Dr Victoria Kuttainen ~ Roderick Scholar in Comparative Literature

Victoria Kuttainen is the Margaret and Colin Roderick Scholar of Comparative Literature. Her expertise concentrates on the Literatures of Canada (where she grew up and studied at the Unversity of British Columbia and the University of Alberta) and Australia (where she has lived since first arriving in 2003 as an international postgraduate student on a presitgious double scholarship from both SSHRC and UQ/IPRS).

Trained at the University of Queensland and a member of the Postcolonial Research Group there, Victoria completed her doctoral studies in the areas of postcolonialism, settler colonialism, and the short story. This culminated in her first book Unsettling Stories: Settler Postcolonialism and the Short Story Composite (Cambridge Scholars Press, 2010).

Since her appointment to the Department of English and her subsequent fellowship as the Margaret and Colin Roderick Scholar at James Cook University, she has honed her focus on the literature and cultural production of colonial modernity, a period (marked by the Great Depression and the rise of American mass media) in which the new nations of Australia and Canada have each been traditionally understood as a cultural wasteland.

With postdoctoral scholars Dr Susann Liebich and Dr Sarah Galletly, a Roderick-funded project (The Transported Imagination) has focused on Australia's three quality magazines of the interwar period: MAN, The BP Magazine, and The Home.  This fruitful collaboration between scholars of reading history; popular fiction; and colonial modernity has revealed a different picture of Australian print and reading culture between the wars.  By considering cultural production as it emerged and was understood in its own day (in contrast to how national and canonical literary scholarship has classified it and remembered it retrospectively), this research has revealed a modern Australian periodical scene and readership that was highly sophisticated and globally engaged; vibrantly modern and modernising; and which navigated emerging technologies and media in fascinating ways. A suite of articles and book chapters as well as a digitally enhanced poster have emerged from this research, and a special journal issue and book are forthcoming.

In 2013 Dr Kuttainen founded and has subsequently led TRIP, an Interdisciplinary Reading Group in the College of Arts, Society and Education at James Cook University that meets monthly to consider scholarship about the interwar period in Australia and beyond. A planned book is emerging from this cluster, tentatively titled Icons: Fame, Infamy, and Obscurity in Modern Australia 1920-1950.

The themes that are woven throughout Dr Kuttainen's research include global exchange; imagined geographies; cultural production and dissemination; literary taste-makers; cultural value, celebrity,  and repute; authors as public intellectuals; and the way in which early twentieth-century writers established, managed, and were subsequently shaped by their multi-platform careers as they straddled the historical forms of new media that arose with the birth of film, cinema, and glossy, image-rich magazines.

These areas of expertise inform Dr Kuttainen's teaching in BA1002 Networks, Narratives, and the Making of Place; EL2055 Print, Literature and Society in Comparative Contexts; and EL3050 Postcolonial Narratives.

Victoria has published in the areas of Australian Literature; Canadian Literature; Comparative and Postcolonial Literature; Modernism and Modernity; Middlebrow and Periodical Print Cultures; Travel and Mobility; the History of the Short Story and the Novel; Life-Writing; Trauma Theory; and the Scholarship of Learning and Teaching.

Her scholarship of teaching and learning involves the development of large first-year BA cores subjects; the first-year experience; integrating and supporting classes of underprepared as well as accelerated students; student enagement; community engagement; the library-teaching nexus; and digital humanities.

Teaching

• BA1002: Our Space: Networks, Narrative and the Making of Place (Level 1; TSV)
• EL2055: Literature, Print and Society in Comparative Contexts 1920-50 (Level 2; CNS & TSV)

Interests

Professional

• Director, Foundation for Australian Literary Studies; Judge, Colin Roderick Award 2015, 2016; Co-Editor LiNQ Literary Journal 2009-2017; Editorial Board: e-Tropic; Honorary Associate: Centre for Media History, Macquarie University; Australian Representative of ACCUTE Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English

Research

• Scholarship of Literature and Culture: postcolonial literature and settler colonialism; Australian Literature as World Literature; colonial modernity; modernism and modernity; interwar print culture; periodicals and magazines; literary taste-makers and repute; new media in early 20th c. contexts; the middlebrow; the writer as public intellectual
• Scholarship of Teaching and Learning: student engagement, supporting multi-level classes; developing cohort identity; bench-marking the discipline of English Literature; the secondary-tertiary teaching nexus

Teaching

• Postcolonial Literature; Print Culture; Periodical Studies, Comparative Literature; Modernism; Network Theory

