Dr Sally Newman
- Tel: +61 3 990 52350
- Fax: +61 3 990 52410
- Email: Sally.Newman@arts.monash.edu.au
- Room W11.49 11th Floor
- Building 11 (Menzies) Clayton Campus
Sally Newman is a recent graduate (PhD) of the Centre for Women's Studies & Gender Research and currently holds a Post Doctoral Assistantship in Teaching and Curriculum Development with the Centre.
Research
I am currently expanding on my doctoral research which focused on the textual traces of female same-sex desire and the historiographical and hermeneutic complexities of archival research for the lesbian historian. I am particularly interested in what Dominick LaCapra has termed the 'transferential relation' that exists between the historian and those objects of the past that she choses to love or become possessed by, and the ways in which these often-unconscious investments in particular ways of seeing profoundly shape one's research and writing.
I am also co-authoring The Intimate Archive: Journeys Through Private Papers, (with Maryanne Dever and Ann Vickery) which is being published by the National Library of Australia. This book teases out the issues involved in archival research into the more intimate aspects women writers' lives: love, romance and sexuality. My contribution focuses on Aileen Palmer (the eldest daughter of literary couple Vance and Nettie Palmer) who left behind a fascinating archive, albeit one fractured by traumatic experience of war and psychiatric institutionalisation. The volume is scheduled for publication in 2008.