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A/Prof Vicki Kirby

BA, Dip Ed, MA Hons Prelim (University of Sydney); PhD (University of California Santa Cruz)
Associate Professor
School of Social Sciences and International Studies
Associate Professor
School of Social Sciences and International Studies

Contact:

Teaching

UNDERGRADUATE TEACHING: current classes - "Society and Desire" and "Forensic Sociology." 



HONOURS STUDENTS: 17 Honours students supervised in the last 10 years: 14 received Hons Class 1, 6 received the Sol Encel Prize, 9 received competitive Graduate Awards, 4 received the University Medal. I currently supervise 3 Honours students.

GRADUATE STUDENTS: topics include – system theories and bio-informatics; re-reading the interface between the biological and social through the immunological body; the politics of entanglement: feminism, post-structural theory, political theory; poststructural approaches to the question of spirit; investigating embodiment: feminisms/queer theory, biological discourses; embodied subjectivities and negotiations of purity.

I currently supervise 6 PhD students, all with Postgraduate Awards.



POSTGRADUATE COMPLETIONS - 1999-2008

*Belinda Clayton Australian Postgraduate Award - “Truth, Meaning and Representation: Questioning Modes of Analysis in Interpretations of Women’s Alcohol Use” Awarded PhD March, 2008


*Peta Hinton “To see the world in a grain of sand…Thinking Universality and Specificity for a Feminist Politics of Difference” Awarded PhD December, 2007


*Olivia Harvey Australian Postgraduate Award - “Posthumanism and the Question of Technology” Awarded PhD April, 2005


*Melinda Rackham Vice-Chancellor's Fellowship “Empyrean: Soft Skinned Space” (corporeality and embodiment) (Joint Supervision with COFA) Awarded PhD October, 2004 


*Anna Bennett Australian Postgraduate Award - “Re-Cognising Power: A Discourse Analysis of Power Relations” Awarded PhD May, 2001


*Kathryn Owler Australian Postgraduate Award - “Well Being Through Movement: Exploring the PhD Degree” Awarded PhD October, 1999

Research Areas

Interests: Poststructuralism, feminist theory, post-humanism, technology and science studies. 



Recent Profile: Chief Investigator of an ARC Discovery Project Grant, “The Life of Language and the Language of Life” (2006-2009) $120,000; Conference Convenor - “The Two Cultures: Reconsidering the Division Between the Sciences and the Humanities” (July 2005), papers appeared in a Guest Edited Special Issue of Australian Feminist Studies in 2008; Visiting Professor in Theory/Praxis - India Centre for Contemporary Theory National Summer School, Berhampur University June 2007.

I am a Founding Member of the Advisory Board Digital Semiotics Encyclopedia and a Member of the Editorial Board, Australian Feminist Studies.

Publications

Recent Publications

BOOKS
Quantum Anthropologies: life at large forthcoming Duke University Press.
(2006) Judith Butler: Live Theory Continuum: London and New York, pp. x, 182.
(1997) Telling Flesh: the substance of the corporeal New York: Routledge, pp. x, 198.

JOURNAL EDITOR
Special Issue on Feminism and Science. Australian Feminist Studies, Vol. 23, No. 55, March 2008.

REFEREED JOURNAL ARTICLES
“Tracing Life: La Vie La Mort” CR: The New Centennial Review (Michigan State University Press) forthcoming.

(March 2008) “Subject to Natural Law: a Meditation on the ‘Two Cultures’ problem” Australian Feminist Studies, Vol. 23, No. 55, pp. 5-17

(Summer 2005) “Ethical Revisions of the Flesh: Irigaray with Merleau-Ponty” Journal of Contemporary Thought No. 20, pp. 7-23. (Forum on Contemporary Theory, Baroda, in collaboration with Louisiana State University and Central Washington College)

(2005) “Just Figures?: Forensic Clairvoyance, Mathematics and the Language Question” SubStance: a review of theory and literary criticism #107, Vol. 35, No. 2, pp. 1-24. (University of Wisconsin)

(Fall, 2003 – published 2004) “Enumerating Language: ‘the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics’” Configurations: Journal of Literature, Science and Technology, Vol. 12, No. 3, pp. 417-439. (Johns Hopkins University Press)

BOOK CHAPTERS
(2008) “(Con)founding ‘the Human’: Incestuous Beginnings” in Noreen Giffney and Myra J. Hird (eds.), Queering the Non/Human Aldershot, Ashgate Press (Queer Interventions Series), pp. 35-54.

(2008) “Natural Convers(at)ions: or, what if Culture was really Nature all along?” in Susan J. Hekman and Stacy Alaimo (eds.), Material Feminisms, Bloomington & Indianapolis, Indiana University Press, pp. 214-236.

