Jessica White is a writer and academic. Her first novel, A Curious Intimacy (Viking, 2007), won a Sydney Morning Herald Best Young Novelist award, was shortlisted for the Dobbie prize and the Western Australia Premier’s awards, and longlisted for the international IMPAC award. Her second novel Entitlement was published in 2012 (Viking). Her third book, Hearing Maud, is a hybrid memoir that weaves together her experiences of deafness with those of Maud Praed, the deaf daughter of 19th century expatriate Australian novelist Rosa Praed. Jessica’s short stories, essays, and poems have appeared widely in Australian and international literary journals and have been shortlisted or longlisted for major prizes. Jessica is also the recipient of funding from Arts Queensland and the Australia Council for the Arts, and has undertaken residencies in Hobart and Rome. She has a PhD from Birkbeck, the University of London, and currently lectures and researches at The University of Queensland, where she is writing an ecobiography of Georgiana Molloy (1805-1843), Western Australia’s first female scientist.
RCC Research Project: Ecobiography: Exploring Environments and Selves
Selected Publications:
- “Extending Our Selves: Writing Lives Through Ecobiography”. Auto/Biography Studies 35, no. 1. (January 2020) (special issue: Life Writing in the Anthropocene).
- Hearing Maud. Crawley: UWA Publishing, 2019.
- “Gardening in the Anthropocene: Wilding, Eco-Memoir and Biodiversity.” In The Poetics and Politics of Gardening in Hard Times, edited by Naomi Milthorpe, 71-86. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2019.
- “Intertwining.” Sydney Review of Books. 10 October 2018.
- “Eco-Memoir: Protecting, Restoring, and Repairing Memory and Environment.” In Mediating Memory: Tracing the Limits of Memoir, edited by Bunty Avieson, Fiona Giles, and Sue Joseph, 141-156. New York: Routledge, 2017.
- "'Since my dear Boy’s death:' Grief, botany and gender in 19th Century Western Australia." Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature 13, no. 2. (2013).