School of English, Communications and Performance Studies, Monash University

From Sappho to X | Andrew Benjamin Hegel's Other Woman: The Figure of Niobe in Hegel's Aesthetics | Andrew Benjamin

From Sappho to X | Robin Dixon Towards an Actorly Understanding of Plautine Comedy | Robin Dixon

From Sappho to X | Marguerite Johnson Saint Sappho | Marguerite Johnson

From Sappho to X | Ika Willis Loving Vergil: Writing, Reading, and History’s Queer Touch | Ika Willis

From Sappho to X | Leni Johnson An Isolation Embedded in Sexuality | Leni Johnson

From Sappho to X | Dr KO Chong-Gossard ‘Setting Sappho to Music: Philology and Text Setting’ | Dr KO Chong-Gossard

From Sappho to X | Sue Tweg ‘Giving Voice to Macaria’ | Sue Tweg

From Sappho to X | Simon Goldhill The Solitude of Sappho: a One-Woman Show | Simon Goldhill

From Sappho to X | Smiljana Glisovic Performing the Invisible | Smiljana Glisovic

From Sappho to X | Dr Giulia Torello Reconstructing Sappho for the Italian Stage | Dr Giulia Torello

From Sappho to X | Group Discussion Sappho Conference | Group Discussion

In this paper, Pierre Bismuth’s desire to disturb expected reactions to works of art – as witnessed in The Jungle Book Project (2002) – becomes a starting point through which to explore Walt Disney’s own approach to his art. With the opening of Disneyland in 1955, Disney transformed his animated worlds and characters into 3-dimensional spaces that individuals could walk into and interact with. In doing so, he created what he and many urban planners considered to be a utopian space. Disney’s obsession with urban planning would culminate in his later vision of a utopian community – Project X – which remained unrealised due to his death but which was revised into the theme park EPCOT (Experimental Prototype City of Tomorrow) and the town Celebration. This paper will explore Disney’s work and his filmic understanding of urban planning, which came to influence contemporary architects such as Jon Jerde and the design of cities including Las Vegas. Angela Ndalianis is Associate Professor in Cinema and Cultural Studies at the University of Melbourne. Her publications include Stars in Our Eyes: the Star Phenomenon in the Contemporary Era (2002), Neo-Baroque Aesthetics and Contemporary Entertainment (2004), Super/Heroes: from Hercules to Superman (2007) and The Comic Book Superhero (2009).

Under construction | William Rothman William Rothman  is Professor of Motion Pictures and Director of the Graduate Programs in Film Studies at the University of Miami. He was founding editor of Harvard University Press's "Harvard Film Studies" series, and is currently series editor of Cambridge University Press's "Studies in Film." His books include Hitchcock-The Murderous Gaze, The "I" of the Camera, Documentary Film Classics, Reading Cavell's The World Viewed: A Philosophical Perspective on Film, Cavell on Film, Jean Rouch: A Celebration of Life and Film and Three Documentary Filmmakers. He is currently working on a book tentatively titled "Emersonian Hollywood" as well as a new book on Hitchcock and a second edition of Hitchcock--The Murderous Gaze.

Writers and Their World Seminar Series | Adam Shoemaker From Constant Change to Change as a 'Constant': Metamorphosis and Alterity in Australian Writing Professor Adam Shoemaker’s sustained research interest is in Indigenous Australian history, literature, culture and politics, and he has been published extensively in these areas. His publications include Black words, White Page: Aboriginal Literature 1929-1988 (1992) and Aboriginal Australians: First Nations of an Ancient Continent (2004) and A Sea Change: Australian Writing and Photography (1998). Professor Shoemaker is the Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Education) at Monash University.

No More "How Green Was My Valley": The Past, Present and Future of the Australian University | Peter Murphy The idea of social and geographical mobility driven by education, culminating in the going to university, proved one of the most powerful post-second world war ideologies. In Australia, with 35% of 19-year olds now attending tertiary institutions, near-universal access to higher education has prevailed. The underlying assumption is that education-fuelled social and geographic mobility is ennobling, not only because it emancipates human beings from a life of labor, but it also enriches the mind. But does it? Students often acquire terrific professional knowledge in contemporary universities, yet universities also bore the brightest of students. While universities have become agencies of social and spatial mobility, their ability to satisfy the most inquiring minds has diminished. The paper discusses how successful social engineering has progressively decimated the media and ecology of imagination in the traditional universities. The consequence is that the kinds of eccentric, wide-ranging, free-wheeling, difficult, and demanding intellectual modes, milieu and media necessary for the brightest of the bright from all backgrounds to flourish have been shut down. Those often astringent intellectual media have been replaced with the deathly dull and exquisitely pedestrian media of the textbook, the unread weekly reading, and the megaphone lecture course. The latter deliver on fiercely audited political goals to increase social mobility and status climbing through participation in higher education but they also marginalize and trivialize high-level intellectual formation and bore senseless the most intellectually gifted.  In the end a paradox is created. Everyone wants to have the glittering prize, but to achieve that goal the glittering prize has to be destroyed. The paper suggests a number of very practical ways in which the nation and its universities can reverse this situation. The intent of such policy is to resist the tyranny of tedium that has been unleashed on the exceptionally gifted, to find ways of re-birthing the media of the imagination at the heart of the university, and to restore, within the larger context of mass higher education, a congenial place for the most adventurous minds. Rather than participation and mobility, which have become tiresome clichés rolled out by glib politically ambitious social climbers, or worse, meritocratic dystopias promoted by over-professionalized ghouls, there is a need today to think about the destination of small numbers of very bright students, many of whom will fail exams, drop out, write papers that are out of their depth, but for whom excite ment and audacity matters, and who we know (from the evidence of very good studies) in the end will form that very tiny but very essential cohort who are highly creative and who deliver virtually all of the lasting achievements across the arts and sciences, in business and the professions.