HRC Past Graduate Students

Dr Paul Pickering, Michelle Antoinette, Angela Philp, Dr Caroline Turner (2007)

Michelle Antoinette

Michelle Antoinette joined the Humanities Research Centre in 2002 to undertake the PhD program in Interdisciplinary Cross-Cultural Research. Her research interests combine modern and contemporary visual cultures, Asian studies, political and social theory and cultural studies.

It was in the course of completing her BA degree that ‘Asian’ contemporary art gained prominence in the international art scene. Immediately after completing her BA, Michelle undertook an internship with the Queensland Art Gallery project team for the Third Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art in 1999. Combined with her degree and several trips throughout Asia, this enriching experience motivated her current doctoral research project with its continuing focus on Asian contemporary artists. While Michelle’s studies have in the past also included a strong interest in Japan, her PhD extends her knowledge of Indonesia to include a study of selected artists from other parts of Southeast Asia, namely Malaysia, the Philippines and Singapore. Southeast Asian contemporary art remains a rich subject for scholarly enquiry and it is Michelle’s hope to contribute to this developing field.

Michelle’s doctoral dissertation is entitled ‘Shifting Visual Cultures in “Southeast Asian” Contemporary Art: New Dimensions in the Politics of Identity.’ In her thesis, Michelle argues that many ‘Southeast Asian’ artists, prominent in international exhibitions of the 1990s until the present, demonstrate significant shifts in the way contemporary artists deal with issues of culture and identity in their art practice and exhibition. Of particular importance is how these Southeast Asian artists, wherever their physical and psychical locations may be, are turning to more intricate and complex aspects of identity such as those relating to notions of the body, urbanity, mobility, cosmopolitanism, memory, and temporality as the subject matter for their work.

In short, Michelle’s thesis seeks to examine how contemporary artists from Southeast Asia offer new ways for interpreting, representing and viewing art by Southeast Asian artists anew, reflecting the social and spatial complexities and transformations from both inside and outside Southeast Asia which have influenced the politics of identity and its relationship to contemporary art in the 1990s and beyond. In this way, Michelle hopes her thesis will inject fresh perspectives on artists’ experiences and visual expressions of place, belonging and subjectivity.

Angela Philp

Angela commenced her PhD in 2001, after 18 years working in Australian art museums, in education, curatorial work and most recently as inaugural Director of the Canberra Museum and Gallery. Her first degree was a Bachelor of Arts Honours, majoring in Fine Arts, at the University of Sydney (awarded 1976), followed by a Diploma of Education (Art). Subsequently she undertook a Master of Arts Honours, also in Fine Arts at the University of Sydney (awarded 1988). Her Masters thesis was on the Sydney Society of Women Painters 1910 - 1934, in which she examined the ambiguous relationship between amateur status and professionalism among a group of early 20th century women artists and which incorporated a critique of contemporary approaches to feminist art history.

In her working life Angela has been involved in art education, a variety of public art projects (including the Canberra National Sculpture Forum, 1995 and 1998) and in the development of greater access to the arts and culture in museum contexts. She has a particular interest in the relationship of art and museums to the public sphere and civil society. The museum's complex relationships to government, professional identities, communities, bureaucracies and social elites have long concerned her. The implicit and explicit communications of museums have thus become a source of ongoing interest, leading to her current research.

Angela has written widely on the visual arts and on museums. She is currently a member of the ANU Drill Hall Gallery Advisory Committee and has previously contributed to community groups as a member of the ACT Public Art Committee and the ACT Committee of Museums Australia, as Chair and Deputy Chair of the Canberra National Sculpture Forum Organising Committee and as a member of a number of professional associations. She is also an art valuer under the Commonwealth Cultural Gifts Program.

Angela’s thesis, Museums and the Public Sphere, will describe and critically evaluate the nature of the museum as an ensemble of communication acts within the theoretical model of the public sphere. In particular, she is studying the changes that have been occurring to museological practice and policy in the context of contemporary critiques of modernist principles of museology, and in response to the emergence of economic and social globalisation and the new, information economy (for example, the so-called virtual museum).

