As part of a new role helping develop and foster research in the School of Languages, Literatures, Cultures and Linguistics (LLCL) at Monash, I am conducting an occasional series of interviews with colleagues about how their current research projects fit into the bigger picture of the questions and themes that run through their work. The first two interviews are with novelist and poet Ali Alizadeh and linguistician Alice Gaby. Ali, who has recently finished writing a novel on Joan of Arc, talks about being an “unashamedly political” writer, his interest in Alain Badiou, and what it is that has drawn him time and again to the figure of Jeanne d’Arc over twenty years of writing. He ends the interview by reading one of his published poems. Alice, who works on Australian indigenous languages and the relations between language, culture and cognition, talks about different conceptions of time in diverse cultures (the future in front of us/uphill from us/behind us) and how she learned to speak like an eighty year old man.
Here are the videos:
And here is the page where further interviews will, I hope, in time be posted:
http://artsonline.monash.edu.au/llcl/category/research-profiles/
