Alumni and Students
Past alumni of Deakin’s Writing, Literature and Culture programs include writers, academics, researchers, teachers, librarians, critics, editors, communications specialists, copywriters and digital storytellers.
Featured Alumni
Katie Hansord
Katie Hansord is a writer and researcher living in Melbourne, Australia. Her research interests include gender, poetry, feminism, political activism and print culture. Katie edits the Association for the Study of Australian Literature’s newsletter, was a research fellow at University of Melbourne, and has convened related conferences.
Her most recent work is Colonial Australian Women Poets: Political voice and feminist traditions (2021, Anthem Press). This book considers the political and feminist significance of non-canonical women poets, particularly those who were writing in newspapers and periodicals, in colonial Australia.
…more featured alumni to come…
Further Alumni Links
Alumni writers include Paddy O’Reilly, Tom Cho, Liam Guilar, Ania Walwicz, Sam Cooney, Christopher Lappas, Sophie Black, Emma Alberici, Kieran Carroll, Fiona McCallum and Gregory Day.
Other alumni have gone on to forge careers as academics, including Indigo Perry, Alyson Miller, Toby Davidson, Liz Parsons, Emma Whatman, Jo Scicluna, Shelley Buerger and Jo Langdon.
Current PhD candidates:
Oscar Davis, PhD candidate in Creative Writing
Majoring in Literary Studies and Astrophysics at Monash University in 2017, Oscar went on to undertake an Honours Course in Creative Writing at the University of Melbourne in 2019. His PhD thesis involves writing an exegesis with an accompanying novel, Static Sun, Phantom Breath, which will implement and explore a post-structuralist analysis of practice-led research and the relationships between theory and practice, and culture and nature.
One of his stories published on
O:JA&L, to become an opera singer or a physician, is available to read here.
Simon Gluskie, PhD candidate in Creative Writing
Simon Gluskie’s research interests are in simulation, surveillance and control. He writes creatively on how technology enables these elements to exist in day-to-day life to varying degrees, creating new spaces while hybridising the old. Simon is concerned with the question of whether experimenting with the form of a creative writing product can allow for a more “accurate” account of the end user existing simultaneously in both virtual and actual space. Using David Foster Wallace as an influence, his fiction aims to “make the familiar strange.” He contributed the presentation ‘Masks & the Avatar’ to a symposium in October 2021.
This paper approaches the problem of the avatar being a mask worn by the user when navigating digital space. David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest will be used as a written creative example of telephonic vanity, contextualised within the current realities of Zoom meetings, social media profiles and video calls.
Anna Spargo-Ryan, PhD candidate in Creative Writing
Anna Spargo-Ryan is the author of The Gulf and The Paper House, stories that try to break open ribcages and stomp on hearts. She won the 2016 Horne Prize for her essay “The Suicide Gene”. Her PhD seeks to understand the experiences of destitute women in nineteenth-century South Australia, and to restore their voices through creative nonfiction writing. Title: Altered States: truthful unreliable minds in contemporary Australian storytelling
…more PhD candidates to come…