Meredith Walsh

gadgetgirl@bust.com

Meredith Walsh is currently a PhD candidate with the HRC. Her research concerns the potential changes to our ideas and selves brought about by the development of new technologies. Her interest in these changes is as much about the method by which they are developed as their effect. In particular, she is interested in the interdisciplinary practice between the arts and sciences, motivating their creation. This is not just theoretical. Walsh herself practices between these disciplines, considering the changes to the researcher as much part of the methodological technique as the process of disciplinary negotiation.

She has recently completed residencies with the CSIRO, IVEC (Interactive Virtual Environments Centre of Western Australia), and SymbioticA, (The Art and Science Collaborative Research Laboratory.)

Robyn Westcott

Robyn is a cross-institutional student from the Department of Critical and Cultural Studies at Macquarie University in Sydney. After a two-year absence from postgraduate study, she commenced at the HRC in March 2003 to complete her PhD thesis (provisionally) entitled, Whiteness as Rhizomatic Relation: Maintaining distinctions between Englishness and Irishness during the Great Famine. Robyn’s background is in postcolonial literature and literary theory, and she holds a BA (Hons 1) in English Literature from Macquarie.

Robyn’s dissertation is an evaluation of the literature of Whiteness Studies and consider the strategies that theorists in this field have employed to produce conceptual articulations of the white subject’s ontological condition. Drawing on the work of Jacques Derrida and Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, her thesis will scrutinize the narrative systems that produce historically located white identities and offer a reading of the formation of English and Irish identities during the Great Famine in Ireland. Her investigations will focus on the experience of Irish famine refugees in England’s port cities in order to consider the confrontation of the “non-white” in the “white” body (the Irish) with the archetypal “white” subject (the English), an interaction currently under-theorised in academic writings on whiteness.

Outside of her doctoral studies, Robyn maintains an eclectic spread of research interests. She is currently thinking about:
· The politics of the publication and academic reception of African literatures (particularly writings from West Africa);
· Re-imagining the prayerful subject as spiritual “machine” through the application of historical-libidinal materialism (eg Deleuze and Guattari, Nieztsche) to feminist (Christian) theology; and
· Fan fictions produced by internet-based fan communities (eg Harry Potter, Buffy the Vampire Slayer) in terms of: (i) the representation of female desire and sexuality; and (ii) a Barthesian assessment of the fan faction phenomena (investigating authorship, readerly/writerly texts etc)

Past Research (Unpublished)

Thesis
“Appropriating Africa: A Short Study of Western Feminism as Cultural Imperialism” submitted for the degree of Bachelor of Arts (Honours), Macquarie University, May 1996

Conference Papers
“Strategies of Terrorism, Modes of Negotiation: Producing and Occupying White Space Within the Nation” – 3rd International Crossroads in Cultural Studies Conference, Birmingham, UK, June 2000

“Post (modernist/feminist/colonialist): A refrain of ‘It wasn’t me, I didn’t do it and you can’t prove anything’” – Cultural Studies Association of Australia Conference, Adelaide, December 1998

“Just a Girl in the World?: Reflections on Race, Rights and Responsibility” – Women’s Studies Work in Progress Seminar, Macquarie University, October 1998

“Two Chicks Goin’ At It: Collaborative Feminist Politics” (with Rebecca Curran) – Against the Grain: Rethinking Feminist Politics, Sydney University, August 1998

“I’m Not a Slut Anymore, I’m Actively Choosing Promiscuity – Deconstructing the ‘Bad’ Politics of Girl Power” (with Rebecca Curran) – 5th Interdisciplinary Gender Studies Conference, University of Newcastle, June 1998.

Harry Wise

Leonard Harry Wise commenced an M.Phil degree at the HRC in March 2004, having completed a B.A. with Honours in History at ANU the previous year. His honours thesis dealt with the Australian reaction to events in Samoa during the period between 1880 and 1900.

His M.Phil thesis examines late nineteenth century Australian colonial defence policy and its relationship to Australia's links with Britain and to domestic political factors within the colonies.

Dr Caroline Turner and Harry Wise