Research Grants
ARC Discovery Project (2004-2006)
Chief Investigator: Associate Professor Alison Lewis
Title: A difficult marriage: gender, politics and the romance in literary accounts of German unification
This project focuses on the interrelationship between gender, politics and the romance in literary accounts of German unification. Through an exploration of how the political “marriage” between East and West Germany, with its conventionalised gender roles, is mapped onto literary marriages, the project examines the challenges and opportunities that unification has afforded men and women. It will yield insights into the ways in which unification has rewritten the scripts for femininity and masculinity and forced a transformation of intimacy. Its findings will enhance knowledge of gender relations in post-communist Europe and the relationships between gender, the nation and modernity.
ARC Discovery Project (2003-2005)
Chief Investigator: Dr Catrin Norrby, Dr Leo Kretzenbacher,
Professor Michael Clyne, Dr Jane Warren
Title: Address in some Western European Languages
This project investigates how recent sociopolitical events and developments have impacted on the ways in which people address each other in French, German and Swedish. Comparisons will be made with Italian and Dutch and between nations using the same language. There is to date no comparative study of this kind. The project is innovative in its use of qualitative and quantitative methodology and will lead to a new conceptual framework for the study of address. It will provide insights for inter-cultural communication and second language acquisition as well as the relation between language, cultural values, and sociopolitical change.
ARC Discovery Project (2003-2005)
Chief Investigator: Dr Heather Benbow
Title: “‘Saving Appearances’: Vision and Reason in the European Enlightenment”
Melbourne Research Grant Scheme (for Early Career Researchers) (2005)
Chief Investigator: Heather Benbow
Title: Cannibals and Amazons: Gender and Race in Pre-Colonial Germany
Compared to its European neighbours, Germany came late to colonialism. The
flourishing of a German colonialist ‘imagination’ in the late
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries has, however, recently emerged
as an area of scholarly interest. This project explores and explains
gendered portrayals of racial heterogeneity and the importance of gender
for national and racial identity. Throwing light on the social context in
which the push for German nationhood and colonisation emerged, the study
shows that gender—particularly as it attaches to the body—was an
important ingredient in German literary and philosophical portrayals of
race and nation.