About Us
Dr Jessica White and Dr Tink are writers and scholars based at the University of South Australia. Their project ‘Finding Australia’s Disabled Authors: Connection, Creativity, Community’ has been funded by the Australian Research Council.
Meet the Team
‘Finding Australia’s Disabled Authors: Connection, Creativity, Community’ is conducted by a team who all identify as disabled.
Dr Jessica White is the chief investigator, and Dr Amanda Tink is the postdoctoral research fellow.
Louise Cooper is the project’s research assistant. She is focussing on locating 19th and early 20th century disabled authors through the ‘Finding Australia’s Disabled Authors’ project and with AustLit, the Australian Literature database.
Dr Jessica White
Dr Jessica White has been deaf since she was four. She is the author of the novels A Curious Intimacy (2007) and Entitlement (2012), and a hybrid memoir about deafness, Hearing Maud (2019), which won the 2020 Michael Crouch Award for a debut work of biography and was shortlisted for four national awards, including the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Nonfiction. Jessica has received funding from the Australia Research Council, Creative Australia, the Copyright Agency, Arts Queensland and Arts South Australia, and has undertaken national and international residencies and fellowships. Jessica is currently a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing and Literature at the University of South Australia. Her next book, Silence is my Habitat: Ecobiographical Essays, will be published by Upswell in 2025.
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Dr Amanda Tink
Dr Amanda Tink is a proud disabled person with research interests in Australian disabled authors, crip poetics and memoir, and the Nazi genocide of disabled people. In 2023 she completed her project “Learning my First Language: Blindness, Neurodivergence, and our Creative Writing Practices” funded by Creative Australia, and graduated from her PhD. Her thesis “Never Towing a Line: Les Murray, Autism, and Australian Literature” details how Murray’s autism and his experiences of being disabled influenced his poetry. Amanda is currently a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at UniSA Creative, University of South Australia, and Adjunct Research Fellow at Western Sydney University’s Writing and Society Research Centre
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Louise Cooper
Qualifications:
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- Other Qualifications name to go here
