Overview
Background
I am Lecturer in American Studies in the School of Communication and Arts, specializing in literature and modernist studies. I am author of The Regional Development of the American Bildungsroman, 1900–1960 (Edinburgh UP 2023), and co-editor of the modernist studies journal Affirmations: of the Modern (Open Humanities Press), which is the organ journal of the Australasian Modernist Studies Network. My research has appeared in PMLA (Cambridge UP), American Literature (Duke UP), Modernism/Modernity (Johns Hopkins UP), The Mississippi Quarterly (Johns Hopkins UP), and Australian Feminist Studies (Routledge). I've also contributed to various published and forthcoming collections, including The Oxford Handbook of African American Women's Writing (Oxford UP, forthcoming),The Edinburgh Companion to Literature and Sound Studies (Edinburgh UP 2024); The Routledge Companion to Literature of the U.S. South (Routledge 2022); and recent collections on American authors including E. L. Doctorow and Carson McCullers. I am also co-editor of Revisiting the Poetics and Politics of Modernism: The Women of 1922 (Palgrave 2025), a collection that revisits perennial debates over modernism's geographies and temporalities by retracing the politics and poetics of women's literature across a range of global contexts in 1922: the annus mirabilis of modernism.
I have taught at the University of Adelaide, the University of New South Wales, Flinders University, and the Australian Catholic University. I received my doctorate in English Literature from UNSW, after completing my undergraduate degree there with First Class Honours; I also have a Masters of Teaching, specialising in teaching English.
I am currently writing two monographs: the first, Writing the Collar-Line, traces the literary history of the racial imaginary, white-collar labor, and the Black typewriter, a literary figure that was brought into representation to unsettle the processes whereby racist and heterosexist criteria regarding who could perform different classes of labor were reified anew not only through the bureaucratization of white-collar office work, c. 1886–1940, but also via cultural depictions of those processes. The second considers how U.S. writers and composers wrote about Black classical musical activism in response to the instrumentalization of classical music as a monolithic racial signifier of whiteness in 19th/20thC U.S. cultural and political discourse.
My other current research projects examine the radical history of typewriters; investigate how technologies of musical reproduction (scores, radio, phonography) guided modernist literary innovation; and trace the poetics of silent resistance that arose in African American women’s protest poetry in the early 1920s. I am generally interested in the history, theory, and politics of modern literature, technology, and sound.
My previous research attended to studies of prose fiction, critical regionalism, and the politics of U.S. literary geography. My monograph, The Regional Development of the American Bildungsroman, is the first scholarly work to probe the relationship between the aesthetics of regional fragmentation and the genre of the novel of development. As the first book to extensively scope the development of the U.S. Bildungsroman, this book challenges and reorients current understandings of where the Bildungsroman fits into nineteenth and twentieth century American literary history and the New Modernist Studies, by engaging in analyses of novels in regional clusters, including the Northeast, the South, the Midwest, and the West, featuring extensive commentary on the novels of African American and Native American writers, such as Wallace Thurman, Jessie Redmon Fauset, Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, and John Joseph Mathews; as well as other American authors, including Theodore Dreiser, Upton Sinclair, James Farrell, Carson McCullers, Flannery O’Connor, F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, and Willa Cather. It historicizes how the American Bildungsroman developed during the period associated with modernism (c. 1900–1960), in ways that challenge the perception of American modernist innovation as antiregionalist, and regionalism as an antimodernist enterprise.
I welcome Honours and HDR proposals on any topics adjacent to modern literature, especially those that intersect with the fields of American and African American studies; modernist studies; musico-literary and sound studies; or critical race studies, postcolonialism, and cultural studies of the Black Atlantic and Global South.
Availability
- Dr Tamlyn Avery is:
- Available for supervision
Qualifications
- Bachelor (Honours) of Arts, University of New South Wales
- Doctor of Philosophy, University of New South Wales
- Masters (Coursework) of Teaching (Secondary), University of New South Wales
Research interests
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Literary Studies
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Novel Studies
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African American Literature
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Modernism
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American Literature
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Musico-Literary and Sound Studies
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American Studies
Works
Search Professor Tamlyn Avery’s works on UQ eSpace
Featured
2024
Journal Article
Playing amanuensis to inner urges: masculinity, authorial anxiety, and Wallace Thurman’s typewriter
Avery, Tamlyn (2024). Playing amanuensis to inner urges: masculinity, authorial anxiety, and Wallace Thurman’s typewriter. Modernism/Modernity, 31 (4).
Featured
2024
Journal Article
Passing as white collar: the black typewriter and the bureaucratization of the racial imaginary
Avery, Tamlyn (2024). Passing as white collar: the black typewriter and the bureaucratization of the racial imaginary. PMLA, 139 (1), 66-81. doi: 10.1632/s0030812923001177
Featured
2023
Book
The regional development of the American Bildungsroman, 1900–1960
Avery, Tamlyn (2023). The regional development of the American Bildungsroman, 1900–1960. Edinburgh, United Kingdom: Edinburgh University Press. doi: 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474489966.001.0001
Featured
2020
Journal Article
'Split by the Moonlight': Beethoven and the Racial Sublime in African American Literature
Avery, Tamlyn (2020). 'Split by the Moonlight': Beethoven and the Racial Sublime in African American Literature. American Literature, 92 (4), 623-652. doi: 10.1215/00029831-8780863
2024
Conference Publication
Season of Rebellion: The American Bildungsroman in the Long 1950s
Avery, Tamlyn (2024). Season of Rebellion: The American Bildungsroman in the Long 1950s. Coming of Age in the Long 1950's America: Literature, Culture, and Film, Lund, Sweden, 19 June 2024.
