Rodney Taveira

Rodney Taveira joined the United States Studies Centre in 2011. He was awarded his PhD in English from the University of Sydney in 2010. He was previously Lecturer in English at the University of New South Wales.

Rodney researches American literature, film, and visual culture. He has taught courses on American silent film, contemporary American fiction, and he currently teaches AMST1001 Global America, USSC1010 America: Heroes, Rebels, and Renegades, and USSC2601 American Foundations.

Rodney has published on contemporary American fiction, literary responses to 9-11, and the interrelation of cinema, photography, painting, and literature. He is currently working on a book manuscript provisionally titled, “The Cinematic Face of American Literature.” Rodney argues that new critical perceptions on violence, sexuality, and the way writing makes meaning are observed in the works such of Thomas Pynchon, James Ellroy, and Don DeLillo when they are read through the lens of visual culture.

A second research project, supported by a US Studies Centre Early Career Research Support grant, is a comprehensive analysis of James Ellroy’s writing career, the American genre of crime (fictional, true, filmic), and the place of Los Angeles in American culture and recent history. “American Romance: The Writing Life of James Ellroy,” will pose and answer questions from a novel perspective—literary insider/outsider to America—about American literary production, American masculinity since World War II, and the place of race, violence, and sex in American culture and life. The project involves full access to Ellroy’s unpublished projects, draft works, and research materials, and a series of interviews with Ellroy about all aspects of his work.