Dr Michelle Smith is an ARC Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Melbourne. She researches girls' literature and culture, with a special interest in British and Australian fiction of the late nineteenth century. Her first book Empire in British Girls' Literature and Culture: Imperial Girls, 1880-1915 was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2011. Michelle has published articles in English Literature in Transition, The Lion and the Unicorn, Victorian Periodicals Review, Continuum and Limina. She has also written scholarly essays for anthologies on subjects relating to gender and empire, including Girl Crusoes, girls' school stories, the 'Australian Girl' in colonial domestic fiction, and British representations of colonial Australian girls. Beyond girlhood, she has published on race in HBO's True Blood, national identity in The Victorian School Paper, gender, race and modernity in early New Zealand film, and boyhood in Tarzan of the Apes.
She has written for a general audience on a variety of subjects relating to gender, childhood and literature in the Age newspaper, The Conversation and On Line Opinion.
Contact: msmith[at]unimelb.edu.au
