Dr Therese Davis
- BA Communications (UTS), MA Research (UTS), PhD (UWS)
- Senior Lecturer
- Contact details
- Full Curriculum Vitae
(PDF)
Background and Research Interests
Therese Davis has a background in communications and cultural studies (University of Technology, Sydney) as well as media production. Her research and scholarship has been in two main fields: spectatorship theory and Australian film and television. She has completed a major project on death and spectatorship in the media age, which resulted in her book, The Face on the Screen: Death, Recognition and Spectatorship (Intellect, 2004), as well as other publications in refereed journals. This project formed the platform for several interrelated projects on spectatorship and cross-cultural recognition in the Australian cinema. One of these projects was the widely referenced co-authored book with Felicity Collins, Australian Cinema After Mabo (CUP, 2004), which looks at the ways in which contemporary Australian cinema has served as an intimate sphere for reviewing our colonial past. She has also developed a collaborative Australian Research Council Discovery project with Nancy Wright and Brooke Collins-Gearing, awarded a grant of $199,000 (2006-2008). These projects have been supported by internal university grants and an international fellowship at The Menzies Centre for Australian Studies, Kings College London. The critical reception of her work in these two fields has largely been based on the significance of this work for contemporary cultural theory. The critical reception of Australian Cinema After Mabo has also highlighted the significance of her work for Australian History and Indigenous Media Studies, evidenced in the subsequent publication of sole and co-authored articles in prestigious journals such as Australian Historical Studies and Aboriginal History. So while her research is primarily located in Film Studies, it also draws on and establishes new dialogues with debates in Cultural Theory, History, and Indigenous media. She is currently developing a research project on teen films, genre and nation.
Selected Publications
The Face on the Screen: Death, Recognition and Spectatorship. Bristol and Portland Or.: Intellect, 2004.
‘In this tender, haunting, imaginative, and innovative work, Therese Davis broadens and deepens cultural theory, away from a 1990s focus on mass culture as pleasure, towards an engagement in the new millennium with the image’s darker power … The Face on the Screen is as profound as it is poignant’.
- John Docker (Australian National University)
The Face on the Screen: Death, Recognition & Spectatorship opens much needed debate on the aesthetics of television in relation to memory, history and death, an aesthetics which has tended to be repressed in cultural theory. While television is on the one hand complicit with the social repression of death, in asking how a possible antidote to this might occur in those very faces that disappear into the ether of electricity, The Face on the Screen: Death, Recognition & Spectatorship offers an important revaluation of contemporary media’s ability to preserve “the subject from a second spiritual death”.
- Maria Walsh, Scope. An online journal of film and television studies, Issue 9, October 2007.
Australian Cinema After Mabo, with Felicity Collins. Cambridge and Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
“the most engaging, useful and comprehensive theoretical text to appear since O’Regan’s [Australian National Cinema, 1996] … I suspect it will become the definitive text on Australian cinema courses around the country, which means it may set a new agenda for the way Australian cinema is taught”
- - Catherine Simpson, Australian Humanities Review, 2005
“[this book] enriches our understanding of the immensity of the cultural changes to which we are witnesses … It presents us with some of the best writing on individual films we are ever likely to read and will become a standard text for courses on Australian cinema globally”.
- - Helen Grace, Screening the Past, 18, 2005.
Therese Davis also contributes to online film journals. For a recent example of her film criticism see, ‘Working Together: Two Cultures, One Film, Many Canoes’ in Senses of Cinema.