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Professor Philip Mead who holds a nationally endowed Chair in Australian Literature at UWA has taken up a year-long appointment at Harvard University to promote Australian literature.

Professor Philip Mead has exchanged his office on UWA’s campus for the autumnal colours of Boston’s Harvard University.

The scholar/poet is sharing his love of our nation’s literature with scholars and students at the prestigious university in Boston, becoming the first UWA professor to take up the Gough Whitlam and Malcolm Fraser Visiting Professorship in Australian Studies. The chair, a gift from the Australian Government to mark the US’s bicentenary, has been held by distinguished scholars working in disciplines from anthropology, to history.

Beyond our shores, Australian literature is now regularly analysed and debated at conferences, seminars, and literary readings in Australian Studies Centres in China, Japan, London, Copenhagen and the US – and at the impressive Menzies Centre for Australian Studies at King’s College, London.

Professor Mead’s work at Harvard (for the 15/16 academic year) will focus on the two-way traffic of writers and the literary ties that bind Australia and the US. Leading authors like Peter Carey, Anna Funda and Geraldine Brooks are now based in US, while the work of Christina Stead, Frank Moorhouse and David Malouf illustrate the fact that Australian literature, as Professor Mead observes, “has always been connected to the wider world”.

When studying at the Australian National University in the 1970s – the decade that saw Patrick White win Australia’s first Nobel Prize for Literature – Philip Mead discovered there was no Australian Literature unit on offer.

“At that time universities across Australia were pretty much the preserve of rather conservative, UK-trained, Professors of English,” recalls the scholar/ poet who went on to work with colleagues to raise the profile of Australian literature, nationally and globally – and his quest was advanced by the significant numbers of Australian writers finding a following across the world.

WA authors are well represented in their ranks because, as Professor Mead observes, “Of all the states, Western Australia has the most highly developed sense of itself and its own regional literature”. UWA graduate Kim Scott (author of the acclaimed That Deadman Dance ) is one of several writers whose work has won awards and global recognition.

“Writers like Kim express the nature of The West in literary terms,” adds Professor Mead, “and UWA has an extraordinary record in nurturing creative writing talent, through its publication of Westerly and its Masters/PhD in Creative Writing courses. The success rate of our graduate writers has been spectacularly high.”

As Chair in Australian Literature at UWA, part of Professor Mead’s brief was to encourage the teaching of Australian literature in secondary schools. “Though it is there in the national curriculum, its teaching is not as strong as it should be, and it is being adopted at different rates and in different ways across Australia,” he says. Its inclusion in the WA curriculum means he and his UWA colleagues have been working to develop resources and knowledge for teachers.

Professor Mead has also completed a MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) for the Coursera platform. Entitled: Australian literature: a rough guide , it is the first MOOC in Australian literature. The UWA academic is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities and co-editor (with John Tranter) of The Penguin Book of Modern Australian Poetry . His Networked Language, Culture & History in Australian Poetry (2010) has made a substantial contribution to understanding the processes and achievements of poetry.