A/Prof Victoria Kuttainen ~ Associate Professor

Victoria Kuttainen is an Associate Professor of English and Writing in the College of Arts, Society and Education at James Cook University where she is coordinator of the English major and Margaret and Colin Roderick Scholar of Comparative Literature. She holds a BA Honours and Masters of Arts from the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, and earned a PhD in postcolonial literature at the University of Queensland.  In 2017, as part of her exploration of the nexus between secondary and tertiary English, she completed a Graduate Diploma of Education (Secondary) at James Cook University.

Her books include Unsettling Stories: Settler Postcolonialism and the Short Story Composite (Cambridge Scholars Press, 2010) and The Transported Imagination: Australian Interwar Magazines and the Geographical Imaginaries of Colonial Modernity (co-authored with Susann Liebich and Sarah Galletly, Cambria, 2018).

Dr Kuttainen researches in three key areas: settler colonialism and the literature of colonial modernity; scholarship of learning and teaching; and creative writing/life writing as a mode of engaging public audiences with social justice issues in the humanities. 

Settler colonialism, colonial modernity, and the literary cultures of the non-metropolitan world

Trained as a scholar of postcolonial literature, Dr Kuttainen's primary focus in literary scholarship involves the intersections between geography, narrative form, and cultural identity. Her first book Unsettling Stories (Cambridge Scholars, 2010) considered the "short story composite" as a genre  well suited to expressing complex dynamics between the one and the many, individuals and communities, the present and the past, home and place, and cultural trauma and storytelling that take shape in the complicated aftermath of settler colonialism. 

This led to a second related area of investigation that recently culminated in the co-authored book The Transported Imagination (Cambria, 2018). Slightly shifting focus to magazines and colonial modernity, this research extended Victoria's exploration of form and genre in these contexts. As leader of the Roderick research team at JCU that included University of Edinburgh postdoctoral scholar Dr Sarah Galletly, and which collaborated with the University of Heidelberg's Karl Jaspers' Centre for Transcultural Studies postdoctoral scholar Susann Lieich, Dr Kuttainen investigated three important but under-examined culture and leisure magazines of interwar Australia: MAN, The Home, and The BP Magazine. This project considered the magazine as a useful format for analysing Australia's engagement with international modernity in the 1920s and 1930s. It reconceptualised the interwar period as a vibrant era of cultural production and the magazine as an important cultural artefact for understanding a dynamic and quickly changing culture prior to the development of a mature publishing industry in Australia. One of its principal concerns is with the ways in which Australian readers reoriented their relationship with England and directed their gaze across the Pacific to America in this era. This research made a significant contribution to the underresearched connection between modernism, modernity, and colonialism. It explores colonial modernity as a problematic involving changing orientations to geography, cultural value, and tradition.

Extending her interest in colonial modernity and cultural value, Dr Kuttainen is currently in hot pursuit of Modern Girl in the literatures of Anglophone modernity, in a project tentatively titled Fast and Loose: The Troublesome Modern Girl in World Literature 1920s-1930s.  This research is a collaboration with doctoral candidate Jilly Lippmann.  Research in cultural history and media studies has revealed that flappers and bright young things were not merely artefacts of metropolitan American and British consumer culture of the interwar period, but also that they were a global phenomenon, present in diverse and far-flung locales such as China, Japan, Canada, and Australia. This research attempts to recover their presence in literature and print culture and considers their ambiguous relationship to commercial culture, modernity, globalism, mobility, literary value, and the projects of national and postcolonial literature. 

A secondary project, and ongoing collaboration with Dr Sarah Galletly, tentatively entitled New Media Nation: Historicising Emerging Media and the Emergence of Australian Literature in the Early Twentieth Century further extends her research in these areas by introducing research in "new media" to the study of historical literary cultures, analysing the role of radio and film, in addition to magazines, in the production and reception of Australian writing and literary sociability in the 1920s-1940s.

The themes that are woven throughout Dr Kuttainen's recent and emerging research include colonialism, modernism, and globalisation; vernacular modernity, world literature, and the production of early twentieth century "new literatures" prior to the canon; imagined geographies; gender, media, and cultural value.

