A/Prof Victoria Kuttainen - Research Portfolio

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About

Victoria Kuttainen is an Associate Professor in the College of Arts, Society and Education at James Cook University in the field of English and Writing. She holds a BA Honours and Masters of Arts from the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, and a PhD in postcolonial literature from the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia. In 2018, as part of her exploration of the nexus between secondary and tertiary education, 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). She is also the author of over forty journal articles, and has delivered two international keynotes.

Dr Kuttainen is an active researcher in three key areas: settler colonialism and colonial modernity; scholarship of learning and teaching; and creative writing.

Settler colonialism and colonial modernity

Trained as a scholar of postcolonial cultures and literatures, Victoria's primary focus in literary scholarship involves the intersections between geography, history, and cultural identity. Her first book Unsettling Stories (Cambridge Scholars, 2010) investigaged the complex aftermath of settler colonialism in the literatures of Canada, Australia, and the USA. Her second monograph, for which she was research-lead of a team including two postdoctoral scholars (Susann Liebich of the Karl Jaspers Centre for Transcultural Studies, University of Heidelberg and Sarah Galletly of University College Dublin), culminated in The Transported Imagination (Cambria, 2018). This research made a significant contribution to the underresearched entanglements of colonialism and modernity.

Extending her interest in colonial modernity and regional cultures, Dr Kuttainen is editor of the forthcoming Special Issue of the international Journal The Space Between which attempts to recover traces of the flapper in global print cultures as geographically diverse as China, Spain, Australasia and beyond.

Scholarship of Teaching and Learning

A faculty teaching citation winner, Victoria is a passionate teacher and a self-reflexive scholar of teaching and learning. Originally trained as a teacher of English as a Second Language, Victoria has long been an advocate for the transformative potential of education in regional settings around the world, and a champion for community engagement and social justice.

The topics she has investigated and continues to focus on include regional higher education; decolonisation; transition pedagogies; secondary-tertiary collaborations; and supporting diverse learners.

Creative Writing as Engagement

For Victoria, the natural and practical output of literary studies is the practice of creative writing, which she regards as a way of finding language for—and engaging public audiences with—complex issues. As well as writing and pubishing poetry, Victoria is currently writing a long-form creative manuscript, for which she has been awarded two residencies (The Historic Joy Kogawa House, Vancouver 2019; Varuna: The National Writers' House, Katoomba NSW, 2021). Her creative work explores themes of place and displacement, migration, mental health, and grief.

Victoria loves being in nature, bush-walking, kayaking, and enjoying wood-fired pizzas and good conversation in the company of family and friends.

Teaching

BA1002: Our Space: Networks, Narrative and the Making of Place (Level 1; CNS)
EL2047: Children's Literature (Level 2; TSV)
EL2055: Literature, Print and Society in Comparative Contexts 1920-50 (Level 2; TSV)
EL3050: Postcolonial Narratives: Writing, Place, and Identity (Level 3; TSV)

Interests

Professional

Executive Director, Foundation for Australian Literary Studies
General (Co-) Editor, JASAL -the peak body journal of Australian Literary Studies
Board Director, Ryan Catholic College
Portfolio Chair: Humanities in the Regions, ACHRC Australasian Centre for Humanities Researchers and Centres

Experience

2019 to present - Associate Professor, JCU
2012 to present - Senior Lecturer, James Cook University (Townsville, Australia)
2016 to 2020 - Member of the Academic Board, 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

Honours

Awards

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

Fellowships

2021 - Fellow, Queensland Academy
2013 - Visiting Researcher, School of Humanities, Strathclyde University, Scotland
2013 - Margaret and Colin Roderick Scholar of Comparative Literature
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

Publications

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 Hansen C (in press) Making connections: exploring the complexity of the secondary-tertiary nexus in English from the perspective of regional Australia. English in Australia, 55 (2), pp. 39-51.
Kuttainen V (2020) Dale Collins, media man: Australian interwar print culture and the technologies of production, distribution, and reception before and after ‘Australian literature’. Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature, 20 (2).
Kuttainen V (2020) Books, films, and phonographs: Australian interwar magazines and the intermediation of historical new media. Journal of European Periodical Studies, 5 (1), pp. 55-70, DOI:10.21825/jeps.v5i1.15970.
Kuttainen V (2019) Lost in the (National) Archive: the Modern Girl, literary cultures, and the magazine. Modernism/Modernity, 4 (2), DOI:10.26597/mod.0115.
Lippmann J and Kuttainen V (2019) The troublesome Modern Girl: Jungfrau, national literature, and the vexations of Transnational Modernity. The Space Between, 15.
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, DOI:10.3167/TRANS.2017.070105.

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

Galletly S and Kuttainen V (2020) Among the Autumn authors: books and writers in interwar Australian magazines. In: Routledge Companion to Australian Literature. Routledge, London, UK
Kuttainen V (2020) 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, pp. 140-158
Kuttainen V and Lippmann J (2020) 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, pp. 41-60
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

More: ResearchOnline@JCU stores 48+ research outputs authored by A/Prof Victoria Kuttainen from 2006 onwards.

Supervision

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

We are made with water: an ontological exploration of water in the Dry Tropics of Northern Queensland. (PhD , Secondary Advisor)
The Beautiful and Damned: Searching for the Flapper in Australian Print Culture 1920's - 1930's (PhD , Primary Advisor/AM/Adv)
Running away, running towards: Isolation, identity, and the performance of gender in contemporary Australian Narrative (PhD , Primary Advisor/AM/Adv)
Gendered Violence in the Tropical Pacific: The Use of Storytelling to Address Global Social Inequality (PhD , Primary Advisor/AM/Adv)
A Call to Art: Expressing the affective power of Art in times of emergency through historical, literary experience. (PhD , Primary Advisor)
Self-help as Literature: Literature as Self-help (PhD , Primary Advisor)
Topographical Texts: Connections Between Landscape, Movement, Materiality and Text in the Fiction of Patrick White, Gerald Murnane and Murray Bail (PhD , Primary Advisor)