PhD Alumni
Past alumni of Deakin’s Writing, Literature and Culture programs include writers, academics, researchers, teachers, librarians, critics, editors, communications specialists, copywriters and digital storytellers.
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. More recently awarded PhD alumni writers include Autumn Royal, Rhett Davis, Dani Netherclift, Eliza Henry-Jones, Nicole Hayes and Kit Cavanagh-Ryan.
Other alumni have gone on to forge careers as academics, often incorporating their creative and/or professional work: including Indigo Perry, Alyson Miller, Toby Davidson, Liz Parsons, Emma Whatman, Jo Scicluna, Shelley Buerger, Jo Langdon, D’arcy Molan and Oscar Davis.
PhD completions from 2023 onwards
| 2025 | To be finalised… | |
| Luke Jackson ‘Literary Sense of Place in Novel-to-Comics Adaptation’ | Prin supervisor Patrick West | |
| Tee Olivier Montague ‘The Ambivalent Devil on the Early Modern English Stage’ | Prin supervisor Geoff Boucher | |
| Síofra Josephine Ramsden ‘The Polyphonic Other: Trans Voice in an Australian Zine Archive’ | Prin supervisor Alyson Miller | |
| Anita Jaboor ‘Spatial and Temporal Re-Imaginings in Contemporary Climate Crisis Fiction’ | Prin supervisor Helen Young | |
| 2024 | ||
| Oscar Davis ‘(Not) In Here: Logocentrism and Undecidability in Creative Arts Research’ | Prin supervisor Patrick West | |
| Noah O’Connor ‘Asexual Necropolitics: Slow Death and Death-Adjacency in Young Adult Fiction’ | Prin supervisor Jodi McAlister | |
| Christian Hayes ‘Designing Narrative Spatiality Systems for Indie Video Games’ | Prin supervisor Karen Le Rossignol | |
| Hannah Garden ‘Australian News and Lifestyle Sites and Popular Feminisms’ | Prin supervisor Kris Moruzi | |
| Caitlin Mary Kavanagh-Ryan ‘Crip Worldbuilding: Representing Disability in Young Adult Speculative Fiction’ | Exec supervisor Sue Chen co-supervisor Clare Bradford | |
| Maria Paula Jones ‘Representations of Liminality in Videopoetry and Graphic Memoir.’ | Prin supervisor David McCooey | |
| Cecilia Yubuko Rogers/Lia Rogers ‘Dark Topographies: Young Adult Gothic Fiction and the Natural World’ | Prin supervisor Kris Moruzi | |
| Karen Lyon ‘Trauma and Testimony in Contemporary Crime Fiction’ | Prin supervisor Helen Young | |
| Alice Elizabeth Bellette ‘Deadly Reckonings: Recognition, Refusal and Relationality in Contemporary Aboriginal Women’s Writing’ | Exec supervisor Emily Potter co-supervisor Gabrielle Fletcher | |
| Nicole Maree Hayes ‘Representations of Mothers and Motherhood in Australian Young Adult Fiction’ | Prin supervisor Jodi McAlister | |
| Simon John Gluskie ‘Hyperconnected Distance: Kaleidoscopic Narratives of the Human and Surveillance Capitalism’ | Prin supervisor Antonia Pont | |
| Anne-Marie Teresa May ‘Bookseller and Librarian Practices for Influencing Teen Recreational Reading’ | Prin supervisor Leonie Rutherford | |
| Danielle Susanne Netherclift ‘The Elegiac Lyric Essay: A Creative Artefact and Exegesis’ | Prin supervisor David McCooey | |
| Kieran Stevenson ‘Pre-Apocalyptic Fiction: Writing Between a Reality Principle and a Real’ | Prin supervisor Antonia Pont | |
| Carmen Tudor ‘Negotiating Matrophobia and Matricentricity in Short Gothic Fiction’ | Prin supervisor Alyson Miller | |
| 2023 | ||
| Charlotte Lucy Guest ‘A Feminist Response to Catullus: A Creative Artefact and Exegesis’ | Prin supervisor David McCooey | |
| Hayley Elliott-Ryan ‘What Writing Wants: Repurposing Bricolage, Waste and Desire in Creative Practice’ | Prin supervisor Antonia Pont | |
| Claire Marita Gaskin ‘Ismene’s Survivable Resistance: Claiming Poetic Voice in the Contemporary Era’ | Prin supervisor Ann Vickery | |
| Shelise Marjorie-Rose Robertson ‘Calculated Investors: John Arbuthnot, Hans Sloane, John Woodward and Slavery’ | Prin supervisor Geoff Boucher | |
| Eliza-Jane Henry-Jones ‘Salt and Skin: Climate Change in Australia and Orkney’ | Prin supervisor Emily Potter | |
| D’arcy William Molan ‘The Wimmera Speaks: Adaptive Work, Poetic Histories, and Place-based Arts’ | Exec supervisor Emily Potter co-supervisor Lynn McCredden | |
| Lorinda Tang ‘Writing Trauma Making Fiction: Dialogic Practices after Bakhtin, Levinas, Derrida’ | Prin supervisor Antonia Pont | |
| Elizabeth Sarah Little ‘Mediating (Post)Feminist Girlhood Through Young Adult Fantasy Literature’ | Prin supervisor Kris Moruzi |
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…