University of Adelaide, JM Coetzee Centre for Creative Practice

• subjects/ specialisms for shared teaching:

The J.M. Coetzee Centre for Creative Practice is a research centre and hub for the arts without borders. Cross-disciplinary in its outreach and project driven in its rationale, the centre investigates new syntheses across traditional borders as art forms evolve. Its main areas of research specialisation and collaboration include: Creative Writing, Literary Studies, Classical and New Music, Sound Production, Musicology, Media and Art History.

• Areas of research interest for collaboration and funding bid applications:

The J.M. Coetzee Centre for Creative Practice has three main research themes that it currently focuses on to explore the nexus between art forms and the critical challenges of our time. These include:

1. Precarity

Precarity is the lived experience of insecurity in an era of increasing environmental and economic challenges, marginalisation, mobility and social and psychological fragmentation. Intersecting with the Global Academy of Liberal Arts’ international theme of “Lost Waters”, a particular focus of this theme is creative responses to environmental disasters brought on by climate change.

2. Immersive Digital Curatorship

  New interactive digital technologies are transforming the way we interpret and engage with artworks, leading to a new critical focus on curatorship as a key concept in the humanities. Our researchers are exploring methodologies that are transforming the way we perform, archive and represent material objects in relation to changing historical narratives, social frameworks and technological potentialities.

3. Transnationalism

As cultures mix and merge in an increasingly globalised world, new transnational cultural formations emerge, along with artists and artworks, that articulate a transnational identity. The J.M. Coetzee Centre is exploring creative and critical responses to these new formations and their creative expression.   The centre is also broadly interested in projects or research around the creative process and the way art-forms, particularly music and literature, intersect and influence one another as they evolve.

• staff/ student mobility opportunities (i.e., summer school programmes)

The JMCCCP regularly hosts Visiting Professors. In 2015, A/Prof Kristina Iwata-Weickgenannt (Nagoya University) visited the centre and gave a seminar on artistic responses in Japan to the Fukushima disaster. In 2016, A/Prof Peter Arnds from Trinity College Dublin was a Visiting Professor at the centre and held a four-part masterclass on the role of the wolf metaphor in world literature. In 2017 Professor Alan Lelchuk (Dartmouth College) will be a Visiting Writer and will hold a masterclass in creative writing. Our masterclasses and seminars can be attended by students outside of the university (depending on numbers) and in June 2017 the centre will be organising a four day creative retreat to Oratunga, South Australia. For more information on visiting the centre please email: jennifer.rutherford@adelaide.edu.au or about attending our masterclasses and seminars rita.horanyi@adelaide.edu.au.

• Upcoming events/ lectures / festivals

Upcoming/in development JMCCCP events around the topic of precarity:  

• Oratunga Retreat: a four day retreat with spatial and cultural theorist Professor Paul Carter (RMIT) that will examine artistic response to precarity and the Australian landscape to be held at Oratunga station – June 2017

• H2O: Life and Death: a two day interdisciplinary conference examining our cultural assumptions and understandings around water – September 2017

  Upcoming events/projects around the topic of immersive digital curatorship:

• Traverses: J.M. Coetzee in the World mobile application. A project that curates rare archival material from the Harry Ransom Centre at the University of Texas Austin, based on an exhibition held at the Kerry Packer Public Gallery at The University of South Australia. The mobile app also includes interviews with world-leading Coetzee scholars, giving users a new way into Coetzee’s enigmatic and challenging oeuvre. Available 2017
• Macau Days: An exhibition of acclaimed artist John Young’s work and a sound installation based on the writing of multi award-winning writer Brian Castro responding to the rich transcultural history of Macau – October 2017

Upcoming/in development events around the idea of transculturalism:

• Macau Days: an exhibition about the rich transcultural history of Macau, the oldest European settlement in Asia, featuring the work of the JMCCCP’s Brian Castro and renowned Chinese-Australian artist John Young – October 2017

Other upcoming events

• A masterclass with novelist and post-colonial literary scholar Professor Elleke Boehmer (Oxford) on the often difficult relationship between writing and criticism – February 2017
• A masterclass and seminar with novelist Professor Alan Lelchuk (Dartmouth College) – April 2017
• A masterclass with Coetzee Centre Writer-in-Residence, Dr Carol Lefevre on creative writers and daydreaming – May 2017
• A session with international speakers as part of an interdisciplinary workshop on “Arts and the Imagination: The Role of Metaphors, Tropes and Images in Shaping Experience and Guiding Action” – July 2017
• A screening of the film Pride and Prejudice and Zombies at a Jane Austen fan-fiction event, which is part of a larger conference held in honour of the 200th anniversary of her death – July 2017

Our Calendar of Events for 2017 is in the process of being finalised. Please check our website or facebook page for more details or contact rita.horanyi@adelaide.edu.au

• Key contacts

Professor Jennifer Rutherford Director, J.M. Coetzee Centre for Creative Practice Rm 609, Schulz Building The University of Adelaide Adelaide SA 5005 +61 8 8313 9165 jennifer.rutherford@adelaide.edu.au   Ms Rita Horanyi Senior Admin Officer (Research), J.M. Coetzee Centre for Creative Practice Rm 606, Schulz Building The University of Adelaide Adelaide SA 5005 +61 8 8313 9164 rita.horanyi@adelaide.edu.au   Website: https://www.adelaide.edu.au/jmcoetzeecentre/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jmcccp/

• relevant photographs

Professor Jennifer Rutherford, Director of the JMCCCP

Schubert in the Street: Seraphim Trio playing Schubert’s “Trout” Quintet, supported by the J.M. Coetzee Centre for Creative Practice, September 2016

Masterclass (March 2016) with 2015 Coetzee Centre Writer-in-Residence, Dr Cath Kenneally

Professor Paul Carter (RMIT), who will be holding a masterclass at the forthcoming Oratunga Retreat

Professor Elleke Boehmer (Oxford) is a member of the centre and will be holding a masterclass on writing and the writer-critic on 28 February 2017