Adapting the Grimms’ fairy tales for a British child readership in 1823 and 1826, Edgar Taylor’s German Popular Stories marked one of the first instances in which these tales were leveraged to socialise British children into hegemonic gender roles that upheld the patriarchal social structure characteristic of Victorian society. In modern scholarship, close attention has been paid to the ways in which the Grimms shaped their stories to inculcate a particular feminine gender ethic that encouraged piety, passivity, and industry, yet little focus has been dedicated to considering how Taylor reworked this gender messaging specifically for British child readers. For a contemporary reader of Taylor’s text, little knowledge of the tales’ folkloric or Germanic roots would have been known, and so divorcing my analysis from this context allows for a deeper understanding of the messages that would have been apparent to, and potentially internalised by, the readers for which the text was designed.

When it comes to constructing ideal femininity in Taylor’s tales, two traits present themselves as most fundamental to achieving a ‘successful’ mode of feminine expression: beauty and domesticity. While both traits combined become the emblematic features of the ideal female heroine in the tales, those characters who possess one but not the other – or, worse, reject both traits entirely – are demonised for failing to fulfill the expectations of traditional femininity. This paper will consider the braiding together of beauty and domesticity into the idealised domestic goddess figure in a selection of Taylor’s most famous tales and examine the consequences of what happens when this braid unravels – or, more specifically, what happens when female characters seek independence and freedom from these potentially constrictive gender norms.

This presentation introduces a metric to measure and classify clean, breathy and rough vocal sounds via audio spectral analysis and a deep learning model. Multiple linear regression modelling showed statistical relevance of the metric for breathiness (R² = .84), roughness (R² = .90) and cleanness (R² = .89), tested on speech and a sustained vowel [i] by a single person (m). The findings then informed a collaboration with the Department of Data Science and IT and the School of Mathematics, to develop a deep learning model for digital sampling and classification, including the proposed metric.

8 data sets (n=9600, 4m, 4f) were recorded, producing all cardinal vowels and a speech sequence in various vocal sounds (i.e., clean, normal, breathy1, breathy2, rough1, rough2). Results showed high within-subject validation using the ratio Train : Accuracy : Test = 6 : 2 : 2 (validation accuracy = .96, test accuracy = .94), and during cross-subject testing of the speech sequence or testing one data set against the other seven (validation accuracy = .82, test accuracy = .70). Aim remains to create a user-friendly feedback tool enhancing Learner Autonomy in clinical and artistic voice training as well as diagnostic assessment, feedback, and language/speech recognition.

This presentation discusses the benefits, both personally and professionally, of adopting mixed methodologies into a literary studies research project. Literary studies projects tend to rely on textual analysis as their primary methodology. My project differs by examining both historical and contemporary popular fiction texts through textual analysis (challenging ideas of canonicity), and also engaging in human research with female romance readers in Melbourne. My human research uses surveys and focus groups, and also works in collaboration with small business bookshops and reading communities across the city. This presentation aims to share what I have learned so far about braiding these methodologies together in my work, and discuss the benefits of it for my own professional development and for the gaps it can fill in the fields of popular romance and Gothic studies as they currently stand.

Representing non-human agency poses a significant creative dilemma: how can a writer voice the world without falling into the traps of anthropomorphism and ventriloquism? My research proposes that creative writing can navigate this impasse by grounding narrative form in relational philosophy; by recognising that no entity exists in isolation, fiction can move away from human-centred narrative toward a relational model where characters, objects, and environments are defined by their dynamic, ongoing entanglements.

This framework utilises the philosophy of Michel Serres, specifically his conceptualisation of the hard and the soft. Serres posits that the physical world is inherently communicative; all matter receives, stores, processes, and emits information. While the rigid structures and raw forces of the world (the hard) are vulnerable to time and eventually succumb to entropy, the informational codes and relationships embedded within them (the soft) remain fluid and endure across time and space. As Serres writes in Biogea (2012), the things of the world constantly emerge to “recount their strange advents” offering stories that require us only to bend down and pick them up. The Earth translates the physical violence of geological time into lasting, soft informational traces; encountered as pebbles, fossils, or chemical signatures, these artifacts function as legible archives waiting to be read, interpreted, and recounted through our own porous, sensory interactions. Just as we absorb the stories of the world, the chemical signatures, pollution, and structural alterations humanity inflicts on the environment are simultaneously encoded back into the Earth, forming material narratives that will endure long after our bodies return to the soil. Serres’ relational philosophy underscores this radical entanglement, emphasising the unwritten symbiotic contract we hold with the planet. My research demonstrates how engaging with Serres’ relational philosophy offers creative writers a way of thinking and writing with the world to move beyond human ventriloquism and enact a poetics of posthuman ecological attunement.

