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

Contact

Rosemary will be returning to Otago in second semester of 2023.

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

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

Background

Rosemary Overell 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.

Research Interests

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

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. 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 and reality television.

More broadly, Rosemary's research interests include gender studies, music 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). She is also the co-editor, with Catherine Dale (Chuo 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. 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'.

In addition to her academic scholarship, Rosemary writes regularly for The Conversationand un projectshas contributed to public debates on how gender and the media work in the contemporary moment.

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 was also the co-editor, with Sarah Thomasson (University of Queensland) of the Performance of the Real: Working Papers series - a site for the circulation of dialogues, provocations and ideas arising from 'Real' events. 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'.

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 is also a Research Associate with the Cultural Research Centre (CRC); affiliated with National University of Singapore - the CRC's aim is to foster cross-disciplinary research informed by cultural studies methodologies for the fostering of diverse publics. It is led by Prof. Audrey Yue. She has also been a fellow in Nagoya University's Gender Studies programme, under the mentorship of Prof. 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.

This year, Rosemary will be teaching in second semester: Documentary and Reality Media (MFCO223) and Media Genres (MFCO213).

Conferences organised

trans/forming feminisms: media, technology identity (2015)

Performance of the Real: Postgrad and Early Career Researcher Symposium (2016)

Mediating the Real (2016)

Mediating the Real 2: Mediations in a Post-truth Era (2017)

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. Currently Rosemary podcasts here.

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

Completed supervisions

Honours

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

Alison Blair:Children of the Revolution: Bolan, Bowie and the Carnivalesque.

PhD

Massimiliana Urbano:Becoming-common: Affective Technologies and Grassroots Activism in Contemporary Italy.

Current supervisions

PhD

Oliver Dearnley-Smith: Negative Affects: Critical Theory and Libidinal (dis)Economies - From Alienation to Misery.

Frankie Fei: Feel your Time: (Re)imagining History and Futurity in Retro-queer Narratives

Bethany Geckle: Actor-network theory and heteronormativity: Analyzing skateboarding and drag

Hannah Herchenbach: Cultural Politics of the Dunedin Sound.

Deniz Karahan Alp: Between Emancipation and Domination: Herbert Marcuse and Social Media.

Peter Stapleton:The Punkumentary: Embodying a punk sensibility within the music documentary?

T. Yousef: Telling gendered news stories of women and Islam in Malaysia: A narrative analysis of Malay women and controversy in Malaysian online news coverage, 2014 to 2017

MA

Taylor Adams: Somatechnics: Machinic Flesh & Re-Writing the Gendered Body

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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

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.

Overell, R. (2022) Methodological masturbation. LACK: Punctual musings. (26 August). Retrieved from https://lackorg.com/2022/08/26/methodological-masturbation/

Adams, T., & Overell, R. (2022). Flayed bodies and the re-turn of the flesh: Foucault and contemporary gendered bodies. Continental Thought & Theory, 3(4), 116-151. doi: 10.26021/13021

Overell, R. (co-editor) (2021). New models codex Y2K20. Germany: New Models, 368p.

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