Student Profiles
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Current Honours Student
Owen Baxendale
"That's the thing about studying Theatre and English. I can't operate as a passive spectator; now I want to create, question and change."
"I always wanted to incorporate my love of the written word and performance into whatever direction I pursued academically. My BA has allowed me to do exactly that.
"The Theatre programme at Victoria is excellent. A standout is the calibre of the programme's lecturers; their passion for the subject and ability to engage completely with students has enhanced my learning experience immeasurably. Combined with the comprehensive knowledge of historical and contemporary literature that I have obtained through the English Literature programme, I have acquired invaluable tools for the ways in which I question, analyse and engage with the world around me.
"I have been able to make my passions my vocation, and I am committed to the creation of exciting and challenging theatre and writing. I look forward to furthering my learning in both of these exciting and vibrant areas of study, and to storming their respective fields armed with the cruise missile of knowledge I have gained through them."
Current MA Students
English
Alasdair Sinclair
"Detective as Author in the works of Dashiell Hammett"
Anna Potts
"Blindness and Other Worlds"
Ashleigh Barrett
"Civic Values and the Postmodern World—Investigating the Poetry of Robert Hass and Charles Simic"
Courtney Wilson
"That's My Stuff"
Eleanor Toland
"Visions of the Horned God"
Emily White
"Post-National Ironies"
Iain Strathern
"Tala, Talavai, Talagāgafa: Stories, Medicine, and Chanting Genealogies"
Margie Michael
"J C Sturm—Before the Silence"
Patrick Biggs
"Rhetoric and Misery in Coleridge's 'Conversation' Poems"
Penny Griffith
"Baxter and Pacifism"
Philippa Nichol Antipas
"Shakespeare's Fairy-Tale Motifs"
Thomas Lissington
"Milton's Masculinities: The Nature of the Angels in Paradise Lost"
NZ Literature
Meghan Hughes
"Books as Social Currency? The Library of Robert Coupland Harding"
Sue Armour
"Violence in Maurice Gee's Fiction for Children"
Film
Kelly Burt
"Emotion and Affect in Cinema: Synthesising Cognitivism and Phenomenology"
Mark Ellsworth
"The 'Asianisation' of Hollywood: The Influence of Cross-over Sinitic Language Martial Arts Films"
Russ Kale
"Zion Rebuilt: Recursion and Intertextuality in the Matrix Franchise"
Theatre
Catherine Swallow
"Faces of the Capitves"; an examination of aesthetic distance in two new children's theatre productions.
Gregor Cameron
"The Role of Misrule; the Performative Text within the Mediated Space of the Theatre"; I am interested in how collaboration in the Theatre invites an element of misrule into the process between written and performed text. I am using Bahktin's work around Carnival to frame this element. I will seek to observe this element in the preparation of a production of Saint Punch.
Rachel Lenart
"Compliance and Defiance in New Zealand Theatre: The Muldoon Years"
Media Studies
Abi (Lydia) Beatson
"New Media, Information Sharing and Crisis Mapping: an Analysis of New Media Based Information Sharing Practices during the Christchurch"
Adnan Khan
"Layered Flow: Transnational Adaptations of High-end Television Drama"
Elyse Robêrt
"News, Satire and TV3's '7 Days'"
Kim Wheately
"Virtual Cities, or the City as Virtual Space? Problematising the 'Augmented City'"
Maria Hellstrom
"Ravelry.com: A Case Study of Cultural Production within a Gendered Social Network"
Nic Anderson
"Google, Governmentality, and the Logic of Social Networks"
Tom Jamieson
"Comparing News Coverage of the Build-up to the Iraq War"
Victoria Skye
"The Body, Identily and Death in Contemporary Post-Christian Society"
Current PhD Students
English
Anne-Maree Mills
To Live Among Words: Monte Holcroft and The Listener
Caoilinn Hughes
A Study of New Zealand Young Adult Fiction
Eden Lackner
"Queer and Fantastic; Fantastically Queer: Edward Gorey and the Dissolution of the Mundane"
Greg Martin
"The Mythology of the Gap in the Poetry of James K Baxter"
Hamish Clayton
"New Zealand's Lost and Found Literature"
Jafar Mirzaee Porkoli
"'We Need to Interpret Interpretations': Reading Milton 'with' Derrida and Thinking Behind Logo-centrism and Deconstruction"
Kay (Avril) Hancock
"Along Came Greedy Cat"
Lilja Sautter
"The Construction of Identity in the Imperial Diaspora"
Lindsay Morton
"Negotiating Nonfiction: Writing Practices in Investigative Journalism"
(Maria) Lujan Herrera
"Re-visiting the Victorian: A Significant Trend in Contemporary Young Adult Fiction"
Mehdy Sedaghat Payam
"False Promises or Unrealised Dreams: A Study of Hypertext Fiction Twenty Years After Its Birth"
Ronan Ryan
"Cope V Marsh"
Saskia Voorendt
"The Imagination of George MacDonald"
Film
Simin Littschwager
"Cinematic Experience Beyond Narration in Contemporary Puzzle Films"
Theatre
Annie Ruth
"Unlocking the Present: In pursuit of the structured, 'live' theatrical moment", exploring performatively the intersection between what is fixed and what is free in theatre performance, proposing that it is possible to hold simultaneously an artistic structure and something truly unknown.
