Professor Kate Mitchell
Areas of expertise
- Literary Studies 2005
- British And Irish Literature 200503
- Literary Theory 200525
- Australian Literature (Excl. Aboriginal And Torres Strait Islander Literature) 200502
Research interests
Neo-Victorian fiction
Historical fiction, especially contemporary British and Australian
Victorian fiction
19th and 20th century literary and cultural history
Cultural Memory
Theory and philosophy of History
Biography
Kate Mitchell is Director of the Research School of Humanities and the Arts and Professor of Literary Studies. Her research is focused on nineteenth- and twentieth-century literary and cultural history, with a particular interest in neo-Victorian fiction and film and contemporary historical recollection in literature and film more generally, including fiction and creative non-fiction. She likes particularly to think about the role of fictional narratives in creating public memory of contested, marginalised or occluded pasts; the ways that 'memory' travels through time and space, especially via novels, film and television; and the ethics - and creative possibilities - involved in fictionalising past lives and events. How can fiction be used to speak the unspeakable, in the past and today?
Her current major project examines the use of art and the figure of the artist in contemporary fiction about the Victorian period, including the representation of the Pre-Raphaelites, Impressionists and other artists and their work.
Her research and teaching interests also include Jane Austen (her novels and her afterlives in contemporary fiction, film and media); period drama, as well as adaptation and remediation more generally; and Victorian gothic fiction.
She is author of "History and Cultural Memory in Neo-Victorian Fiction: Victorian Afterimages" and co-editor of "Reading Historical Fiction: the revenant and remembered past." Her articles on historical fiction have appeared in journals including "Neo-Victorian Studies", "Australian Literary Studies", "Victoriographies", "College Literature" and in a number of edited collections.
Kate is passionate about the value of humanities and the arts in the university and beyond.
Researcher's projects
Nineteenth-Century Australia Then and Now: Remembering Australia’s Past in Neo-Victorian Fiction
The historical novel is a highly popular and critically-significant genre among contemporary Australian novelists and readers alike, with examples dominating bestseller and literary award lists. Among these historical novels, the nineteenth century recurs with an insistence that identifies, or indeed, constructs, the period as central to the Australian historical imaginary.
This project explores how we remember the past in Australia in today. It provides new ways of understanding the operation of literature as a form of cultural memory, opening up the critical debate beyond whether novels constitute ‘good’ or ‘bad’ history to consider how they function in relation to a range of discourses about the past and how it is remembered today.
Current student projects
Primary Supervisor:
Ashely Orr, 'Breaking the Mould: Neo-Victorian Fiction, Female Corporeality, and the Politics of Resistance.'
Kate Oakes. 'Altruism and Agriculture: The Ethics of the Farmyard in Thomas Hardy's Novels.'
Supervisory Panel Member:
Chung-Yen Yu, '"The House of Waiting": An Epistolary Novel and Dissertation.'
Kathryn Hind, 'Ugly Feelings and Passive States in the Works of Gabriel Tallent and Anne Enright.'
Luisa Moore, Textual Critique Through the Artist's Eye: John Austen's Illustrated Hamlet.'
Meredith Trinko, 'A Well-Lived Death: Taxidermy in Victorian Material Culture 1850-1900.'
Louisa Kirk, ‘Through stories and secrets’: Female friendship as displaced intimacy.'
Past student projects
PhD Projects:
Primary Supervisor:
Kathryne Ford, 'I lost courage and burned the rest’: Biofiction, Legacy, and the Hero-Protagonist Split in Charles Dickens’s Life-Writing Novels. 2018.
Jessica Hewenn, 'Unsettling: Settler-Colonial Environments in Neo-Victorian Fiction.' 2018.
Matthew Thompson, 'The figure of Jack the Ripper in Victorian and Neo-Victorian Fiction.' 2017.
Supervisory Panel Member:
Tania Evans, 'Cripples and Bastards and Broken Things: Masculinity, Violence, and Abjection in A Song of Ice and Fire and Game of Thrones.' 2019.
Suzanne Faigan, An Annotated Bibliography of Maria Yakovlevna Frumkina (Esther). 2019.
Stephanie Kizimchuk, Mizrahi Memoirs: History, Memory, and Identity in Displacement.
Rebecca Clode, 'Critical Celebrations: Metatheatre in Australian Drama of the Late Twentieth and Early Twenty-First Centuries.' 2014.
Lucy Neave, Who We Were: A Novel and Dissertation by Publication. Dissertation title: ‘Writing Process: Writers’ Practices, Mystique and Pedagogy.’ 2013.
Hamish Dalley, 'Contemporary Historical Fiction in Nigeria, Australia and New Zealand.' 2011.
Fourth-Year Honours Projects:
Music in Jane Austen’s Emma. 2019.
Representations of the figure of the psychopath in gothic fiction. 2019.
Reimagining Agnes: Burial Rites as a Restorative Literary Act. 2018.
Subjectivity and Self in the Victorian Novel: Focusing on the Boundary. 2016.
Romancing the Environment in Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd. 2015.
Transitioning Gender in Vampire Fiction from the nineteenth century to the present. 2015.
Illness and the Gothic in Wuthering Heights. 2015.
Adventuring with Austen. 2013.
Neo-Victorian Graphic Novels: Alan Moore’s The Lost Girls. 2012.
Weather in the (Neo)Victorian Novel. 2012.
