Louise is an Associate Professor in the English Literatures Program. She received a BA (Hons) specializing in medieval literature from the University of Sydney in 1990. Her 1997 PhD thesis, also completed at the University of Sydney, examined the concepts of political and literary authority in the writings of medieval women. Her two main current research areas are medievalism and medieval women’s writing. Medievalism examines post-medieval receptions and constructions of the Middle Ages, and considers the impact of these constructions on modern cultural, political, and social life. Louise’s work on Australian medievalism examines the cultural and ideological role played by medievalism in colonial and former-colonial societies. Her work on Christine de Pizan focuses on Christine’s political writings, examining how Christine deploys notions of gender and ethnicity to formulate models of political action and to authorize her own intervention into the late medieval political sphere. Louise currently holds an Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Grant for the project “Medievalism in Australian Cultural Memory” (2008-2011). She is a Chief Investigator along with Professor Stephanie Trigg (University of Melbourne), Associate Professor Andrew Lynch (University of Western Australia), and Professor John Ganim (University of California, Riverside). In 2009 she was also awarded an Australian Academy of Humanities / British Academy Special Joint Project grant, with Dr Chris Jones (St Andrews), for the project “Fossil and Root: A Comparative Study of Anglo-Saxonism in Nineteenth-Century British and Australian Poetry”. She is a member of the Arts Faculty’s Institute for Social Transformation Research (ISTR), and is Chief Investigator on the ISTR project, “Literarary Impact and Social Transformation”. She has been leader of the Cultural Memories research theme of the ARC-funded Network for Early European Research (2007-09), and co-ordinator of the Network’s Australasian Medievalisms research cluster (2006-09). She is also a member of the Advisory Committee of the Sydney Centre for Medieval Studies. Louise has supervised, and continues to supervise, a number of PhD theses in the areas of medievalism, Australian literature, women’s writing, and drama.
Articles
Laughing in the face of the past: Satire and nostalgia in medieval heritage tourism, Faculty of Arts - Papers (2011)
Emerging out of the development of local and national `heritage,ÿmedieval heritage tourism is imbricated with...
Medievalism, Nationalism, Colonialism: Introduction (with Andrew Lynch and Stephanie Trigg), Faculty of Arts - Papers (2011)
Meta-medievalism and the future of the past in the 'Australian Girl' Novel, Faculty of Arts - Papers (2011)
Old Songs in the Timeless Land: Medievalism in Australian Literature 1840-1910, Faculty of Arts - Papers (2011)
From "eccentric affiliation" to "corrective medievalism: Bruce Holsinger's the premodern condition, Faculty of Arts - Papers (2010)
An intriguing trope has found favor amongst a number of reviewers of Bruce Holsinger’s The...
Books
Maistresse of My Wit: Medieval Women, Modern Scholars (Making the Middle Ages, 7) (with Juanita F. Ruys), Faculty of Arts - Papers (2004)
Contributions to Books
'Femmes a part': unsociable sociability, women, lifewriting (with Anne A. Collett), Faculty of Arts - Papers (2010)
When Christine de Pizan, in her 1410 Lamentation on the Evils of Civil War, described...
'Je, Christine': Christine de Pizan's Autobiographical Topoi, Faculty of Arts - Papers (2010)
The literary output of Christine de Pizan (1365-c.1429) was prolific, spanning almost four decades and...