Rate My Professor Stephen Harris

Dr. Stephen Harris serves as a lecturer in the School of Arts, Faculty of Humanities, Arts, Social Sciences and Education at the University of New England in Armidale, New South Wales. He earned his BA Honours (Class 1), MA Honours (Research), and PhD in American Literature from the University of New England. Harris teaches across the field of literary studies, specializing in American Literature, the Contemporary Novel, Nature Writing, and assisting in film studies courses. His academic career at UNE includes roles as an adjunct lecturer in the Faculty of Humanities, Arts, Social Sciences and Education.

Harris's research focuses on the historical novel, self and subjectivity in literature, the contemporary novel in 21st-century culture, and representations of sound and music in literature. He is conducting a comparative study of individualism in American and Australian cultures. As a member of the interdisciplinary Water Research and Innovation Network (WRaIN) at UNE, he collaborates on eco-critical projects examining the relationship between literature and the environment. He has co-edited interdisciplinary collections including Water Policy, Imagination and Innovation: Interdisciplinary Approaches and Rethinking Wilderness and the Wild: Conflict, Conservation and Co-existence. Key publications encompass his monographs The Fiction of Gore Vidal and E.L. Doctorow: Writing the Historical Self (Peter Lang, 2002) and Gore Vidal’s Historical Novels and the Shaping of American Political Consciousness (Edwin Mellen Press, 2005). Selected articles include “Tim Winton’s Dirt Music: Sounding Country/Re-siting Place” (Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature, 2015), “Water Wars, Talking Water: Art, Activism and the Eco-politics of Whitman’s Walk on the Water” (Australasian Journal of Ecocriticism and Cultural Ecology, 2012), and “Narratives from Another Creek: Judith Wright and the Poetics of Water Australia” (Journal of Ecocriticism, 2009). He has contributed book chapters such as “Questioning the Cultural Industry of the Self” in The Self-Industry: Therapy and Fiction (2015) and numerous book reviews in journals like Australasian Journal of American Studies and Plumwood Mountain. Harris is affiliated with the Posthuman Literary and Cultural Studies Research Group and the University of New England Cultural and Creative Arts Network (U-CCAN).