2024
Book Chapter
Notes to literature: scores as musical reproduction in the literary text
Avery, Tamlyn (2024). Notes to literature: scores as musical reproduction in the literary text. The Edinburgh companion to literature and sound studies. (pp. 81-98) edited by Helen Groth and Julian Murphet. Edinburgh, United Kingdom: Edinburgh University Press.
2023
Other Outputs
Lydia Davis’ amusing, insightful stories address the estrangements of everyday life – and resist the hollowing of language
Avery, Tamlyn (2023, 12 04). Lydia Davis’ amusing, insightful stories address the estrangements of everyday life – and resist the hollowing of language The Conversation
2023
Conference Publication
Jean Toomer and the racial politics of modernist difficulty
Avery, Tamlyn (2023). Jean Toomer and the racial politics of modernist difficulty. Difficult Conversations in Modernist Studies: A Series of Online Events Organised by Five International Associations of Modernists, Online, July 2023.
2023
Conference Publication
Pauline Hopkins and the racial imaginary of typewriter fiction
Avery, Tamlyn (2023). Pauline Hopkins and the racial imaginary of typewriter fiction. The American Literature Association Annual Convention, Boston, MA, United States, May 2023.
2023
Other Outputs
Jean Toomer’s Cane at 100: the ‘everlasting song’ that defined the Harlem Renaissance
Avery, Tamlyn (2023, 03 14). Jean Toomer’s Cane at 100: the ‘everlasting song’ that defined the Harlem Renaissance The Conversation
2022
Book Chapter
Classical Music
Avery, Tamlyn (2022). Classical Music. The Routledge Companion to Literature of the U.S. South. (pp. 157-161) edited by Katharine A. Burnett, Todd Hagstette and Monica Carol Miller. New York, NY United States: Routledge. doi: 10.4324/9781003009924-41
2022
Conference Publication
Eliot's typewriter and the bureaucratization of the social imaginary
Avery, Tamlyn (2022). Eliot's typewriter and the bureaucratization of the social imaginary. The Waste Land at 100, Adelaide, SA, Australia, April 29-30 2022.
2021
Journal Article
Fredric Jameson, Richard Wright, and the Black National Allegory
Avery, Tamlyn (2021). Fredric Jameson, Richard Wright, and the Black National Allegory. Affirmations: of the Modern, 7 (1).
2020
Book Chapter
Current of music in Carson McCullers
Avery, Tamlyn (2020). Current of music in Carson McCullers. Understanding the short fiction of Carson McCullers. (pp. 191-211) edited by Alison Bertolini and Casey Kayser. Macon, GA, United States: Mercer University Press.
2020
Book Chapter
Doctorow and the Halbbildungsroman
Avery, Tamlyn (2020). Doctorow and the Halbbildungsroman. E. L. Doctorow: a reconsideration. (pp. 33-52) edited by Michael Wutz and Julian Murphet. Edinburgh, Scotland: Edinburgh University Press.
2019
Conference Publication
Richard Wright, Fredric Jameson, and the Black National Allegory
Avery, Tamlyn (2019). Richard Wright, Fredric Jameson, and the Black National Allegory . Fredric Jameson's Allegory and Ideology: a Symposium, UNSW Sydney, 6 December 2019.
2019
Journal Article
Gretel Adorno, the Typewriter: Sacrificial Lambs and Critical Theory's 'Risk of Formulation'
Avery, Tamlyn (2019). Gretel Adorno, the Typewriter: Sacrificial Lambs and Critical Theory's 'Risk of Formulation'. Australian Feminist Studies, 34 (101), 309-324. doi: 10.1080/08164649.2019.1679020
2019
Journal Article
The Métis and the Multiple "Me" in Carson McCullers's The Member of the Wedding
Avery, Tamlyn (2019). The Métis and the Multiple "Me" in Carson McCullers's The Member of the Wedding. Mississippi Quarterly, 72 (1), 69-93. doi: 10.1353/mss.2019.0002
2018
Conference Publication
After Bildung: towards a theory of the Halbbildungsroman
Avery, Tamlyn (2018). After Bildung: towards a theory of the Halbbildungsroman. The Bildungsroman: form and transformations, Sydney, NSW, United States, 22-25 November 2018.
2017
Conference Publication
A Crude Awakening: Capital & the Bildungsromance of Women’s Labour in Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie
Avery, Tamlyn (2017). A Crude Awakening: Capital & the Bildungsromance of Women’s Labour in Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie. The Idea of Prose Style: A Symposium, UNSW and the University of Sydney, December 13–15 2017.
Supervision
Availability
- Dr Tamlyn Avery is:
- Available for supervision
Before you email them, read our advice on how to contact a supervisor.
Supervision history
Current supervision
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Master Philosophy
Vision of the artist: the poetry of Mark Strand
Associate Advisor
Other advisors: Professor Bronwyn Lea
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Master Philosophy
What we hear when we read: sound, ekphrasis and the novel
Associate Advisor
Other advisors: Associate Professor Helen Marshall
Media
Enquiries
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