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Dr Peter Kirkpatrick

Dr Peter Kirkpatrick

BA (Hons) UNSW, MA (Hons) Sydney, PhD Sydney
Senior Lecturer
Room N324 John Woolley Building, A20

+61 2 9351 2270

My research is in Australian literature and cultural history. I’m especially interested in poetry, and in particular its uses and transformations within popular culture over the last hundred years. A century ago poetry possessed a communal, frequently oral and performative dimension that has now largely disappeared. My research project on the public roles of poetry in Australia seeks to understand how this happened, and to explore modernity’s impact on the everyday life of literary forms. Intersecting with this, I’m writing a book on literary modernism in Sydney, with chapters on a variety of poets and fiction writers from Henry Lawson to Patrick White. I’ve published two collections of verse, and am working towards a third. I have taught across a wide range of English and Australian literature, as well as literary theory. My postgraduate supervision has included literary and cultural history, Indigenous Australian writing, poetry and poetics, and creative writing.

Research areas

  • Australian literature and cultural history
  • Poetry and popular culture
  • Poetry and poetics
  • Modernity and modernism
  • Creative writing

Research groups

Nineteenth-Century Studies
Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies group

Current projects

  • The Everyday Life of Poetry in Australia: a history of the public culture/s of poetry, taking in readership, education, performance (elocution), publishing and the mass media.
  • Sydney Literary Modernism 1890-1970: an exploration of the relationships between modernity, popular culture and “high” literature.

Selected publications

Forthcoming

  • "'New Words Come Tripping Slowly': Poetry, Popular Culture and Modernity 1890-1950", Cambridge History of Australian Literature, ed. Peter Pierce (Cambridge University Press)
  • "'We Are but Dust, Add Water and We Are Mud': The Comic Language of Here's Luck", Serious Frolic: Essays on Australian Humour, ed. Fran de Groen and Peter Kirkpatrick (University of Queensland Press)
  • Introduction, A.B. Paterson, The Man from Snowy River and Other Verses (Sydney University Press)
  • "Henry Lawson", Australian Greats, ed. Peter Cochrane (Random House)

Published

  • The Sea Coast of Bohemia: Literary Life in Sydney’s Roaring Twenties, 2nd ed. (API Network Australian Scholarly Classics, 2007)
  • “Hunting the Wild Reciter: Elocution and the Art of Recitation”, Talking and Listening in the Age of Modernity: Essays on the History of Sound, ed. Joy Damousi and Desley Deacon (ANU E Press, 2007), pp. 59-71
    http://epress.anu.edu.au/tal_citation.html
  • Westering, poetry (Puncher and Wattmann, 2006)
  • “Badly Hurt and Beautifully Loved: The Poetry of John Laws”, Heat 10 (2005), pp. 55-72
  • “The Wanderer and the Flâneur: Christopher Brennan’s Modernism”, Southerly 63.2 (2003), pp. 63-77
  • (with Jill Dimond) Literary Sydney: A Walking Guide (University of Queensland Press, 2000)
  • “‘Your Tool Box Will be Raffled By and By’: Poetry and the People in the Railways’ Union Gazette and Railroad, 1920–1940”, Journal of Social Change and Critical Inquiry 2 (2000) http://www.uow.edu.au/arts/joscci/kirkpatrick.html
  • “That Shy Mysterious Poet Arthur Stace”, Battlers and Stirrers: Journal of Australian Studies 54/55 (1998), pp. 63-70
  • (as editor) The Queen of Bohemia: The Autobiography of Dulcie Deamer (University of Queensland Press, 1998)
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