(2006) “Culpability and the Double-Cross: Irigaray with Merleau-Ponty” in D. Olkowski and G Weiss (eds.), Feminist Interpretations of Maurice Merleau-Ponty University Park Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania State University Press, pp. 127-145.

(2005) “Out of Africa: ‘Our Bodies Ourselves?’” in O. Nnaemeka (ed), Female Circumcision and the Politics of Knowledge: African Women in Imperialist Discourses, Westport and London: Praeger, pp. 81-96.

(2005) “When All That Is Solid Melts Into Language: Judith Butler and the Question of Matter,” in M. Soenser Breen and W. S. Blumenfield (eds.), Judith Butler: Ten Years After Gender Trouble Hampshire, Ashgate, pp. 41-56; reprinted in International Journal of Sexuality and Gender Studies, Vol. 7, No. 4, October 2002, pp. 265-280 (Kluwer).

(2005) M. Soenser Breen, J. Blumenfeld, S. Baer, A. Brookey, L. Hall, V. Kirby, D. H. Miller, R. Shail, N. Wilson, “ ‘There Is A Person Here’: An Interview with Judith Butler” in M. Soenser Breen and W. S. Blumenfield (eds.), Judith Butler: Ten Years After Gender Trouble Hampshire, Ashgate, pp. 9-25; reprinted in International Journal of Sexuality and Gender Studies, Vol. 6, Numbers 1 & 2, April 2001, pp. 7-23 (Kluwer).

(2001) “Theory Incorporated” in V. Demos and M. Texler Segal (eds.), The International Feminist Challenge to Theory JAI: Elsevier Science Press, pp. 25-39.

(2001) “Quantum Anthropologies” in L. Simmons and H. Worth (eds.), Derrida Downunder Palmerston North: Dunmore Press, pp. 53-68.

NON-REFEREED REVIEWS
(September 1, 2006) E-Journal Review – “Dominique Janicaud, On the Human Condition, Routledge: 2005,” Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 4 pages.

(March, 2004) “Humanism, Posthumanism and the Sociological Enterprise: Revisiting Cultural Constructionism” Nexus: Newsletter of the Australian Sociological Association, p. 8.

Interests

The motivating question behind the above research is the puzzle of the nature/culture, body/mind, matter/form, body/technology division - because so many political and ethical decisions are configured around this opposition. I am also interested in "the language question" - what is language, and how does the way we answer that question define the human and inaugurate the political?

Other

PRESENTATIONS (Last 5 years)

2008:
July 10-12, Panelist and Panel Convenor, “Speaking of Nature” Derrida Today Conference, Macquarie University Sydney

June 30-July 6, Invited Session, “Force Vitale: Derrida and Life’ International Association for Philosophy and Literature, RMIT Melbourne.

June 3-7, Panelist, “Reprising Cognition: the bio-graph as author and reader” European Conference of the Society for Literature, Science and the Arts (SLSA) Zentrum für Literatur – und Kulturforshung Berlin

April 4, Invited Speaker, “Judith Butler and the Impasse of Cultural Constructionism” Department of Political Science, University of Alberta, Canada

2007:
October 19, Invited speaker, “Feminism and the Biological Body” Double Visions: A 21st century exploration of art, feminism and the body Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney

June 22, Plenary Speaker, “When Scientific Objects Turn into Language” Centre for Contemporary Theory National Summer School in Theory/Praxis, in collaboration with Department of History, Berhampur University, Orissa, India

March 14, Invited Speaker, “Judith Butler and the Impasse of Cultural Constructionism” Australian Research Centre in Sex, Health and Society Faculty of Health Sciences, La Trobe University

2006:
November 21, Invited Speaker and Theory Workshop Leader, Department of East Asian Studies, McGill University, Montréal

November 11, Panelist, “The Life of Language as the Language of Life,” the 20th Annual Meeting of the Society for Literature, Science and the Arts Conference, New York, NY

2005:
October 24-27, 2005: Invited Plenary Speaker: “Natural Convers(at)ions: or, what if Culture was really Nature all along?” - The Body and the Limits of Corporeal Figuration, Tenth Annual National Workshop, Centre for Contemporary Theory, Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, Gujarat India

July 22, 2005: Conference Organiser and Speaker: “Natural Convers(at)ions: or, what if Culture was really Nature all along?” The Two Cultures: reconsidering the Division between the Sciences and the Humanities’ The University of New South Wales

2004:
December 3, 2004: Presentation, Bruno Latour’s recent work Bruno Latour Reading Group, University of Technology, Sydney

October 15, 2004: Panelist, “Distributing Agency” Society for Literature and Science Annual Conference, Raleigh, Durham NC

School or Unit Information
Phone: + 61 2 9385 1807; + 61 2 9385 2292
School of Social Sciences and International Studies
Office: G47 – Morven Brown
Email: ssis@unsw.edu.au
Webpage: http://ssis.arts.unsw.edu.au
 

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