Blackwell Reference Online

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Meaghan Morris is a leading intellectual in the field of cultural studies and one of a handful of Australian cultural theorists whose work has gained a considerable audience in the Anglo-American academy. Her work spans a wide range of fields from cultural geography to feminism and is strongly informed by French theory, in particular theories of the everyday. Morris's intellectual career has been characterized by a considerable degree of mobility, both institutional and geographic. She has worked as a film critic for the Sydney Morning Herald (1979–81) and the Australian Financial Review (1981–5) and has held numerous research positions and taught in universities in Australia and in the US, only relatively recently taking up her first fulltime academic position at Hong Kong's Lingnan University. Born in Australia in 1950, Morris was raised in a small town on the outskirts of the industrial city of Newcastle in New South Wales and grew up in an atmosphere dominated by class issues and communist party politics. In 1969, she moved to Sydney to study French and English at the University of Sydney. Strongly influenced by the structuralist teachings of French studies academics such as Anne Freadman, it was in Sydney in the early 1970s that Morris was also first exposed to the work of French thinkers such as Louis Althusser and Michel Foucault via reading groups associated with various ... log in or subscribe to read full text