Louise D'Arcens

Louise is a Professor in the Department of English, and a recent Australian Research Council Future Fellow (2013-17). She received a BA (Hons) specializing in medieval literature from the University of Sydney in 1990. Her 1997 PhD thesis, also completed at the University of Sydney, examined the concepts of political and literary authority in the writings of medieval women. Her two main current research areas are medievalism and medieval women’s writing. Medievalism examines post-medieval receptions and constructions of the Middle Ages, and considers the impact of these constructions on modern cultural, political, and social life. Louise’s work on Australian medievalism examines the cultural and ideological role played by medievalism in colonial and former-colonial societies. Her work on Christine de Pizan focuses on Christine’s political writings, examining how Christine deploys notions of gender and ethnicity to formulate models of political action and to authorize her own intervention into the late medieval political sphere

She is also an Associate Investigator (2012-16) in the Australian Research Council (ARC) Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions. For a snapshot of her work with the Centre, see http://vimeo.com/59466691

She has been leader of the Cultural Memories research theme of the ARC Network for Early European Research (2007-09), and co-ordinator of the Network’s Australasian Medievalisms research cluster (2006-09).

She is a current member of the Australia and New Zealand Association for Medieval and Early Modern Studies (ANZAMEMS), has been a member of the Advisory Committee of the Sydney Centre for Medieval Studies, and acts as a referee for numerous national and international presses, journals, and research funding bodies.

SELECTED GRANTS AND AWARDS:
Louise recently held an ARC Future Fellowship for the project “Comic Medievalism and the Modern World” (2013-17).

She was also a Chief Investigator on the ARC Discovery Grant for the project “Medievalism in Australian Cultural Memory” (2008-2011), along with first-named CI Professor Stephanie Trigg (University of Melbourne), Associate Professor Andrew Lynch (University of Western Australia), and Professor John Ganim (University of California, Riverside).

In 2009 she was awarded an Australian Academy of Humanities / British Academy Special Joint Project grant, with Dr Chris Jones (St Andrews), for the project “Fossil and Root: A Comparative Study of Anglo-Saxonism in Nineteenth-Century British and Australian Poetry”.