century English Literature, eds. Laura Marcus and Peter Nicholls (Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 716-735
  •  “Multiculturalism and All That Jazz,” with Desmond King, in American Politics and Society Today, ed. Robert Singh (Polity Press, 2002)
  • “Grounding Theory: Literary Theory and the New Geography,” in Post-Theory: New Directions in Criticism, eds. McQuillan et al (Edinburgh University Press, 1999), pp. 200-208

   

  Journal Articles (Peer-Reviewed):

   

  • “The Poetry of Nothing: John Cage and 4’33”,” Dossier on 4’33”, Australian Humanities Review: AHR 70 (2022)
  • “The Marcusian Moment: Sound, Film, and the Body of a Woman,” Laura Marcus Dossier, Screen 63.1 (Spring 2023)
  • “Transferring Suspiria: Historicism and Philosophies of Psychoanalytic Transference,” Film-Philosophy 26.1 (March 2022)
  • “Mineral Poetics,” Textual Practice 33.1, Special Issue: ‘Anti-Humanist Modernisms’, ed. Guy Stevenson (September 2020)
  •  “An Oasis of Horror: affirming the affect in The Portrait of a Lady,” The Henry James Review 40.3, Forum Issue on Emotion, Feeling, Sentiment in James (Fall 2019): 194-203
  •  “The Mortification of Novelistic Discourse,” The Journal of Beckett Studies 26.1 (April 2017): 39-52
  • “Rosa Plus Emma,” Filzofski vestnik 13 Special Issue on Reason (Winter 2016-17): 201-12
  • “Godard’s Stereopticon,” Screening the Past 41, Special Issue on Late Godard, ed. Sarinah Masukor (December 2016)
  •  “A Modest Proposal for the Inhuman,” Modernism/modernity 23.3 Special Issue: Inhumanism, ed. Aaron Jaffe (September 2016): 651-70
  • “Aesthetic Perception and ‘the flaw’: Towards a Jamesonian Account of Late James,” The Henry James Review 36.3, Special Issue on Jameson and James (Fall 2015): 226-233
  •  “On the Market and Uneven Development,” Affirmations: of the modern 1.1 (2013): 1-20
  • “‘Events listening to their own tremors’: Zukofsky and Objective Anachrony,” Textual Practice 26:2, Special Issue: The Uses of Anachronism, eds. Helen Groth and Paul Sheehan (Spring, 2012): 707-727
  • “Coetzee and Late Style: Exile within the Form,” in Twentieth Century Literature, Special Issue: Late Coetzee, eds. Murphet and Danta, 57.1 (2012): 86-104
  • “The Mole and the Multiple: A Chiasmus of Character,” New Literary History, Special Issue: Character, vol. 42, no. 2 (Spring, 2011): 255-276
  • “The Wire and Realism,” Sydney Studies in English, Vol. 36 (2010): 52-76
  • “Beckett’s Televisual Modernism,” Critical Quarterly, Special Issue on Modernism and New Media History, ed. David Trotter, vol. 51, no. 2 (2009): 60-78
  • “Eliot’s Mechanism of Sensibility: poetic form and media change,” Literature and Aesthetics, vol. 18, no. 1 (2008): 31-42
  • “P. T. Anderson’s Dilemma,” Sydney Studies in English, vol. 34 (2008): 63-85
  • “Pitiable or Political Animals? Some notes on the ‘last humans’,” SubStance, Vol. 37, no. 3, Issue 117 (December, 2008): 97-116
  • “Character and Event,” SubStance, Vol. 36, no. 3, issue 113 (September, 2007): 106-125
  • “Hard Drives?” Writing Technologies, Vol. 1, no. 1 (April, 2007)
  • “Postmodernism as American Studies,” Australasian Journal of American Studies, Vol. 25, no. 2 (December 2006): 65-76
  • “Behind the Scenes: Animation and Postmodern Value,” Sydney Studies in English 32 (2006): 143-165
  • “The Mulatto: an unspeakable concept,” Working Papers on the Web, Volume 5 (2003)
  • “Film Noir and the Racial Unconscious,” Screen 39:1 (Spring, 1998): 22-35
  • “Identity and Difference in Anna Deavere Smith’s Performance Art,” Wasafiri 27 (Spring 1998): 29-33

   

  Reviews and other pieces:

   

  • “block/supply/chain,” Australian Humanities Review 66 (May 2020)
  • Review of Peter Weiss, The Aesthetics of Resistance, Vol II, in Sydney Review of Books (30 March 2020)
  • “Decadence,” Modernism/modernity, Responses to the Special Issue on Weak Theory, Part II, March 10, 2019
  • Review of Keston Sutherland, Poetical Works, 1999-2015, in Chicago Review 62.01 (Spring 2019)
  • Review of Annie McCallahan, Dead Pledges and Jasper Bernes, The Work of Art in the Age of Deindustrialization, in Affirmations: of the modern Vol 5, no. 1 (2017)
  • Review of Robert S. Levine, The Lives of Frederick Douglass, in AJAS Vol. 35, no. 2 (December 2016)
  • Review of Fredric Jameson, The Ancients and the Postmoderns, in Affirmations: of the modern Vol 3, no. 1 (2015)
  • “Steven Connor from Down Under,” Critical Quarterly, Special Issue on Steven Connor, ed. Joseph Brooker (2014)
  • “No Alternative: On Vivek Chibber,” Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry Vol. 1, no. 1. (September 2013)
  • Review of Michael Wutz, Enduring Words: Literary Narrative in a Changing Media Ecology (2009), Review of English Studies (2010)
  • “Whither Cultural Studies?” Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies, vol. 22, no. 5 (2008)
  • Review of Jean-François Lyotard, Friedrich Nietzsche and Jacques Derrida (Routledge Critical Thinkers Series) in Literature and Aesthetics (June 2004)
  • “Has September 11 Changed Literary Studies?” Australian Humanities Review http://www.lib.latrobe.edu.au/AHR/archive/Issue-May-2003/murphett.html
  • Review of Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Nellie Y. McKay, eds. The Norton Anthology of African-American Literature, in Wasafiri 13.27 (1998)

   

   

• Professional Associations

  Fellow of the Academy of the Humanities in Australia, 2013-

  Member of the Australian Research Council's College of Experts, 2019-

  Member of the Editorial Board of Modernism/Modernity

  Member of the Editorial Board of The Faulkner Journal

  Member of the Advisory Board of the British Association of Modernist Studies

  Member of the Modernist Studies Association

  Member of the American Studies Association

  Member of the Australasian Modernist Studies Network

Entry last updated: Wednesday, 22 Nov 2023

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