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Dr Sharon Bickle

Dr Sharon Bickle

Sharon holds degrees from the University of Queensland (BA; MA) and Monash University (PhD); and diplomas from University of Queensland (Grad. DipEd) and University of Melbourne (PGDA). Before receiving her fellowship at the Centre for Women's Studies and Gender Research, Sharon was a regular sessional tutor and lecturer in the Centre, and at the University of Melbourne (English Department).

Research

Sharon's research focuses on feminist and queer literary studies with a particular concern for women's poetry; biography, autobiography and life-writing; the politics of the "gendered" archive; and scholarly editing. Central to this research are the pre-modern lesbian poets, "Michael Field."

"Michael Field" was the cross-gendered literary identity of Katharine Harris Bradley (1846–1914) and Edith Emma Cooper (1862–1913). Bradley and Cooper were aunt and niece, devoted lovers and the members of a prolific collaborative partnership.

Sharon's larger research project is Michael Field, Literary Cross-dressing, and the Production of Authorship. This project will use commodity theory as outlined by critics such as Regina Gagnier and Rita Felski to develop a theoretical model based on the concept of commodified authorship through which to examine bodies, images, and social and cultural forces. This model engages with the performative aspects in the self-production of "Michael Field's" authorial identity through their extensive life-writings, and extends this into an investigation of the circulation of gendered authorship and the textual body of the author within English literary culture.

Sharon is a founding member of the Michael Field Society, which seeks to promote the study of Field. She is currently preparing for online publication the inaugural issue of /The Michaelian /(forthcoming December 2008), a peer-reviewed scholarly journal dedicated not only to the study of Michael Field, but to their extended literary friends and associates such as Browning and Wilde; their feminist acquaintances such as Frances Power Cobbe and Josephine Butler; and late-Victorian culture and society. (See _Table of Contents)

Sharon's current research project, for which she holds an Australian Academy of the Humanities, Humanities Travelling Fellowship (2007) involves the production of a scholarly edition of the correspondence exchanged by "Michael Field" and Father John Gray, the beautiful youth supposedly courted by Oscar Wilde through the title character of The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891). This edition will make a significant contribution to understandings of pre-modern gay and lesbian sexuality; the links between homosexuality and the Catholic church in the late-nineteenth/early-twentieth century; life-writing and the production and rewriting of gendered identity.

Recently completed research projects include:

Publications

Book:

Chapters:

"Rethinking Michael Field: The Case for the Bodleian Letters,"; in Michael Field and their World, eds. Margaret Stetz and Cheryl Wilson.  London: Rivendale Press, 2007: pp. 39-48.
"A Woman of Women for "A Sonnet of Sonnets:" The Ideal Translator and Female Subjectivity in Christina Rossetti's Monna Innominata" in Tradition and the Poetics of Self in Nineteenth-Century Women's Poetry, ed. Barbara Garlick (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002): pp. 117-136.

Articles:

Selected Conference Papers:

Reviews and Other Publications:

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