The Life Narrative Lab

The Lab is seeking interdisciplinary collaborators. If you are a researcher and want to get involved, please get in touch.

Research Interests:

We are interested in life writing’s intersection with:

Childhood and youth
Memory, truth and selfhood
Trauma and grief
Digital mediation of life and life narrative
Marginal texts and media cultures
Essays, diaries, letters, and comics
Material cultures
Health and wellbeing
Activism and politics
Place, space and the environment

Our Current Projects

The Process of Autofictional Self-Transformation

Holly Hershman This project considers how the process of authoring autofictional works transforms writers’ perspectives about their experiences and enables them to take control of their narrative. Through processing past wounds, writers reauthor themselves in an autofictional world of their creation. These worlds enable authors to develop new truths that explore deeper emotionality and alternative…
Writing and Wellbeing

Associate Professor Kylie Cardell, Dr Katerina Bryant, Christiana Harous, Dr Emma Maguire (JCU), Associate Professor Lydia Woodyatt This project investigates how writing can impact wellbeing. This interdisciplinary project surveys and analyses a large sample of writers in order to understand and map the experiences of wellbeing and resilience across a cohort and to measure and…
The New Personal Essay

Associate Professor Kylie Cardell & Associate Professor Rachel Robertson (Curtin) This project explores and analyses the literary essay as a dynamic and evolving form in the twenty-first century. This ongoing project is creating new scholarly knowledge about the essay form, addressing major gaps in understanding in relation to the essay as it is practiced by…
Kids Read Biography: Book Clubs and Children as Cultural Critics

Professor Kate Douglas By developing readership studies with children, this project aims to produce the first extended study of how children read biographies. The project expects to generate new knowledge and innovative research methods at the intersection of children’s literature and life narrative studies. Expected outcomes of this project include new knowledge on children as…
True Crime Writing: Practice-led Research

Dr Rachel Spencer What are the ethical challenges for the lawyer-writer when using law as a framework for a true crime narrative? My research is an innovative cross-disciplinary study positioned at the nexus of legal theory and creative writing. It is a work of creative research into an important South Australian criminal case from 1981.…
Choices, Choices, Choices: Writing the biography of Australia’s father of pain medicine

Gabriella Kelly-Davies The creative component of my PhD is the biography of Australia’s father of pain medicine: Breaking through the pain barrier. The extraordinary life of Dr Michael J. Cousins. The biography of Dr Michael Cousins explores what made Australia’s ‘father of pain medicine’ tick and what set him ticking. It portrays his dreams, trials and…