School of Culture and Communication

Research interests

Genre studies, popular fiction and popular film, postcolonial studies, Australian literary studies, popular cultural studies, 19th century fiction, post-theory literary studies, subcultural studies.

Qualifications

BA Hons, MA (Flinders), PhD (Stirling)

Biography

Ken Gelder joined the University of Melbourne in 1989 and has since taught across the English and Cultural Studies programs in a variety of areas: from popular culture to literary theory. In 1994 and 1995 he was a Reader in English and Cultural Studies at De Montfort University, England. He has been a visiting fellow at University College, London, and the University of Edinburgh.

Ken currently teaches courses in modern and contemporary literature, popular/genre fiction, Australian literature (from 2012) and subcultural studies. His books,Reading the Vampire (1994) and Popular Fiction: The Logics and Practices of a Literary Field (2004), have helped to make him an international authority on genre fiction and the Gothic. The co-written Uncanny Australia (1998) - with Jane M. Jacobs - has been especially influential, both nationally and internationally, on postcolonial work across a range of disciplines. He has also published widely on subcultures, as the author of Subcultures: Cultural Histories and Social Practice (2007) and editor of The Subcultures Reader: second edition (2005) and the four-volume Critical Concepts in Media and Cultural Studies series on subcultures (2007). Ken has also co-written two Australian literary histories, covering the period 1970-2007, and is currently involved in a major research project on colonial Australian popular fiction and the colonial Australian journals. With Rachael Weaver, he has co-edited four anthologies of colonial Australian popular fiction: covering the Gothic, crime fiction, romance, and adventure fiction. He is completing a book on new vampire cinema 1992-2010 for the British Film Institute, and with Rachael Weaver is compiling a book about the Australian colonial journals for University of Western Australia Publishing.

Current Research

An ARC Discovery Project on the colonial Australian journals and periodicals 2011-13: Rachael Weaver is this project's SRA.

An earlier ARC Discovery Project 2007-09 initiated work on colonial Australian popular fiction with Rachael Weaver that is also ongoing. Among other things, this project saw the construction of an extensive digital archive of colonial Australian popular fiction which is now a collaborative project involving Ken and Rachael and staff at the Library at the University of Melbourne, including Ailie Smith from the eScholarship Research Centre. Here is the link to this archive: Colonial Australian Popular Fiction: A Digital Archive

Knowledge transfer

• editorial board, Gothic Studies
• editorial board, Australian Humanities Review
• editorial board, Adaptations
• editorial board, antiTHESIS
• editorial board, International Gothic Studies series
• editorial board, Anthem Australian Humanities Research series
• editorial board, Transgressive Culture
• advisory review panel, Cine-Excess e-journal
  

Teaching

• ENGL10001 Modern and Contemporary Literature
• ENGL20009 The Australian Imaginary
• ENGL30007 Genre Fiction/Popular Fiction
• CULS40005 Subcultural Studies

Full subject descriptions are available on the University of Melbourne Handbook

Publications

Authored Books

• co-author (with Paul Salzman) After the Celebration: Australian Fiction 1989-2007 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, January 2009)
• Subcultures: Cultural Histories and Social Practice (London and New York: Routledge, 2007)
• Popular Fiction: The Logics and Practices of a Literary Field (London and New York: Routledge, December 2004)
• co-author (with Jane M. Jacobs), Uncanny Australia: Sacredness and Identity in a Postcolonial Nation (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1998)
• Reading the Vampire (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), published in Italian in 1998 as Incontri Col Vampiro (Como: Red Edizione, 1998)
• Atomic Fiction: the Novels of David Ireland (St. Lucia, Queensland, University of Queensland Press, Studies in Australian Literature series, 1993)
• co-author (with Paul Salzman) The New Diversity: Australian Fiction 1970-1988 (Melbourne: McPhee Gribble, 1989)

Edited books

• co-editor (with Rachael Weaver) The Anthology of Colonial Australian Adventure Fiction (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2011)
  
• co-editor (with Rachael Weaver) The Anthology of Colonial Australian Romance Fiction (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2010)
• co-editor (with Rachael Weaver) The Anthology of Colonial Australian Crime Fiction (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2008)
• editor, Subcultures: Critical Concepts in Media and Cultural Studies (London and New York: Routledge 2007). Four volumes:
• • Vol 1: Subcultural Histories
  • Vol 2: Chicago, Birmingham, Scenes and Communities
  • Vol 3: Subcultures and Music
  • Vol 4: Sexed Subjects, Virtual Communities, Neo-Tribes
    
    
• co-editor (with Rachael Weaver) The Anthology of Colonial Australian Gothic Fiction (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2007)
• editor, The Subcultures Reader, Second Edition (London and New York: Routledge, 2005)
• editor, The Horror Reader (London and New York: Routledge, 2000)
• co-editor (with Sarah Thornton), The Subcultures Reader (London and New York: Routledge, 1997)
• editor, The Oxford Book of Australian Ghost Stories (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994)
• editor, Robert Louis Stevenson: The Scottish Stories and Essays (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1989)

