Associate Professor Kevin Foster
- BA (Hons.) (Manchester) MA (Sask.) PhD (Monash)
- Head of Communications
- 2nd/3rd Year Unit Coordinator
- Honours/Masters Unit coordinator
- Contact details
- Full Curriculum Vitae
(PDF)
Background
Kevin Foster was educated in the UK, Canada and Australia. He received his Ph.D from Monash University. His work has appeared in a range of international journals including Cultural Studies, Third Text, Modern Fiction Studies, and Southern Review. He is the Author of Fighting Fictions: War, Narrative and National Identity (Pluto, 1999), and Lost Worlds: Latin America and the Imagining of Empire (Pluto, September 2009), and the editor of What are we doing in Afghanistan? The Military and the Media at War (Australian Scholarly Publishing, April 2009). He is currently working on a comparative study of media operations among the Australian, Canadian, Dutch, US and UK militaries.
Research Interests
My main research interests are in reportage and the representation of war, the cultural production of national and regional identity, and Twentieth Century British film, television and literary culture. I also have an interest in British and Australian constructions of the Hispanic world. I would welcome enquiries from potential postgraduate students interested in research projects on:
- War reporting
- War and national identity
- War writing, film and photography
- The cultural politics of post second world war Britain
- The cultural history of the North
Selected Publications
Fighting Fictions: War, Narrative and National Identity. (London: Pluto Press, 1999), 204p.
Fighting Fictions is principally a study of British and Argentine cultural productions of the Falklands War. It explores how the war was inscribed within resonant narratives of national self definition and how public opinion about it was subsequently shaped and deployed.
What Are We Doing in Afghanistan? The Military and the Media at War (Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2009), 200p
This volume offers the first comprehensive analysis of the policies and practices that have shaped Australian media coverage of the war in Afghanistan. It examines the media’s relations with the military, assesses ADF public affairs policies, explores how journalists work within and around them, and analyses their output and the understandings of the war that they have produced.
‘Lost Worlds is a lucidly written, illuminating account of how both an imagined and real Latin America has become a privileged symbolic site for working through the crises of national identity of Britain, the United States and Australia. … This book sensitively explores how the lost worlds of Latin America have served to reimagine and refashion the lost worlds of the English-speaking west.’- Professor Noël Valis, Yale University
‘In Lost Worlds, Kevin Foster provides a remarkable gift to postcolonial studies. The case could not be more thoroughly made for Latin America as fecund country for the generation of frank and compromising fantasies in British, American and Australian literature.’ - Professor David Attwell, University of York