Experience

• 2013 to present - Margaret and Colin Roderick Scholar, James Cook University (Townsville)
• 2012 to 2013 - Senior Lecturer, James Cook University (Townsville, Australia)
• 2009 to 2012 - Lecturer, James Cook University (Townsville, Australia)
• 2008 - Lecturer, Bond University (Gold Coast, Australia)
• 2003 to 2008 - PhD, University of Queensland (Brisbane, Australia)
• 2007 - Lecturer, University of the Sunshine Coast (Sunshine Coast, Australia)
• 2002 to 2003 - PhD Coursework, University of Alberta (Edmonton, Canada)
• 1999 to 2002 - Masters, University of British Columbia (Vancouver, Canada)
• 1996 to 1999 - Teacher of English as a Foreign Language, Various (Taiwan, Vancouver)
• 1991 to 1996 - BA Hons, University of British Columbia (Vancouver, Canada)

Research Disciplines

• Literary Studies (2005)

Socio-Economic Objectives

• Communication (9502)
• Understanding Past Societies (9505)

Awards

• 2015 - Rising Star-Top Up Award
• 2012 - Citation for Outstanding Contribution to Student Learning
• 2012 - Townsville Arts Award
• 2011 to 2012 - Rising Star Early Career Researcher Award, James Cook University

Fellowships

• 2013 - Margaret and Colin Roderick Scholar of Comparative Literature
• 2013 - Visiting Researcher, School of Humanities, Strathclyde University, Scotland
• 2004 to 2008 - SSHRC Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Doctoral Fellowship
• 2003 to 2008 - University of Queensland International Postgraduate Research Scholarship

Other

• 2013 - Visiting Scholar, Menzies Centre and Department of English; King's College London

These are the most recent publications associated with this author. To see a detailed profile of all publications stored at JCU, visit ResearchOnline@JCU.

Journal Articles

• Kuttainen V and Liebich S (2017) Worldly tastes: mobility and the geographical imaginaries of interwar Australian magazines. Transfers, 7 (1). pp. 52-69
• Kuttainen V and Galletly S (2016) Making friends of the nations: Australian interwar magazines and middlebrow Orientalism in the Pacific. Journeys, 17 (2). pp. 23-48
• Kuttainen V, Liebich S and Galletly S (2015) Place, platform, and value: periodicals and the Pacific in late colonial modernity. English Studies in Canada, 41 (1). pp. 155-177
• Kuttainen V (2014) "Sailor, novelist, and scientist-also explorer" Frank Burnett, Canada's Kon-Tiki, and the ethnographic middlebrow. Canadian Literature, 221. pp. 74-91
• Kuttainen V (2014) Trafficking literature: travel, modernity, and the middle ground of Canadian and Australian middlebrow print cultures. International Journal of Canadian Studies, 48. pp. 85-103
• Kuttainen V (2013) Dear Miss Cowie: the construction of Canadian authorship, 1920s and 1930s . English Studies in Canada, 39 (4). pp. 145-171
• Cardell K and Kuttainen V (2012) The ethics of laughter: David Sedaris and humour memoir. Mosaic, 45 (3). pp. 99-114

Book Chapters

• Kuttainen V and Manning G (in press) Postmodernist and literary experiments (Australia, New Zealand, Canada, South Pacific). In: Oxford History of the Novel in English. Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK
• Kuttainen V (in press) Settler stories: postcolonial short fiction. In: Cambridge History of the English Short Story. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK, pp. 358-376
• Kuttainen V (2013) 1938: the most literary yet: Man magazine. In: Telling Stories: Australian life and literature 1935-2012. Monash University Publishing, Melbourne, VIC, Australia, pp. 31-36
• Kuttainen V (2013) 1940: style, modernity and popular magazines: writing Pacific travel. In: Telling Stories: Australian life and literature 1935-2012. Monash University Publishing, Melbourne, VIC, Australia, pp. 51-56
• Kuttainen V (2012) Boundary trouble: trauma fiction and postcolonialism in Tim Winton's 'The Turning'. In: Border-Crossings: narrative demarcation in postcolonial literatures and media. Universitätsverlag Winter, Heidlelberg, Germany, pp. 33-44

More

ResearchOnline@JCU stores 35+ research outputs authored by Dr Victoria Kuttainen from 2006 onwards.

Advisory Accreditation: I can be on your Advisory Panel as a Primary or Secondary Advisor.

These Higher Degree Research projects are either current or by students who have completed their studies within the past 5 years at JCU. Linked titles show theses available within ResearchOnline@JCU.

Current

• Time, Place, Memory and Identity in the literature of Australian South Sea Islanders. (PhD , Secondary Advisor)
• The Beautiful and Damned: Searching for the Flapper in Australian Print Culture 1920's - 1930's (PhD , Primary Advisor)
• No Woman is an Island: Humour, Ethics and Identity in the Australian Regional Family Memoir (PhD , Primary Advisor)
• Shadows in the Cane: Reconstructing History Through Fiction to Responsibly Reimagine and Make Accessible the 1930s History of Cassowary Coast Migrant Sugar Workers. (PhD , Primary Advisor)