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Rosemary Overell_186BA(Hons) PhD (The University of Melbourne) Senior Lecturer

Contact

Email rosemary.overell@otago.ac.nz
Office: Burns 3N10

Rosemary is also currently convening the Master of Arts (Coursework) for the Division of Humanities.

@muzaken / researchgate.net / Google scholar profile / Academia.edu

Research interests

  • Psychoanalysis / Lacanian theory
  • Gender Studies
  • Japanese and Asian Studies

Background

Rosemary completed a doctorate at the University of Melbourne in 2012. Her thesis, Brutal: Affect Belonging In, and Between, Australia and Japan's Grindcore Scenes, explored how fans of grindcore metal music feel 'at home' in scenic spaces and was based on ethnographic research in Osaka, Japan and Melbourne, Australia. Before joining the department at Otago in 2013, Rosemary taught at the University of Melbourne in Cultural Studies.

Between 2021 and 2023, she worked in The Department of Communication and New Media at the National University of Singapore.

Research

Rosemary Overell's most recent work considers how gendered subjectivities are co-constituted by and through mediation. She draws particularly on Lacanian psychoanalysis to explore a variety of mediated sites, such as #MeToo and trans* bodies. In particular, she considers the intersections between affect and signification and how these produce gender. Rosemary has looked at media as varied as anime, extreme metal, reality television and documentary film. She co-edited, with Catherine Dale (Tokyo Women's University) of Orienting Feminism: Media, Activism and Cultural Representation (Palgrave, 2018), a collection which explores the meaning of feminisms in the contemporary moment as constituted by both action and uncertainity. Focusing on feminist media representations, the collection asks questions about how feminist subjectivity is articulated and intersects with media technologies and representation.

More broadly, Rosemary's research interests includes subcultures and how affect can enable or curtail particular modes of gendered being and belonging for otherwise marginalised people. This was explored in her 2014 monograph, Affective Intensities in Extreme Music Scenes (Palgrave), as well as numerous journal articles and chapters in edited collections.

Rosemary was a founding member of the Performance of the Real research theme steering group and led the 'Mediating the Real' programme within the theme. She co-ran the Mediating the Real reading group with Brett Nicholls. This group primarily draws on Lacanian and Baudrillardian approaches to mediation of 'the Real'. In 2019, with colleague Brett Nicholls, she co-edited Post-Truth and the Mediation of Reality: New Conjunctures. This collection critically interrogates mediated experiences, subjects and technologies in the 'post-truth era'. This publication arose from the Mediating the Real 2 conference. She was also the co-editor, with Sarah Thomasson (Victoria University, Wellington) of the Performance of the Real: Working Papers series – a site for the circulation of dialogues, provocations and ideas arising from 'Real' events.

In addition to her academic scholarship, Rosemary writes regularly for The Conversation and un projects has contributed to public debates on how gender and the media work in the contemporary moment. She has also written for ArtNZ. She collaborated with the New Models collective in 2021 on NM CODEX Y2K20

Rosemary is also on the editorial board of Continental Thought & Theory: A Journal of Intellectual Freedom, Metal Music Studies and Puratoke: Journal of Undergraduate Research in the Creative Arts and Industries. She has also been a fellow in Nagoya University's Gender Studies programme, under the mentorship of Professor Chika Tanimoto.

Rosemary Overell welcomes PhD theses on any topics related to her research, including subcultural media, gender studies and psychoanalysis.

For more details, please see her list of research publications below.

Teaching

Rosemary Overell has taught papers on digital media and identity, contemporary media studies, critical journalism studies and music cultures.

In 2024, Rosemary will co-ordinate:

  • MFCO 103 Introduction to Communication Studies
  • MFCO 213 Media Genres: Crime
  • MFCO 401 Advanced Media, Film & Communication Theory

Conferences organised

Expertise and public engagement

Rosemary Overell is committed to pedagogy beyond the university and her role as a practitioner as a 'critic and conscience' in the public sphere. She has run short courses for the Dunedin Free University on feminism and gender; and surveillance and media cultures.