Book chapters (from 2000)

• 'Australian Gothic', in The New Companion to the Gothic, ed. David Punter (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2012)
• '"Dramas of Encounter and Recognition": gender and the limits of ACARA's aspirations for the teaching of literature in schools', in Teaching Australian Literature: From Classroom Conversations to National Imaginings, eds. Brenton Doecke, Larissa McLean Davies and Philip Mead (Adelaide: Wakefield Press, 2011)
  
• 'Subculture'and 'Dick Hebdige', in The Encyclopedia of Literary and Cultural Theory, ed. Michael Ryan (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011): http://www.literatureencyclopedia.com/public/cultural_about
  
• 'Australian Gothic', in The Routledge Companion to Gothic, eds. Catherine Spooner and Emma McEvoy (London and New York: Routledge, 2007)
• Paperback Fiction', in The International Encyclopedia of Communication, executive ed. Wolfgang Donsbach (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2007)
• "The 'unAustralian'Goth: some notes towards a dislocated national subject", in Gothic and Medieval Australia, ed. Stephanie Trigg (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2005); reprinted in Lauren Goodlad and Michael Bibby, eds.,Goth: Undead Subculture (Duke University Press, 2006)
• "Epic Fantasy and Global Terrorism", From Hobbits to Hollywood: Essays on Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings, eds. Ernest Mathijs and Steven Schneider (Rodopi, Studies in Contemporary Cinema, Amsterdam, 2006)
• Foreword,Free NRG: Notes from the Edge of the Dance Floor, ed. Graham St. John (Melbourne: Common Ground, 2001)
• "The End of Australian Literature? Australian Popular Fiction and the Transnational", Australian Literary Studies in the 21st Century: Proceedings of the 2000 ASAL Conference, ed. P. Mead (Hobart: ASAL [Association for the Study of Australian Literature], 2001)
• "Aborigines and Cars", in The Oxford Companion to Aboriginal Art and Culture, eds. Sylvia Kleinart and Margo Neale (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 2000)
• "Jane Campion and the Limits of Literary Cinema", in Adaptations: Novel to Cinema, Cinema to Novel, eds. Deborah Cartmell and Imelda Whelehan (London and New York: Routledge, 1999). Reprinted in Twentieth Century Literary Criticism, vol.118 (Farmington Hills, Michigan, The Gale Group, 2002)

Journal articles (from 2000)

• 'Negotiating the Colonial Australian Popular Fiction Archive', JASAL: special issue: archive madness (August 2011)
  
• co-author (with Rachael Weaver) 'Louise Mack and Colonial Pseudo-Literature', Southerly, 70, 2 (June 2010)
  
• 'Review Article:The Cambridge History of Australian Literature', JASAL: currents, cross-currents, undercurrents issue, 10 (2010)
  
• 'The Catcher in the Ryeand J D Salinger: Plagiarism and Literature', Media & Arts Law Review, 15, 1 (March 2010)
  
• 'English, Autonomy, and the Republic of Letters', Australian Humanities Review, 47 (November 2009)
• 'Proximate Reading: Australian Literature in Transnational Reading Frameworks', JASAL: special issue: common readers and cultural critics (2009)
  
• 'Politics, Monomania and the Rarefied World of Contemporary Australian Literary Culture', Overland, 184 (Spring 2006)
• 'When the Imaginary Australian is Not Uncanny: Nation, Psyche and Belonging in Recent Australian Cultural Criticism and History', Journal of Australian Studies 86, 2006 (special issue:Terra Incognita: New Essays in Australian Studies, eds. Leigh Dale and Margaret Henderson)
• 'Notes on the Research Future of Australian Literary Studies', Australian Humanities Review, 37 (December 2005)
• 'Reading Stephen Muecke's Ancient and Modern: Time, Culture, and Indigenous Philosophy', Australian Humanities Review, 36 (July 2005)
• 'Us, Them and Everybody Else: Reviewing the New Humanities in Australia', Overland, 181 (Summer 2005)
• '"Plagued by Hideous Imaginings": the Despondent Worlds of Contemporary Australian Fiction', Overland, 179 (Winter 2005)
• 'Epic Fantasy and Global Terrorism', Overland, 173 (Summer 2003)
  
• 'Haitian Voodoo as a Postcolonial Symptom', Paradoxa: Studies in World Literary Genres(special issue on the horror genre) (forthcoming, August 2002)
• "The Imaginary Eco-(Pre-)Historian: Peter Read's Belonging as a Postcolonial 'Symptom'", Australian Humanities Review.19 (September-November 2000)
• 'Introduction: Global/Postcolonial Horror" and "Postcolonial Voodoo', Postcolonial Studies. 3, 1 (May 2000)
• 'The Obscure(d) World of Australian Popular Fiction' (La Trobe University Essay), Australian Book Review, 222 (July 2000)