Scholarship of Learning and Teaching

A faculty teaching citation winner, and a current LTSE grant holder with the English discipline, Victoria is a passionate teacher and self-reflexive scholar of teaching and learning.  Originally trained as a teacher of English as a Second Language, Victoria has long been interested in engagement and in the transformative potential of language and literature learning in cultural contexts. The topics she has investigated and focuses on include transition pedagogies; liberal arts education; and using technology, storytelling, and scaffolded assessment design to support differentiated cohorts of learners. Since 2017 when she completed the Graduate Diploma in Education at JCU, she has been collaborating with a small group of like-minded scholars at JCU and beyond who are building relationships between secondary and tertiary education and seeking ways to engage the public with the humanities.

Creative Writing as Public Engagement with the Humanities

In 2019 Victoria is Writer in Residence at the Historic Joy Kogawa House in Vancouver.  Her creative work tests the hypothesis that creative writing can be a powerful way to explore complex ideas in humanities research and express their findings to the general public in a format that can make a difference for good. The themes of Victoria's creative writing include social justice, medical humanities, post-trauma, narratology, and life writing.

Teaching

• BA1002: Our Space: Networks, Narrative and the Making of Place (Level 1; CNS & TSV)
• EL2096: From Gutenberg to Google: Transformations in Text, Technology, and Culture (Level 2; TSV)
• EL3050: Postcolonial Narratives: Writing, Place, and Identity (Level 3; CNS & TSV)

Interests

Professional

• Executive Director, Foundation for Australian Literary Studies; Queensland Rep. ASAL Association for the Study of Australian Literature; 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; 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 Modern Girl; gender; the writer as public intellectual
• Scholarship of Teaching and Learning: liberal arts education; transition pedagogy; student engagement; differentiated teaching to support multi-level classes and diverse learners; developing cohort identity; the secondary-tertiary teaching nexus
• Creative writing as a way to communicate complex ideas in the humanities to a general readership and to stimulate public engagement with and understanding of difficult and pressing social justice issues

Teaching

• Postcolonial Literature; Print Culture; Book History; Periodical Studies, Comparative Literature; Modernism

Experience

• 2019 to present - Associate Professor, JCU
• 2012 to present - Senior Lecturer, James Cook University (Townsville, Australia)
• 2013 to 2018 - Margaret and Colin Roderick Scholar, James Cook University (Townsville)
• 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 (in press) Lost in the (National) Archive: the Modern Girl, literary cultures, and the magazine. Modernism/Modernity,
• Lippmann J and Kuttainen V (in press) The troublesome Modern Girl: Jungfrau, national literature, and the vexations of Transnational Modernity. The Space Between,
• Kuttainen V (2017) Illustrating mobility: networks of visual print culture and the periodical contexts of modern Australian writing. Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature, 17 (2).
• 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

Books

• Kuttainen V, Liebich S and Galletly S (2018) The Transported Imagination: Australian Interwar Magazines and the Geographical Imaginaries of Colonial Modernity. Cambria Press, Amherst, NY, USA

Book Chapters

• Kuttainen V (in press) Cross-colonial encounters and cultural contestation in Somerset Maugham's 'Rain'. In: The Imperial Middlebrow: cross-colonial encounters and expressions of power in middlebrow literature and culture, 1890-1940. Brill
• Kuttainen V and Lippmann J (in press) Alternative imaginaries of the modern girl: a comparative examination of Canadian and Australian magazines. In: Comparative Print Culture: a study of alternative literary modernities. Palgrave Macmillan
• Kuttainen V and Manning G (2017) Postmodernist and literary experiments (Australia, New Zealand, Canada, South Pacific). In: Oxford History of the Novel in English. Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK, pp. 221-235
• Kuttainen V (2016) Settler stories: postcolonial short fiction. In: Cambridge History of the English Short Story. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK, pp. 358-376

More

ResearchOnline@JCU stores 43+ research outputs authored by A/Prof 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

• No Woman is an Island: Humour, Ethics and Identity in the Australian Regional Family Memoir (PhD , Primary Advisor)
• The Beautiful and Damned: Searching for the Flapper in Australian Print Culture 1920's - 1930's (PhD , Primary Advisor)

Completed

• Memory and Identity in the Life Writing of Australian South Sea Islanders: Struggling for Recognition (2018, PhD , Secondary Advisor)