Welcome!

Charting the Australian Fantastic: Ecocriticism, Migrant Fiction and Postcoloniality In Australian Speculative Fiction is a collaborative teaching and research project started and maintained by three young scholars from the Universities of Dusseldorf and Cologne. In early 2019, Bettina BurgerLucas Mattila and David Kern and set out to put a spotlight on Australian speculative fiction, which they felt was otherwise largely ignored outside of the Australian literary studies sphere, especially in Europe. Their ambitious project sought (and still seeks) to produce innovative and interactive materials in an attempt to spur interest in Australian speculative fiction.

As well as providing innovative teaching resources in the field, this project facilitates interdisciplinary research on Australian speculative fiction. It seeks to provide a platform that highlights individual Australian authors, supported by an interview series and other forms of academic output such as workshops and peer-reviewed publications. It also facilitates cutting-edge, multimedia pedagogical approaches, including an ongoing podcast series and a student-driven blog on Australian speculative fiction.

In late 2020, Bettina Burger and Lucas Mattila also became Digital Fellows at Heinrich-Heine University Düsseldorf, which not only granted them additional funding for the project, but also allowed them to start contributing their Australian speculative fiction teaching material to a newly built Open Educational Resource platform, ORCA.nrw (openly available in summer 2021). 

Please don’t hesitate to reach out – we’d love to hear from you: australianprojectnrw@gmail.com

Follow us on Twitter for the latest updates on the project: @SpeculativeAus1

The Blog: Speculative Australia

Our Interview Series

On Australian Speculative Fiction - Essays

Charting the Australian Fantastic Podcast

Our Recent Tweets