News

Appointment of two literature scholars to ACU’s Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences

ACU’s Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences (IHSS) is pleased to announce the recent appointment of two scholars of literature.

Professor Paul Giles comes to ACU from the University of Sydney, where he was the Challis Professor of English. Prior to that post he held positions at Cambridge and Oxford. Professor Giles, a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, is one of the most eminent scholars of the humanities in Australia today and recognized internationally as a leading specialist in American literature. He has a particular interest in transnational approaches to literary history and culture. He has published eleven sole-authored scholarly works on American, English, and Australian literature, and his many articles have appeared in such journals as PMLA; Essays in Criticism; Studies in Romanticism; and American Literary History. His most recent monograph, The Planetary Clock: Antipodean Time and Spherical Postmodern Fictions, which appeared with Oxford University Press in 2021 and offers a global account of literature and the arts from 1960, won the 2021 Book Prize from the Australian University Heads of English. 

Associate Professor Lisa O’Connell joins ACU from the University of Queensland. Trained at Melbourne and Brown universities, she is an authority on British literature of the eighteenth century as well as on the history and theory of the novel. She has particular interests in the entanglements of English fiction with empire and colonialism, Enlightenment culture, and gender and sexuality. Her study The Origins of the English Marriage Plot: Literature, Politics, and Religion in the Eighteenth Century appeared with Cambridge University Press in 2019. Her many essays and articles have been published in such journals as Novel: A Forum on Fiction; The Eighteenth-Century: Theory and Interpretation; Eighteenth-Century Life; and Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, as well as in numerous scholarly collections. She recently co-edited a special issue of Postcolonial Studies on “Colonial Transformations of Anglo-European Literary Culture in the Long Eighteenth Century”.