PROFILE
Professor Tanya Dalziell
Started at UWA: 2001
Multi-award winning humanities teacher
Professor Tanya Dalziell is a researcher, teacher and Discipline Chair of English and Literary Studies, specialising in English literature, covering everything from 19th-century novels to cinema and modernist author, Virginia Woolf.
She is renowned at the School of Humanities for her outstanding teaching. Among numerous other commendations, Professor Dalziell’s teaching has been recognised nationally through the Australian Awards for University Teaching, and at UWA in the Student Guild’s Student Choice awards and the Excellence in Teaching awards.
Her teaching style centres on two seemingly simple questions: how and why. She sees critical thinking as central to English and a skill for life that she encourages students to develop and exercise at every opportunity.
Professor Dalziell’s research has attracted national acclaim. She is the co-author (with Paul Genoni) of Half the Perfect World: Writers, Dreamers and Drifters on Hydra, 1955-1964 (2018), which won the 2019 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Non-Fiction and is being made into a feature film. Her book, Settler Romances the Australian Girl (2004), was awarded the Walter McRae Russell Prize for Australian literary scholarship. She has also published widely on Australian literature and film, modernism and literary theory. With Karen Welberry she edited Cultural Seeds: Essays on the Work of Nick Cave (2009) and edited Telling Stories: Australian Life and Literature, 1935-2012 (2013) with Paul Genoni.
I talk with smart, interesting students every day who go on to do wonderful things with their lives. That we get to talk about books and discuss how these might shape our understanding of the world is a privilege.
Professor Tanya Dalziell
News
Prime Minister's Literary Award winner
Half the Perfect World: Writers, Dreamers and Drifters on Hydra, 1955–1964, wins Prime Ministers Literary Award in the category of Non-Fiction.
Read moreFrom the page to the big screen
Half the Perfect World: Writers, Dreamers and Drifters on Hydra, 1955–1964, secures film deal.
Read moreHalf the Perfect World review
Towards the end of Half the Perfect World there is a photograph of Charmian Clift and George Johnston that reveals something of the precarity of the writers' inner lives and fractious relationship.
Read moreSupervisor opportunities
Professor Dalziell has been a research supervisor since 2001, supporting topics as broad as music and literature, camp culture, representations of the body and movement, and creative writing. She welcomes students with a variety of interests to consider undertaking a PhD, MA or honours under her supervision. For more information, contact Professor Dalziell using the details below.