CAPSTRANS: Affiliated Staff - Wenche Ommundsen

CAPSTRANS research associate

Licence ès letters, Dip. Ed. (Lausanne)
MA (London)
Ph D (Melbourne)

Postcolonial, multicultural and diasporic literatures (with particular focus on Asian diasporas)
Globalisation and cultural production
Cultural citizenship and transnationalism
The sociology of cultural production
Australian literature and public culture
Multiculturalism and children's literature

English
Norwegian
French
Some German

Australian literature and public culture. ARC Discovery project 2003-2005. Current research on literary festivals, celebrity writers and theories of cultural production.
Building Cultural Citizenship: Multiculturalism and Children’s Literature. ARC Discovery 2005-2008. Current research on refugee narratives and on life stories by young women of Asian background.
AustLit Partner and board member of major infrastructure development. Coordinator of multicultural subset of AustLit database. ARC infrastructure funding since 1999, current 2007.
Globalising Australian literature: ARC Discovery application 2008-2012. Focus on literary interactions between Asia and Australia.

Searchable RIS publications from 2000 to date

Books

in press: Cultural Citizenship and the Challenges of Globalisation, co-edited with Michael Leach and Andrew Vandenberg, Cresskill, New Jersey: Hampton Press.
2001: Bastard Moon: Essays on Chinese-Australian Writing, edited by Wenche Ommundsen, Melbourne: Otherland Publications.

Book Chapters

in press: 'Disappearing race: Normative whiteness and cultural appropriation in Australian refugee narratives', in Robbie B. H. Goh, ed., Ethnic Nationalisms: Narration and Cultural Politics in Asian Societies from Independence to Globalization, Hong Kong University Press.
in press: 'Work in progress: Australian multicultural literature', in Nicholas Birns and Rebecca McNeer, eds, Companion to Australian Literature of the Twentieth Century, Rochester, N.Y.: University of Rochester Press.
2006: ‘In the wake of the Tampa: Multiculturalism, cultural citizenship and Australian refugee narratives’, in Charles I. Armstrong and Øyunn Hestetun, eds, Postcolonial Dislocations: Travel, History, and the Ironies of Narrative, Oslo: Novus Press, 21-35.
2005: ‘Behind the mirror: Searching for the Chinese-Australian self’, in Charles Ferrall, Paul Millar and Keren Smith, eds, East by South: China in the Australasian Imagination, Wellington, N.Z.: Victoria University Press, 405-21.
2005: ‘Sleep no more: Ouyang Yu’s wake-up call to multicultural Australia’, in Kam Louie and Tseen Khoo, eds, Culture, Identity, Commodity: Diasporic Chinese Literatures in English, Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 231-51.
2004: ‘Cultural citizenship in diaspora: A study of Chinese Australia’, in Shawn Wong and Robbie Goh, eds, Asian Diasporas: Cultures, Identities, Representation, Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 77-94.

Journal Articles

2004: ‘Floating lives: Cultural citizenship and the limits of diaspora’, Life Writing, vol. 1. no.2, 101-21.
Winter 2003: ‘Too close to home: Evelyn Lau, Ouyang Yu and the performing self’, in New Literatures Review, vol. 40, 42-56.
2003: ‘Tough ghosts: Modes of cultural belonging in diaspora’, Asian Studies Review, vol. 27, no.2, 181-204.
2002: ‘Of dragons and devils: Chinese-Australian life stories’, JASAL (Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature), vol. 1, no. 1, 67-80.