Zoomcast Overview

Ryan D. Fong interviews Jason Rudy, Professor of English at the University of Maryland, College Park. In their conversation, they discuss how each of them came to study nineteenth-century Australia and to do so through an Indigenous-centered lens. They focus on the importance of visual art in the aesthetic traditions of many Aboriginal communities across Australia, both within the nineteenth century and in contemporary contexts. By showing how visual works function as both archival records and interventions into colonial accounts of history, Rudy and Fong talk about how they have incorporated these materials into their teaching. Rudy also discusses the impact that his relationship with Indigenous artist Gordon Syron has had on his thinking, research, and teaching, especially as Rudy has worked with Syron on writing the artist’s biography.

Further Reading

Astley, Thea. A Kindness Cup. Allen & Unwin, 1974.

Behrendt, Larissa. Finding Eliza: Power and Colonial Storytelling. University of Queensland Press, 2016.

Clendinnen, Inga. Dancing with Strangers: Europeans and Australians at First Contact. Cambridge University Press, 2005.

Pascoe, Bruce. Dark Emu: Aboriginal Australia and the Birth of Agriculture. Scribe, 2018.

Sayers, Andrew. Aboriginal Artists of the Nineteenth Century. Oxford University Press, 1994.

Scott, Kim. Taboo. Small Beer Press, 2019.

Beyond the Literary Series

This cluster of Zoomcasts highlights one strategy of undisciplining Victorian studies and our syllabi: looking beyond and challenging traditional conceptions of the “literary.” While reading novels, poetry, drama, and prose will undoubtedly remain important to our work, these forms can problematically limit our ability to recognize and understand the many different ways that Indigenous, occupied, and non-white communities expressed themselves aesthetically in nineteenth-century Britain and its colonies. Our conversations focus on ways that we can alter our syllabi and pedagogical approaches in widening the scope of our classrooms in this way.

Guest Biography

Jason Rudy is a Professor of English at the University of Maryland (UMD), College Park, past president of the Northeast Victorian Studies Association, and a member of the Historical Poetics Working Group. He currently directs the English Honors program at UMD. Professor Rudy serves on the advisory boards of the journals Victorian Studies and Victorian Poetry and is a General Editor for the Broadview Anthology of British Literature. His research focuses on nineteenth-century literature in English, especially poetry; his work is committed to thinking globally about the circulation of literature, particularly in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and South Africa. He is the author of Imagined Homelands: British Poetry in the Colonies (Johns Hopkins Press, 2017) and Electric Meters: Victorian Physiological Poetics (Ohio University Press, 2009).