Associate ProfessorBrigid Rooney

Associate Professor Brigid Rooney researches and teaches Australian literature, focusing especially on twentieth-century and contemporary fiction. Her interests include the poetics of space, time and modernity; fictions of suburbia; representations of nature, place and the environment; and the activist careers and public interventions of Australian writers.

Brigid is the author of two monographs: Suburban Space, the Novel and Australian Modernity (Anthem 2018) and Literary Activists: Writers and Australian Public Life (UQP 2009). These books investigate the role of literature in Australia’s public life, culture and collective memory. Both exercise Brigid’s commitment to imaginative interpretation as a means of illuminating the primary texts themselves and their wider cultural meanings. Suburban Space conceptualises the ways in which novels have functioned, for over a century, to encode, remember and bring significance to otherwise obscure or ephemeral suburban places and communities. Literary Activists combines broadly sociological frames with close literary textual analysis in its discussion of the writings, careers and public interventions of postwar Australian authors.

Brigid has published widely, in commissioned book chapters and journal articles, on the writings and careers of many of Australia’s major authors, including Elizabeth Harrower, Shirley Hazzard, David Malouf, Gerald Murnane, Christina Stead and Patrick White, among others. Her PhD thesis, ‘Gendering the revolutionary subject: the role of Marxist thought in Christina Stead’s authorial production’ (Macquarie University, 1998, available online) began her lasting fascination with the fiction of Christina Stead on whom she has continued to publish. Brigid’s most recent book, Suburban Space, offers original readings of novels by established and emerging writers, including, among many others, works by Steven Carroll, Michelle de Kretser, Melissa Lucashenko, Omar Musa and Alexis Wright.

Brigid is Immediate Past President of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature (ASAL), the peak international association for academic scholars and critics of Australian literature. She was ASAL President from 2017 to 2019 and continues to serve on its Executive. Brigid serves on the Editorial Boards of Australian Literary Studies (ALS); Sydney Studies in Australian Literature(Sydney University Press) and the Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature (JASAL)