Kemuel DeMoville
"Traditional Performance Practices Found Within Contemporary Pacific Syncretic Theatre"
Michele Fontana
"Moving Science"
Rachel Somerfield
"Moving Minds: The Social Neuroscience of Performance"
Sally Richards
"Directing: A Mirror to Solo Performance - Provocation, Collaboration and Proxy Audience"
Media Studies
Chris Cherry
"The Cultures of Football Spectatorship"
Jean-Philippe Loret
"Media in Marginalised Urban Spaces in France and New Zealand"
Michael Schraa
"Self-help in the Nineties: Aesthetics and Methodologies"
Natalia Ferrer Roca
"Feature Film Production in NZ: Discourse, Policy and Industry"
Former Students
Kania Sugandi
BA, BA(Hons)
"I love travelling and I'm fascinated by theories of identity and subjectivity. My MA lets me combine the two."
Kania is completing a Master of Arts in Media Studies, where her research has allowed her to combine her passion for travel and her academic interest in the role of the media in constructing and representing identities.
Kania's thesis examines the fairly uncharted academic territory of television travel programmes. Drawing on the dichotomy between travel and tourism, she is focusing particularly on the notion of authenticity, something which seems to be prevalent in any discussion on the subject. As opposed to trying to deliberate what is or what isn't authentic, she contends that different television travel genres articulate and reproduce different discourses of authenticity, each of them consistent with the genre to which they belong.
Having grown up in Indonesia before moving to New Zealand, Kania says that her research interests stem from her exposure to a diverse range of cultures. She is planning to travel further after the completion of her thesis.
Sun-Ha Hong
BA, BA(Hons)
After completing MDIA Honours at Victoria I thought about trying to jump straight to a PhD at Victoria or to go overseas. I was successful in getting offers of study at NYU and the New School's MA programmes, but found that financial support is very scarce for international Master's students. I decided to complete a MA at Victoria before applying again. In doing so I could take advantage of the rolling admissions and the level of freedom it offered - during the 12 months it took to complete the thesis I was also able to work in news analysis and as a Media tutor. Following the completion of the thesis I attended several conferences in Australasia to present my work, and also submitted it in article form for publication.
This meant that when I was applying for PhD, I could present an application which included a Master's degree as well as the beginnings of 'professional' academic activity. I also received a lot of advice from staff members like Tony Schirato and Trisha Dunleavy on various prospects and the application process. After several months I've was offered a place in the University of Pennsylvania, University of Warwick, Goldsmiths University of London, London School of Economics, University of Sussex and University of Westminster, all with varying degrees of funding offered.
I've accepted the offer, with full funding, at the Annenberg School, UPenn - who also paid for me to visit them in their open day. It was extremely difficult to choose between them and Warwick, also full funding. The deciding factors were its reputation (locally and globally), resources, and the variety of learning (courses, etc) - if I can use those things intelligently while I am there I expect that I'll make some valuable inroads into global/comparative research and knowledge, better networking, career paths into government/industry/NGOs as well as academia, and so on. While I was there UPenn's more qualitative scholars assured me that cultural studies, etc was not marginalised - I'm still a bit skeptical of that, but as long as they let me bring in the kind of scholarly background I developed here, well, that's also an opportunity to see if that can't flourish a little bit more there.
