DrMeg Brayshaw

BA Hons, DipEd, PhD

Meg Brayshaw researches and teaches Australian literature, with a particular focus on the intersection of aesthetic developments with politics, history, space and the environment. She serves as co-editor of Australian Literary Studies and is Academic Editor of the Sydney Studies in Australian Literature series at Sydney University Press. She has held fellowships from the National Library of Australia, the Roderick Centre for Australian Literature and Creative Writing, and the Centre for Concurrences in Colonial and Postcolonial Studies at Linnaeus University, Sweden.

Meg has made contributions to Australian literary studies, the study of global modernisms, urban literary studies, and ecological literary criticism. Her first monograph, Sydney and its Waterway in Australian Literary Modernism, revised the accepted narrative of Australian literary history by proving the existence of a modernist aesthetic and perspective in Australia before World War II. It deployed materialist ecocritical analysis to argue that in the interwar period, Australian women writers developed a situated modern urban poetics through engagement with Sydney's iconic estuary and harbour. 

She is currently working on two projects. The first is a literary history of mining in Australia, which will explore literature's role in shaping the complex cultural politics and social values pertaining to the industry. She has published on the topic in Textual Practice, and The Journal of Postcolonial Writing.

Her second project is a monograph about the Australian writer Dymphna Cusack and the politics of Australian literature during the Cold War.