University of Sydney / Faculty of Arts / Department of English / Staff / Academic Staff

Dr Victoria Burrows

Vic Burrows

BA Hons, PhD UWA
Lecturer
Room N312 John Woolley Building A20

+61 2 9114 1204

I am currently writing a monograph on whiteness and shame which explores the way shame works as a form of social control, especially in relation to racial hierarchies. My research areas are fairly eclectic but tend to gather around the construction of subject positions within the shifting racial hierarchies of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries read in conjunction with their historical legacies, especially in relation to the unmarked privileges of whiteness. I am also very interested in theories of emotion and the varying effects emotion and affect have on the formation of subjectivity. Prior to coming to Sydney, I held a three year UWA Re-Entry Post-Doctoral Research Fellowship at The University of Western Australia and then for two and a half years lectured in the English department at the University of Tasmania.

Research areas

  • Whiteness theory and its literary representations
  • Trauma theory and its literary representations
  • Shame theory and its literary representations
  • Postcolonial theory and literatures
  • African-American literature and literary criticism (especially black feminist criticism)
  • Fiction of Toni Morrison
  • Contemporary fiction
  • Contemporary travel writing
  • British Modernism

Current Projects

  • Whiteness and the Ethical Demand of Shame: Duras, Coetzee and Roy (monograph in process)
  • The White Gaze of Nostalgia: Fiction(s) of the British Raj and Beyond (monograph at research stage only)

Selected Publications

Books

  • Victoria Burrows. Whiteness and Trauma: The Mother-Daughter Knot in the Fiction of Jean Rhys, Jamaica Kincaid and Toni Morrison. Basingstoke, UK & New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.

Book Chapters

  • Victoria Burrows. “Whiteness and the Displacement of Hope: South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission and J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace and Antjie Krog’s [[i|Country of My Skull]].” Forthcoming: ed. John Hochheimer: to be published by Inter-Disciplinary Press, Oxford, UK.
  • Victoria Burrows. “Whiteness and Trauma: A Reading of Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea.” Placing Race/Localising Whiteness. Eds. Susanne Schech and Ben Wadham. Adelaide: Flinders University Press, 2004, 143-54.
  • Victoria Burrows and Hilary Fraser. “Mending Fractures: Florence Nightingale's Suggestions For Thought.” Re-inventing Christianity: Nineteenth-century Contexts. Ed. Linda Woodhead, Aldershot, UK: Ashgate: 2001, 199-210.

Journal Articles

  • Victoria Burrows. “The Heterotopic Spaces of Postcolonial Trauma in Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost.” Studies in the Novel 1 & 2 (Spring & Summer 2008): 161-177.
  • Victoria Burrows. “The Ghostly Hauntings of White Shame in David Malouf’s Remembering Babylon.” Westerly 51 (2006): 124-35.
  • Victoria Burrows and Hilary Fraser. “Virginia Stephen in George Duckworth's Family Album.” Australasian Victorian Studies Journal 5 (1999): 13-34.
  • Victoria Burrows. “Knowing Other People: An Interview with Lorraine Code.” Outskirts: Feminisms Along the Edge 1 (May 1996): 8-12.
  • Victoria Burrows. “Desire and the (Re)-Presentation of the Lesbian Body in History.” Limina: A Journal of History and Cultural Studies 1:1 (1995): 33-46.
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