Dr Vanessa Smith

BA Sydney, PhD Cambridge
Lecturer

+61 2 9351 2857

My research straddles the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and is primarily concerned with issues of intercultural contact. My ARC QEII fellowship 'A Gift for Friendship: intimacy and exchange in Oceanic encounter' explored the ways in which European ethics of friendship were placed under scrutiny in contexts of imperial encounter. I am now beginning to research the links between the development of notions of emotional subjectivity and intercultural exchange. I have a mixed bag of further interests, from breadfruit to recycling, mourning rituals to cross-dressing. My teaching is in the areas of Literature and Travel, Victorian Literature and late-eighteenth and nineteenth-century literature and culture. I supervise research students in any of these areas.

Research groups

• Literature and Travel
• Eighteenth-Century Studies
• Nineteenth-Century Studies
• Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies group

Current projects

• Research into cross-cultural encounter in the Pacific in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Selected publications

Books

(co-edited with Rod Edmond), Islands In History and Representation, Routledge, 2003; paperback, 2006.

(with Nicholas Thomas and Jonathan Lamb): Exploration and Exchange: a South Seas Anthology, 1680-1900, Chicago University Press, 2000

Literary Culture and the Pacific: nineteenth-century textual encounters, Cambridge University Press, 1998; paperback 2005.

Refereed Journal Articles

• 2008: ‘Performance Anxieties: grief and theatre in European writing on Tahiti’ Eighteenth-Century Studies vol. 41, no. 2: 149-64
• 2007: ‘Prizeable Companions: intimacy and cultural observation in the Marquesan accounts of William Crook, Edward Robarts and Herman Melville’ in Leviathan (forthcoming)
• 2006: ‘Give us our Daily Breadfruit: bread substitution in the Pacific in the Eighteenth Century’, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 35: 53-75
• 2005: ‘Crossing the Beach at Taipivai: the psychogeography of islands and beaches’ in ESQ: a journal of the American Renaissance 51: nos 1-2, Special Issue on Melville in the Marquesas: Actuality of Place in Typee and Other Island Writings, 104-113
• 2004: ‘Crowd Scenes: Pacific Collectivity and European Encounter’, Pacific Studies 27, nos 1-2, March/June 1-21

Book Chapters

• 2005: Piracy and Exchange: Stevenson's Pacific Fiction', in Harold Bloom (ed.) Bloom's Modern Critical Views: Robert Louis Stevenson, Philadelphia: Chelsea House, pp. 261-306
• 2004: Costume Changes: passing at Sea and on the Beach’ in Sea Changes: Historicizing the Ocean, ed. Bernhard Klein and Gesa Mackenthun, Routledge
• 2003: ‘Pitcairn’s ‘Guilty stock’: the island as breeding ground’. In Islands in History and Representation
  (with Rod Edmond), Introduction, Islands in History and Representation
• 1996: ‘Crusoe in the South Seas: Beachcombers, Missionaries and the Myth of the Castaway’, in Lieve Spaas and Brian Stimpson (eds), Robinson Crusoe: Myths and Metamorphoses, London: Macmillan

Research Areas

• late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature and culture
• post-colonial theory
• literature and anthropology
• Pacific history and literature.