The Preface in the Victorian Novel (M.A.). 2012.
Victorian Masculinities: The Experienced Hero. 2012.
The Outsider and the Orphan: Educators and Motherless Heroines in the Victorian home. 2011.
Preservation and the Historical Imagination in The Remains of the Day and Atonement. 2010.
Publications
- Mitchell, K 2010, History and Cultural Memory in Neo-Victorian Fiction: Victorian Afterimages, Palgrave Macmillan Ltd, Basingstoke, New York.
- Mitchell, K & Parsons, N, eds, 2013, Reading Historical Fiction The Revenant and Remembered Past, Palgrave Macmillan Ltd, Hampshire, UK and New York, USA.
- Fischer, N, Lo, J & Mitchell, K, eds, 2013, Crossings: Journal of Migration & Culture Volume 4 Number 1 Entangled Pasts: Transnational Memories in Germany and Australia.
- Mitchell, K & Berryman, A, eds, 2009, Humanities Research Vol XV. No. 1. 2009, Vol XV. No. 1. 2009.
- Fischer, N & Mitchell, K 2021, 'Fiction as Counter Memory: Writing Armenia and Palestine in Aline Ohanesian’s Orhan’s Inheritance and Susan Abulhawa’s Mornings in Jenin', College Literature, vol. 48, no. 4, pp. 738-767.
- Mitchell, K 2019, 'Painted Traces: Art and Ekphrasis in Elizabeth Kostova's The Swan Thieves', Victoriographies, vol. 9, no. 3, pp. 259-279.
- Mitchell, K 2017, 'Constructing Cosmopolitanism, Promoting Humanitarianism: The Marvellous Melbourne of E.W. Cole in Lisa Lang’s Utopian Man (2010)', Australian Literary Studies, vol. 32, no. 2, pp. 21pp.
- Mitchell, K 2016, 'Projecting Neo-Victorianism: Review of Nadine Boehm-Schnitker and Susanne Gruss, Neo-Victorian Literature and Culture: Immersions and Revisitations', Neo-Victorian Studies, vol. 8, no. 2, pp. 224-242pp.
- Mitchell, K 2015, 'Making and Unmaking 'Marvellous Melbourne': The colonial city as palimpsest in neo-Victorian fiction and non-fiction', in Marie-Luise Kohlke and Christian Gutleben (ed.), Neo-Victorian Cities: Reassessing Urban Politics and Poetics, Brill Rodopi, Leiden and Boston.
- Fischer, N, Lo, J & Mitchell, K 2013, 'Introduction: 'Entangled Pasts'', Crossings: Journal of Migration & Culture, vol. 4, no. 1, pp. 3-11.
- Mitchell, K & Parsons, N 2013, 'Reading the Represented Past: History and Fiction from 1700 to the Present', in Kate Mitchell and Nicola Parsons (ed.), Reading Historical Fiction: The Revenant and Remembered Past, Palgrave Macmillan Ltd, Hampshire, UK and New York, USA, pp. 1-18.
- Mitchell, K 2013, 'The migratory imagination: Anna Funder's Stasiland as prosthetic memory', Crossings: Journal of Migration & Culture, vol. 4, no. 1, pp. 91-110.
- Mitchell, K 2010, 'Australia's 'Other' History Wars: Trauma and the Work of Cultural Memory in Kate Grenville's The Secret River', in Marie-Luise Kohlke and Christian Gutleben (ed.), Neo-Victorian Tropes of Trauma: The Politics of Bearing After-Witness to Nineteenth-Century Suffering, Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam, NY United States of America, pp. 253-282.
- Mitchell, K 2009, 'Feeling it as it actually happened: History as Sensation in A.S. Byatt's Possession: A Romance', in Anthony Uhlmann, Helen Groth, Paul Sheehan and Stephen McLaren (ed.), Literature and Sensation, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Newcastle upon Tyne, pp. 266-279.
- Mitchell, K 2008, 'Ghostly Histories and Embodied Memories: photography, spectrality and historical fiction in Afterimage and Sixty Lights', Neo-Victorian Studies, vol. 1, no. 1 - 2008, pp. 81-109.
- Mitchell, K 2005, 'A Fertile Excess Waterland, Desire and the Historical Sublime', antiThesis, vol. 15, pp. 170-187.
- Mitchell, K 2019, 'Book Review: Interventions: Rethinking the nineteenth century', Victorian Studies: a journal of the humanities, arts and sciences, vol. 61, no. 2, pp. 344-347.
- Mitchell, K 2011, 'Book Review: Lighting Dark Places: Essays on Kate Grenville, edited by Sue Kossew. Cross Cultures: Readings in Post/Colonial Literatures and Cultures in English. Vol. 131. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2010.', Australian Literary Studies (ALS), vol. 26, no. 2, pp. 112-114.
- Mitchell K. 2011. Review: Susan K. Martin and Kylie Mirmohamadi. Sensational Melbourne: Reading Sensation Fiction and Lady Audley�??s Secret in the Victorian Metropolis. Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature 11:2
- Mitchell, K 2010, 'Book Review: Posting It: The Victorian Revolution in Letter Writing', Textual Culture: Texts, Contexts, Interpretation, vol. 5, no. 1, pp. 137-140.
- Mitchell, K 2008, 'Possession', in Robert Clark (ed.), The Literary Encyclopedia, Literary Dictionary Company Ltd, http://www.litencyc.com/index.php, pp. online.