Alex Johnson
"Control of the Mind in and by Literature"
Alexandra Paterson
"John Keats as a Reader"
Allison Maplesden
"Toxic Celebrity"
Andy Armitage
"The Birthday Letter Myth"
Anna Currie
"The Hills: A US Docusoap", analysing the mix of factual material and fictional narrative techniques on MTV's docusoap The Hills.
Anne Brown
"The Works of Charlotte Evans (1842–1882): Introduction and Biography", New Zealand's 'First Romantic Novelist.
Bert van Dijk
"Towards a New Pacific Theatre", developing a model of actor training and performance practice that is strongly connected to the unique geographic, cultural and spiritual qualities of New Zealand.
Brady Hammond
"Justifying Violence: Exploring Representations of the Negative Peace in Blockbuster US Cinema from 1996 to 2006"
Brett Davidson
"The Edifice in Science Fiction"
Catherine Proffitt
"Margaret Mahy and the Golden Age of Children's Literature"
Daniel Herman
"Zen and the White Whale: Herman Melville's Leap into the Unknown"
Erin Mercer
"Absence and the Uncanny in Post World War Two American Literature"
Erin Scudder
"Representations of Rape in the Fiction of J M Coetzee"
Frances Cook
"Governance in Contemporary TV"
Frank Hawcroft
"Olivia Manning's and Evelyn Waugh's Second World War Novels"
Hannah Parry
"Classical Epic and the Works of JRR Tolkien"
Horst Sarubin
"Film on a Song"
Isabel Ross
"Literary influences on Scott Westeryeld's Uglies series and Phillip Pulman's His Dark Materials trilogy"
Ivy McDaniels
"Idealist of Material Things or Materialist of Ideal Things? Reading Katherine Mansfield through her Stuff"
Kania Sugandi
"From Tourist to Traveller: Discourses of Authenticity and Self Transformation in Television Tourism Genres"
Kendra Marston
"Depictions of the Female Adolescent in the Contemporary Teen Cinderella Film"
Lori Leigh
"The Dramaturgy of Female Gender in Early Modern English Theatre: An investigation of the theatrical expression of gender in selected Jacobean plays, their Restoration/early eighteenth-century adaptations and both original and contemporary staging"
Meg Waghorn
"Writing Whiteness in Three Contemporary Australian Historical Novels"
Michael Pohl
"Classical Allusions in the Novels of Margaret Mahy"
Patrick Coelho
"Exploring the Lyric-Dramatic Dynamic in the Work of T S Eliot"
Rebecca Gordon
"Landscape in Settler Fiction across the Victorian Empire"
Rose Sneyd
"Elizabeth Barrett Browning: the Progress of a Shocking Poet"
Sam Waldron
"Narrative Levels in David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas and Mark Z Danielewski's House of Leaves"
Sarah Richardson
"Narrative Structure and Autobiography in Maus and Fun Home"
Sophie Johnson
"From Family Albums to Global Search Engines: Translating Family Photography for the Digital Age"
Stephen Wenley
"Social Satire in the Work of Bret Easton Ellis and Chuck Palahniuk"
Sun Ha Hong
"A Spectacle of Signs: Media Production of Korean Nationality through the 2002 World Cup", examines the South Korean media coverage of the 2002 World Cup for the ways in which the idea of 'Korea' and 'Korean-ness' is deliberately produced for domestic and international consumption.
Susan Wild
"Writing New Zealand: Pakeha Constructions of National Identity in New Zealand anthologies of Verse and Short Fiction (1906–2006)"
Thomas Bogle Petterson
"Savagery and Infantilism in the Work of Robert Louis Stevenson"
Timothy Jones
"The Canniness of the Gothic: Genre and Practice"
Tonya Cooper
"Alt. Country, Authenticity in the New Zealand Audience"
Will Carter
"The American Road Movie of the 1960s and 1970s—Some Forms and Contexts"