Graduate House — The Graduate Union of the University of Melbourne

THE GRADUATE UNION        

presents

Editing Mary Gilmore’s Poetry

An address to be delivered by

Associate Professor Jennifer Strauss AM

Wednesday, 7 July 2010

Jennifer Strauss (nee Wallace) completed an Honours Degree in English Language and Literature at the University of Melbourne in 1954 and, in the period of university expansion just then beginning to unfold, was able to move immediately into an academic appointment at the newly independent University of New England.  Since then she has been a member of the Departments of English at Melbourne and Monash Universities and a visiting scholar at various international universities.

Australian Literature was her first academic love, but finding it not considered a proper basis for an academic career, she turned initially to Medieval Studies, adding Australian literature to her teaching and research interests as it gradually established itself in the academy, along with the even later curriculum addition of Womens Studies and feminist Criticism.

Herself a practising poet, who has recently been awarded the Fellowship of Australian Writers Christopher Brennan Award for sustained excellence in poetry, she was drawn to the academic study of other women poets and published book-length critical studies of Judith Wright and Gwen Harwood before setting out on the Gilmore project, for which she was otherwise minimally prepared by having edited the anthologies The Oxford Anthology of Australian Literature and Family Ties: Australian Poems of the Family.

In 2007 she was awarded an AM for ‘service to education as an academic and scholar in the field of Australian literature and poetry, and to a range of organizations involved in women’s issues and industrial relations’.