A/Prof Vicki Kirby

Research Summary

Areas: 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.

UNSW Research Profile

Teaching

Undergraduate Teaching: current classes - "Society and Desire" and "Forensic Sociology." 



Honours Students: 18 Honours students supervised in the last 10 years: 15 received Hons Class 1, 7 received the Sol Encel Prize, 10 received competitive Graduate Awards, 5 received the University Medal.

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

Current Postgraduate Research Supervision
* Corporeality, phenomenology, sociology of time
*Rethinking Narrative: The Politics of Critique
*Perceptual Plasticity: Ecology and the Social Brain
*An investigation of allergy which examines the interface between the biological and social, through the rereading of the immunological body
* Working through major thesis revisions with her
*Proper Young Bodies

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
“Original Science: Nature Deconstructing Itself” Derrida Today (Edinburgh University Press) forthcoming.

(Spring 2009) “Tracing Life: La Vie La Mort” CR: The New Centennial Review, Vol. 9, No. 1, pp. 107-126. (Michigan State University Press)

(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
“Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble” in Diana Newall and Grant Poke (eds.) Fifty Key Texts in Art History Routledge forthcoming

“Deconstruction” in The Routledge Companion to Literature and Science in Manuela Rossini and Bruno Clarke (eds.), New York, Routledge, forthcoming.

(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).

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.

Affiliations and Memberships

FASS Research Committee, FASS Promotions Committee (ASPRO)

Other Information

PRESENTATIONS (Last 5 years)
2009:
November 10, Invited Speaker, “Language, models, mediation – ‘the two cultures’ revisited.” Science & Justice Working Group, University of California Santa Cruz

November 12, Invited Speaker, “The Impasse of Cultural Constructionism: or, what if Culture was really Nature all along?” Sponsored by Feminist Studies, Center for Cultural Studies, History of Consciousness Department, Philosophy Department, and Science and Justice Working Group, University of California at Santa Cruz


October 20, Invited Speaker, “The Impasse of Cultural Constructionism: or, what if Culture was really Nature all along?” Feminist Theory Network, Manchester University

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

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: 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

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?