About Me

Dr Michelle Smith is a Senior Lecturer in Literary Studies at Monash University, Australia. She researches nineteenth-century literature and culture, with a special interest in British and Australian girls' fiction and periodicals. Her current research project is on female beauty and consumer culture in Victorian magazines, advertising and fiction.

Michelle is the author of From Colonial to Modern: Transnational Girlhood in Canadian, Australian, and New Zealand Children’s Literature (1840-1940) (U of Toronto P, 2018, with Clare Bradford and Kristine Moruzi) and Empire in British Girls’ Literature and Culture: Imperial Girls, 1880–1915 (Palgrave, 2011, winner of the European Society for the Study of English award for best book by a junior scholar in 2012).  With Kristine Moruzi, she is the editor of Colonial Girlhood in Literature, Culture, and History, 1840–1950 (Palgrave, 2014), Girls’ School Stories, 1749–1929 (Routledge, 2013), and, more recently (also with Elizabeth Bullen), Affect, Emotion and Children’s Literature: Representation and Socialisation in Texts for Children and Young Adults (Routledge, 2017).

Michelle has published articles in Nineteenth-Century Contexts, Women's Writing, English Literature in Transition, Children's Literature in EducationThe Lion and the Unicorn, Victorian Periodicals Review, Continuum, Papers: Explorations into Children's Literature  and Limina. She has also written scholarly essays for numerous edited collections 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, television and literature in the Guardian, the AgeWashington Post, New Statesman, The Drum, MamaMia and sbs.com.au. She has also been interviewed regularly on radio (Radio National, ABC Melbourne and regional stations) and television (The Project, ABC News Breakfast, Hinch Live, 10 News).

This blog has been selected by the National Library of Australia for archiving in PANDORA.