How might Asian performance traditions open up new theatrical possibilities within Chekhov’s The Seagull?

This presentation introduces The Seagull Flies South, a practice-based PhD project that reimagines Chekhov’s play through selected performance resources from Jingju, Huangmei Opera and Mak Yong. Rather than transforming the play entirely into one traditional form, the project brings movement, music, rhythm, voice and ritual into dialogue with Chekhov’s dramaturgy.

Drawing on script development, rehearsals and work-in-progress performance, the presentation considers how these traditions interact with Chekhov’s comedy, lyricism, inner action and theatrical atmosphere. It will share examples from the creative process, including moments of experimentation, emerging insights and practical challenges encountered while working across different performance languages.

Through short performance demonstrations and audiovisual materials, audiences will see how the project is developing a multilingual and intercultural adaptation that explores artistic aspiration, disappointment and the possibility of moving forward. The presentation invites audiences to consider how traditional performance resources can be selectively reconfigured within contemporary theatre practice.

If you stumbled across a recipe within a work of fiction, would you ever consider trying it out in your own kitchen? This presentation looks closely at the spate of “recipistolary novels” penned and popularised by women in the 1980s. These novels, which include bestsellers such as Laura Esquivel’s Like Water for Chocolate and Nora Ephron’s Heartburn, feature full recipes within the fictional text. While these recipes do appear replicable for readers, they are rarely used as such. So, what are these recipes for? What do they do? Working within the text and the kitchen, I consider what happens when the consumption of food and fiction collide. This presentation explores the role of the recipe in the text, particularly the way it blurs the lines between novel and cookbook, fiction and reality, and how this interacts with the ideologies of patriarchy and advanced capitalism. Finally, I turn to the contemporary world, where recipistolary novels are less common, but food and consumption are still incredibly present in literature by women. At a time when these food-focused novels are just a small part of a seemingly unlimited buffet of content, I ask: what could we gain from eating the novel?

Unlike many outlaw traditions, the bushranger legend has failed to create a purely fictional canon. Stories of real people, real events, and real places have provided a well of inspiration for ripping yarns about daring, dashing, and gallivanting bushrangers. The popularity of these novels, plays, poems, films and visual art featuring bushrangers has allowed the figure to live on in posterity. And yet, so little scholarship is attentive to their relationship between fact and fiction. Moreover, representations of bushrangers in creative media, a practice dating to at least 1821, have received surprisingly little critical attention despite their ubiquity in Australian culture.

My presentation (a dry run for Confirmation) will outline the beginnings of my research into the bushranger legend. What even is a bushranger? What formats, genres, and aesthetics are deployed and what meanings do they create? Why are they still so present within Australian culture? How does the bushranger legend adapt, cannibalise, and deny history; what does it mean for a text to be ‘based on a true story’; and, importantly, how do contemporary Australian audiences interpret colonial history through these texts?

Illness is just a blip, right? You get sick, you rest, then you get better. That’s how it works.

What happens when it doesn’t work like that?

I am looking at the ways chronically ill people (including myself) navigate their perception of illness. How do we express ourselves? What mannerisms are performed or suppressed? Where can you go when you don’t get better?

If you’ll allow it, I would love this presentation to be an interactive exploration of our relationship with illness. I will share some of my preliminary research, and what I hope to achieve over the course of my PhD, and then encourage the room to view illness in multiple creative ways.

I am at the pre-confirmation stage, having started in March of this year, and would love the chance to share the concepts I’m playing with! My research is focusing on narrative medicine, epistemic justice, and the role creativity plays in our understanding of self.