profiles

This page, which will change regularly, will feature interesting women researchers from around the University of New South Wales. These women will not necessarily be the most senior women researchers, and nor will they necessarily be the most that attract the most money. They represent a cross section of interesting research within the University, across all Faculties, and all levels of seniority. These women have been selected for the enthusiasm, diversity and richness they contribute to the University of New South Wales research profile. Please feel free to contact these women to discuss their research. They will be delighted to have an interest shown in their work, and to expand their networks with both colleagues, and with interested people from outside the University.

If you would like your work to be featured, or if you can think of a woman researcher within UNSW who should be featured, please contact the Women's Research Development Officer, at: Genee.Marks@unsw.edu.au

Dijana Alic

Dijana Alic, who is a lecturer in the Faculty of the Built Environment, brings an especially interesting research perspective to UNSW, as she did her undergraduate architectural qualification in Sarajevo, where she then worked as a designer and site supervisor on a number of large projects. In 1990, she was rewarded a prestigious Australian-European Award, which enabled her to study at UNSW, where she completed her Master of Architecture degree. She became a full time staff member of the University in 1993.

Dijana's research interests are diverse, and include: war and architecture; modern architecture and national expression in Eastern Europe; heritage studies; and technology, multiculturalism and cultural memory. Her current primary research focus, however, is the relationship between modernity and national expression in architecture. She is currently working on my doctoral research, which is entitled "Modern Architecture and National Expression: Interpreting and Redesigning Sarajevo 1935 - 1955". This dissertation situates Juraj Neidhardt's architectural projects and theoretical writings (produced in the 1940s - 1950s) within the political and cultural milieu of the then newly formed Socialist Federative Republic of Yugoslavia. The aim is to identify these seemingly modernist designs as a particular expression of the complex relationship between the nationalist and the socialist (communist) political agendas.

Some recent publications and conference papers include:

• D. Alic, M. Gusheh, "The Appropriation of the Ottoman heritage in Socialist Yugoslavia: Bascarsija Project (1948- 53)", Proceedings: Association of the Collegiate Schools of Architecture International conference, Building as a Political Act, ACSA Press, Washington DC, 1998, 179 - 185. Refereed conference.
  
• D. Alic "Destruction of Memory", in Ruuska P. & Valo M. (editors), Abstracts, Crossroads in Cultural Studies, Series B: 37, 1996, Department of Sociology and Social Psychology, University of Tampere, Finland, Tampereen Yliopisto, Tampere, 1996, 19 -20. (ISBN951- 44- 3989- 9 ISSN 0359- 8144)
  
• D. Alic, "Nationalism and Orientalism in the War Destruction of Bosnia", "Religion, Politics, and Society"; EPIIC International Symposium at Tufts University Education for Public Inquiry and International Citizenship, Tufts University, Cambridge Massachusetts, USA, 18- 22 April 1996.
  
• D. Alic, Gusheh, M. "The Media Representation of Sarajevo: Manufacturing cities through war", The XIX Congress International Union of Architects, Barcelona, Spain, July 1996, (2,800 words), paper No. PO74.

Dijana may be contacted as follows:

Faculty of the Built Environment
The University of New South Wales
Sydney 2052, Australia

Phone : 61 2 9385 4817
Fax : 61 2 9385 4507
Email : D.Alic@unsw.edu.au

Lesley Stern

Lesley Stern, a film historian and theorist who teaches Film and Theatre Studies, has published in the areas of film, theatre, photography and cultural studies. Lesley has the honour of being one of five scholars selected to work at The Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities, as part of their current research theme of "Representing the Passions". The year long position is one for which academics are head-hunted, rather than seeking the position by application. However, it is possible for less well known researchers and scholars, both pre- and post-doctoral, to obtain fellowships to The Getty, which Lesley mentions is a wonderful research environment, which provides great support.

According to The Getty website (www.getty.edu), "Getty Scholars, Visiting Scholars, and Getty Fellows are invited based upon how their work relates to a specific theme chosen by the Research Institute. They share an interest in the theme but approach it in diverse ways, relying upon different expertise and using different methodologies. The Research Institute is committed to the idea that intellectual diversity is a key to creating dialogue and discovering new avenues of investigation."

The main research project that Lesley is working on this year, in her contribution to "Representing the Passions", addresses "Histrionic Cinema". This is an attempt to delineate, firstly, a certain kind of cinema, or cinematic tendency, characterised (according to the conventions of contemporary Western cinema) by passionate excess; and, secondly the question of affect in cinema. The impact of the theatre on the cinema has usually been posed primarily as a question of acting (and usually approached in historical rather than aesthetic terms), but the very substance of cinema, as technology with its own potential for articulating time and space and therefore the nature of bodily presence, produces a particular cinematic theatricality. Lesley is researching a cinematic 'pre-history' various stagings of the passionsin order to explore histrionic effect. Her focus is primarily theoretical, but involves an historical and comparative dimension, incorporating different periods, and examples from different national cinemas.

The second project Lesley is working on is on "Bulawayo Township Theatre". This is an on-going and long term project which both documents the extraordinary performance history and style that has developed in this town in Zimbabwe since independence in 1980, and also incorporates a more detailed historical contextualisation which illuminates this phenomenon as a particularly interesting instance of post-colonial cultural practice. The pronounced physicality of this theatre (incorporating music, dance, and much stage fighting) has often been explained as a remnant of Ndebele warrior culture, but in fact, one of the main inspirations has been karate and kung fu cinema! This theatre took root during a period of post-independence civil war, but the conditions for its development can also be traced in the complex and extremely fascinating history of Matabeleland, the region in which Bulawayo is situated (a history which, for a variety of cultural and political reasons, telling in themselves, has only been sketchily articulated).

Lesley may be contacted at Lstern@getty.edu