Higher Degree Research Candidates

Lucy Matthews is a PhD candidate in English in the School of Literature, Languages, and Linguistics at ANU. She is a theatre maker with a keen interest in how theory and practice align. Her thesis “What’s mine is yours and what is yours is mine: Queer women adapting queer women, a PaR study of William Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure and John Lyly’s Gallathea,” examines the creative processes involved in adapting early modern theatre from a queer perspective utilising theatre devising techniques to engage and explore sixteenth-century representations of female-female desire.

Fleur Goldthorpe is a PhD candidate in the School of History at ANU. The title of her thesis is “British Women of the Portocracy: Port Wine Dinastias, Family, and Transcultural Lives, 1678–1855.” Prior to commencing her post-graduate research, Fleur worked for nearly a decade in the field of technology commercialisation, translating research outputs into new products and services. Her research interests include Anglo-Portuguese studies, Australian colonial history, international wine studies, migration and transculturalism, and gender history. In January 2018, Fleur was awarded the National Council of Women (NSW) Australian History Award in recognition of her research on women exhibitors of Australian colonial wine at international and intercolonial exhibitions of the nineteenth century.

Matilda Hatcher is a PhD candidate in the School of History of the Australian National University, Canberra. Her research focuses on men and masculinity in the British Royal Navy during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. She is currently undertaking a history of emotion, unpacking the interactions between masculine ideals and sailors’ lived experiences of combat. Through this project she seeks to illuminate the nuances of men’s wartime emotions in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. Her Honours thesis, which was awarded the Mick Williams Prize in History and University Medal, focussed on war-related disability, examining British naval manliness and impaired bodies in visual culture during the French Wars. Matilda is an editor of the ANU Historical Journal II.

Julia Rodwell is a PhD candidate in the School of Art and Design at ANU. She is also the Publishing Coordinator at the National Gallery of Victoria. Her PhD research sits within the ARC Linkage Project Transforming the Early Modern Archive: the Emmerson Collection at SLV. Her thesis title is “Digital Design for Cultural Collections: Digital Humanities, Art Curatorship, and Museology in the Emmerson Collection Online Exhibition Project.” She is interested in engaging audiences with art and history through publishing, the display of archival materials, and online exhibitions.

Madeline Sargeant is a PhD candidate in English at the School of Literature, Languages, and Linguistics at the Australian National University. In 2025, she was awarded a doctoral position on Dr Una McIlvenna’s ARC-funded Future Fellowship project, Singing the News: Ballads as News Media in Europe and Australia, 1550–1920. The title of her thesis is ‘The History of Ballads as News Media in Australia’. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in History (Hons) from The University of Melbourne where she wrote her Honours thesis ‘Blood Miracles and the 1641 Rebellion’. Her research interests include settler, diasporic and Colonial histories; religion and religious conflict; supernatural belief; and wonders and print culture from the early modern period until the early twentieth century in Australia and Europe.

Barbara Taylor is a PhD candidate in English, within the School of Literature, Languages, and Linguistics at ANU. The title of her thesis is ‘”If this be magic, let it be an art”: the Performance and Materiality of Magic in Shakespearean Romance.’ She holds a BA (Hons) in English and Ancient History from the University of Sydney, and an MA in Shakespeare Studies from King’s College London.

Hannah Upton is a PhD candidate in English within the School of Literature, Languages, and Linguistics at ANU. The title of her thesis is “The politics of marginalia and the early modern female reader,” with a particular focus on early modern women’s marginalia in the British Library. After her BA in English, she completed her MA in Early Modern English Literature: Text and Transmission (2020), both at King’s College London. The title of her MA thesis was “The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia and Early Modern Female Readership.” Her research focuses on female readership practices and political marginalia in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In 2021 she was awarded the position of HDR candidate on Professor Rosalind Smith’s ARC funded Future Fellowship Marginalia and the Early Modern Woman Writer, 1530-1660.

Rhianne Grieve completed her PhD in the ANU School of History in 2024. The title of her thesis is “In Search of Harmony : Socialist thought in Britain 1775 – 1850.” She also holds a BA/LLB (Hons) from the University of Technology Sydney, and an MPhil in Political Thought and Intellectual History from the University of Cambridge.

Researcher profile

Sarah Hodge completed her PhD in the ANU Centre for Art History and Art Theory in 2024. The title of her thesis is “Fashioning women’s agency in Nineteenth-Century Britain: The wearers and makers of historicised fancy dress 1796-1856.” Her research centres upon British and French eighteenth-nineteenth century dress evoking history and historical themes in their design. She is interested in sartorial historicism and the idea of dressing out of time.

Thomas Lalevee completed his PhD in the ANU School of History in 2022. The title of his thesis is “From Perfectibility to Progress: The Search for a Science of Society in France, 1750-1850.” Thomas is interested in the history of social and political thought, of science, and of ideas more generally.

Kelly Peihopa completed her PhD in English and Writing at the University of Newcastle. The title of her thesis is “Anne Boleyn’s Prison Literature: Reception, Circulation, Attribution.” She graduated from the University of Newcastle with a Bachelor of Arts Distinction in 2016, with a double major in English and Writing and History. Her English honours thesis earned First Class Honours, the Faculty Medal, and the University Medal, and was subsequently published as “Reframing Feminine Modesty, Complaint, and Desire in the More Family” in Parergon 37.1 (2020). She also has published creative nonfiction articles on domestic violence in literary journals Meanjin (Spring 2018) and Sūdo Journal (January 2019). Kelly is a research assistant for the Early Modern Women Research Network (EMWRN) and the Gender Research Network (GRN) at the University of Newcastle, and was research and editorial assistant for the Palgrave Encyclopedia of Early Modern Women’s Writing (2024), working with general editors Rosalind Smith and Patricia Pender. Her interests are early modern women’s writing, prison writing, poetry, domestic violence research, and creative nonfiction.

Emma Rayner completed her PhD in English at the ANU School of Literature, Languages, and Linguistics in 2024. The title of her thesis is “Fashioning Worth, Fashioning Worlds: Early Modern Women and Civil Discourses.” She has published an article on poet Hester Pulter and dramatist John Webster in Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, and an entry on poetry and emotion in the Palgrave Encyclopedia of Early Modern Women’s Writing. She also holds a BA and MA in English Literature from Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, and comes to ANU from the University of Fribourg, Switzerland.