Dr Belinda Morrissey
Lecturer, Communications and Writing
| Phone: | +61 3 990 26301 or +61 3 512 26301 | |
| Fax: | +61 3 990 26359 or +61 3 512 26359 | |
| Office: | 1E 227, Gippsland Campus | |
| Email: | belinda.morrissey@monash.edu |
Biography
Belinda Morrissey has been researching in the areas of critical legal studies, cultural studies, media studies and fictocriticism for the last 20 years.
She is the author of ‘When Women Kill: Questions of Agency and Subjectivity”, and many journal articles and book chapters. Prior to coming to Monash, Dr Morrissey worked as a senior lecturer at the University of Canberra, and also as a researcher at both the University of Queensland and Queensland University of Technology.
Research interests
- critical legal studies, especially studies of killers
- disappearance and trauma
- memory and trauma
- cinema and memory
- cultural studies analyses of film and pop culture
- fictocriticism
- celebrity studies
- autoethnographic analysis
Current research project
Dr Morrissey is currently completing a project on the sociohistorical impact of the disappearance of a young girl on her small community. This project crosses the fields of :
- sociology, memory and trauma studies
- community understandings of ‘history’
- critical legal studies
- and fictocriticism.
It is being written as an autoethnography, but also uses the fractured voices of the townspeople to speak verbatim and, at times, without analysis, in order to attempt communication of the trauma this event caused and is still causing.
Recent publications
- Morrissey, B. (2012) ‘The Geography of Everyday Terror: Childhood Trauma, Faulty Memory and the House I Grew Up In’ in Geography and Memory, Owain Jones (ed) London: Palgrave Macmillan (forthcoming)
- Morrissey, B. (2012) ‘Impossible Memory: Traumatic Memories in Memento and Mulholland Drive’, in Millennial Cinema: Representations of Memory in Film, Terence McSweeney (ed) Oxford UK: Wallflower Press (forthcoming)
- Morrissey, B. (2011) 'Gone: The Disappearance of Marilyn Wallman' in The Reinvention of Everyday Life: Culture in the Twenty-first Century. (Chinese Edition) H. McNaughton and A. Lam (eds.) Christchurch: University of Canterbury Press, 247-257
- Morrissey, B. (2010) ‘Monstrous Semantics: The Case of the Criminal Diary’ Australian Feminist Studies 25:65, September, 295-311
- Morrissey, B. and K. Davis (2010) ‘Fear and Horror in a Small Town: The Legacy of the Disappearance of Marilyn Wallman’ in Fear Itself: Reasoning the Unreasonable, Stephen Hessel and Michéle Huppert (eds) Probing the Boundaries series, Amsterdam: Rodopi 175-188.
- Morrissey, B. (2008) ‘Killing ‘Just for Fun’: Amoral Monsters” Monsters and the Monstrous: Myths and Metaphors of Enduring Evil Proceedings, At The Interface series, Vol. 54, Oxford: Inter-Disciplinary Press, e-book: http://www.interdisciplinary.net/publishing/idp/eBooks/miohindex.html
Teaching
Dr Morrissey has been teaching media and communication studies, and writing, for the last 20 years. She has taught in universities across Australia, including Murdoch University, Curtin University, University of Western Sydney, Charles Sturt University, University of Canberra, University of Queensland and Queensland University of Technology.
Expert media commentary
- media representation of crime
- legal representation of criminals
- history of media
- cultural representations of trauma and memory
- celebrity and crime
Postgraduate supervision
- The Rise of the Media Real: Representation, the Real and September 11, 2001
- (Un)Representing Queer
- The Third Closet: Domestic Violence and Lesbian Couples
- Quuer(y)ing the Sydney Star Observer: Queer Representation in ‘Queer’ Media
- Contemplating Mayhem: The Port Arthur Massacre and Australia’s Cultural Imaginings
- Lights, Camera, Black Sista Action: The Representation of Indigenous Women in Australian Film
- The Texture of the Narrative: Hybrid Texts and the Uncanny
- Lesbians and Families: Some Australian Stories
- Fanfic and Subjectivity: The Fans and the Fiction Surrounding Xena Warrior Princess