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In Slobodan Milosevic's Serbia, Shakespeare's sonnets were a secret escape from reality for an undergraduate studying English and literature at The University of Belgrade.

The sonnets also gave the keen student, who is now Adjunct Professor Danijela Kambaskovic, a deep love for poetry and a bedrock of expertise from which to mine her own future ideas.

Adjunct Professor Kambaskovic, one of only two early career academics to be invited to become Associate Investigator with the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions 1100-1800, is also an award-winning poet.

After her poems were accepted for the ACT's 2008 and 2009 Poetry in ACTion projects displaying local poetry in the public transport, she had the disconcerting experience of occasionally sitting under her own verses on a Canberra bus.

She is the only poet who migrated to Australia as an adult to be represented in the new anthology of Australian poetry, Thirty Australian Poets (ed. Felicity Plunkett, University of Queensland Press, 2011). Internal Monologues, her third collection of poetry, but the first one written in English and published in Australia, has just come out (Fremantle Press, 2013).

Now, Adjunct Professor Kambaskovic's creative talents have taken a new turn.

Just as her own poetry grew from an appreciation of the sonnets Shakespeare may have penned for his ‘dark lady', her latest venture sprang from a feminist world view that has some of its origins in the Bard's secret mistress.

While Adjunct Professor Kambaskovic works on her dress styles she sometimes lets her mind wander to Shakespeare's ‘dark lady', the complex woman who inspired some of the most complex and thought-provoking love verses of all time.

While scholars do not know for sure who this intriguing woman was, Adjunct Professor Kambaskovic thinks that the theory proposing Aemilia Lanier, England's first feminist poet, has the advantage of being the most interesting.

This dark lady may be the subject of Adjunct Professor Kambaskovic's next foray, a novel set in Shakespeare's London. Perhaps, as UWA's own Renaissance woman fleshes out her protagonist, she may dress her too in striking, dark-hued styles.

Adjunct Professor Kambaskovic began combining research, poetry and design as a student, coming of age at the time of the war raging in the Former Yugoslavia, when luxuries were beyond her and most people's reach.

She quickly worked out that the only way to have a stylish prom dress was to invent it herself.

By Sally-Ann Jones