Rosemary collaborated with Melbourne-based artist Lisa Radford on Dear Masato, all at once (get a life, the only thing that cuts across the species is death at West Space in 2016. Rosemary has been an invited judge, and emcee, at the Dunedin Fringe Festival in 2016 and 2017. She ran a highly successful radio programme between 2013 and 2016 on 91FM Radio One called 'culture jamming'. This programme included interviews with academics, music practitioners and media workers on the intersections between music, culture and politics. Some archived podcasts are avaliable here.

She is a regular contributor to un projects considering the intersections between art, culture and politics.

Completed supervisions

Honours

  • Ayodya Rathnayaka: Anime fans under lockdoen in Singapore: a communicative theory of identity ethnography. (At NUS).
  • Taylor Adams: Navigating the 'In-Between': The Posthuman, Metamorphosis & Hopeful Becomings.
  • Oliver Dearnley-Smith: Madoka: Japanese anime from a Lacanian perspective
  • Julia Stewart: Bigger, Fatter, Gypsier: Biopower and My Big, Fat, Gypsy Wedding
  • Brianna Kirkham: The Business of Blogging
  • Sarah Rayner: Twitter and Television: New Interactions between Fans, Critics and Creators
  • Shelley Harding: Flourishing Under a Rose-Tine: Nostalgic Depictions of Misogyny in Mad Men

MA

  • Stanley Arvan WIjaya: Uncovering Visual Novels: Exploring the history and transformation of a cross cultural game genre. (At NUS)
  • Huang Yimin: Feminist Bloggers and Online Feminist Activism on Chinese Social Media. (At NUS).
  • Taylor Adams: From flayed bodies to frozen eggs: A cultural history of the body, somatechnics and the 're'-turn of the flesh.
  • Alison Blair:Children of the Revolution: Bolan, Bowie and the Carnivalesque.

PhD

  • Massimiliana Urbano:Becoming-common: Affective Technologies and Grassroots Activism in Contemporary Italy.
  • Bethany Geckle: Queer World-Making: Destabilising Heteronormativity through Skateboarding.
  • Hannah Herchenbach: On Becoming a Dunedin Rock Musician: The Cultural Politics of the Dunedin Sound.
  • Tha-era Yousef: Narrative Analysis of Online News Coverage of Controversial Case Studies of Women and Islam in Malaysia: 2014 to 2018.

Current supervisions

PhD

  • Eleanor Crabill: Myths and realities of impact and legacy in the post-FIFA Women's World Cup era.
  • Oliver Dearnley-Smith: Self-Alienated spirit: the subject and the social in Hegel and Critical Theory.
  • Frankie Fei: Feels like queer spirit: (re)imagining history and futurity in retro-queer narratives.
  • Deniz Karahan Alp: Between Emancipation and Domination: Herbert Marcuse and Social Media.
  • Peter Stapleton:The Punkumentary: Embodying a punk sensibility within the music documentary?

MA

  • LingLing Yana Hu: Jia Ling and fan discourse online

Publications

Millar, I., Nicholls, B., Overell, R., & Tutt, D. (2024). Power and politics in Adam Curtis' Can't get you out of my head: An emotional history of the modern world. In C. Owens & S. Meehan O'Callaghan (Eds.), Psychoanalysis and the small screen: The year the cinemas closed. (pp. 163-189). Abingdon, UK: Routledge. doi: 10.4324/9781003272069-11 Chapter in Book - Research

Overell, R. (2023). Simon Denny: Seeing things. In Documents 2021-2023. (pp. 120-133). Auckland, New Zealand: Michael Lett. Chapter in Book - Research

Overell, R. (2023). 'Don't worry darling' (2022): What do women want after #MeToo? Proceedings of the Australian & New Zealand Communication Association (ANZCA) Conference: Ka mua, ka muri: Bridging communication pasts and futures. (pp. 97). Retrieved from https://www.anzca2023.com Conference Contribution - Published proceedings: Abstract

Overell, R. (2023). Favour & the brave [Review of the exhibition Bev Moon's Fortune]. Art New Zealand, (188), 70-73. [Performance/Film/Composition Review]. Journal - Research Other

Overell, R. (2023, April). Don't worry darling: What do women want after #MeToo? Verbal presentation at the LACK iv: Psychoanalytic Theory Conference, Burlington, USA. Conference Contribution - Verbal presentation and other Conference outputs

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