Dr Sara L. Knox

• Biography
• Areas of Research / Teaching Expertise
• Grants / Current Projects
• Awards and Recognition
• Publications
• Contact Details

Biography

Majoring in History at Victoria University, Wellington (N.Z), Sara completed her B.A. (with Honours) and then began a move toward interdisciplinarity. After submitting her Masters thesis on cold war discourse (focussing on the trial and execution of the Rosenbergs), she secured a scholarship to complete her doctorate in American Studies at La Trobe University. Her doctoral thesis work was subsequently published by Duke University Press as Murder: a Tale of American Life. She subsequently expanded on this early work by scholarly exploration of the discursive contexts to murder. This long-standing interest and expertise is also expressed in her principal area of teaching at UWS—the cultural history of death, and the representation of crime and violence. Throughout the period of her development of an interdisciplinary scholarly career, she was also publishing poetry and short works of literary non-fiction in major literary journals in New Zealand and Australia. Her first novel, The Orphan Gunner, was shortlisted for the regional Commonwealth Writers’ Prize in 2008. She therefore very much enjoys her second area of teaching expertise in the College of Arts: creative writing.

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Areas of Research / Teaching Expertise

Major Fields:

Violence and narrative; crime and representation; crime and the media; literary representations of death and the afterlife.

Secondary Fields:

Contemporary cultures of reading (audio-book use, group reading practices); the novels and autobiographical writing of Hilary Mantel; creative writing.

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Grants / Current Projects

Australia Council for the Arts, Literature Board grant toward New Work for Developing Writers (for novel, The Midday Demon), 2008.

Australia Council for the Arts, Literature Board grant toward New Work for Emerging Writers (for the novel, The Orphan Gunner), 2004.

Current research projects on: the narrator’s voice, affect and audio-book; on group reading practices and cultures of reading; critical study of the autobiographical work and fiction of Hilary Mantel.

Ongoing: The Social Life of the Book: Reading in Groups.

2004: Australia Council for the Arts, New Work (Literature) Grant

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Awards and Recognition

Shortlisted for the 2008 Commonwealth Writer's Prize for the South Pacific/South Asia/New Zealand/Australia region (The Orphan Gunner).

The Orphan Gunner shortlisted for the 2008 Melbourne Age Book of the Year.

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Publications

Book—creative works (novel):

The Orphan Gunner (Sydney, NSW: Giramondo Press, 2007).

Book—single-authored, research:

Murder: a Tale of Modern American Life (Durham, North Carolina : Duke University Press, 1998).

Book—chapter:

‘The Confessions of Henry Lee Lucas: High Numbers and Higher Stakes’, Famous American Crimes and Trials Vol 5. / edited by Frankie Y Bailey and Steven Chernak. (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2004). pp. 35-52. ISBN 0-275-98338-2.

‘The Serial Killer as Collector’, Acts Of Possession: the Culture of Collecting in the United States / edited by Leah Dilworth (New York : Rutgers University Press, 2003), pp. 286-302.

Book — chapter (forthcoming in late 2009):

‘Random School Shootings, Teen culture and the Representation of Violence’, in Rethinking School Violence, Sue Saltmarsh, Kerry Robinson and Cristyn Davies (eds.) Palgrave.

Journal Articles — refereed (forthcoming in 2010):

'Giving flesh to the “wraiths of violence”: super-realism in the fiction of Hilary Mantel’, Australian Feminist Studies

Journal Articles — refereed:

‘”New ways to frame the mammoth horror”: media first responders and the Katrina Event’, Cultural Studies Review, vol. 14 no. 2 (Sept 2008).

‘The Nearness of Distant Things: on Researching Historical Fiction’, Heat, no. 16 (New Series, 2008).

‘Death, Afterlife, and the Eschatology of Consciousness: Themes in Contemporary Cinema’, Mortality, vol. 11 no. 3 (2006), pp. 233-252.

‘A Gruesome Accounting: Mass, Serial and Spree Killing in the Mediated Public Sphere’, Journal for Crime, Conflict and the Media . vol. 1 no. 2. (2004) pp. 1-14.

‘Crime, Law and Symbolic Order: the Rhetoric of Transparency’, Theory and Event vol. 7 No. 1 (2003), pp. 1-26.

'Introduction', Mortality, vol. 7 no. 1 (2002) [Special issue: Violence, Mourning, and Memory], Abingdon, Oxfordshire: Carfax Publishers pp. 5-12.

'A Few Deaths, Here and There' [expanded version], Mortality, vol. 7 no. 1 (2002) pp. 47-62.

'The Productive Power of Confessions of Cruelty', Postmodern Culture (May 2001). Online version of article

'A World Made of Glass: Crime , Culture and Community in an Age of Hypermedia' Theory and Event vol 4 no, 4 (2000).

Web Links:

Excerpt from The Wordshed (produced by the Johanna Featherstone and the Red Room Company)- Sara and Elizabeth Knox on Fantasy, hallucination and migraine.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubbAdBTWm-s

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