Professor Tanya Dalziell

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.