Deborah Pike

Associate Professor, English Literature
PhD (English), BA Hons,  Grad Cert (Education)

Email: deborah.pike@nd.edu.au
Phone: (02) 8204 4107

  • Biography

    Deborah Pike is Associate Professor of Literature and Writing at the University of Notre Dame Australia, Sydney campus. She is a recipient of an Australian Government Award for University Teaching, a Citation for Outstanding Contributions to Student Learning for literature as a transdisciplinary practice, and a Vice Chancellor’s Award for Teaching.

    Deborah holds a first-class Honours degree in English and Philosophy from the University of Western Australia and a PhD in English from the University of Sydney.

    Her research explores the ways literature moves across disciplinary, cultural and historical boundaries. Her current interests include literary modernism; wellbeing literature; and the nature of literary study as a discipline, particularly its possibilities as a transdisciplinary practice. Her publications span postcolonial and cultural studies and modernist literatures. Her monograph, The Subversive Art of Zelda Fitzgerald, was shortlisted for the inaugural AUHE Prize in Literary Scholarship, and she has published and edited multidisciplinary volumes.

    Before joining Notre Dame, Deborah lectured in English language and literature at the University of Paris VII and the Paris Institute of Political Studies (Sciences Po) and worked as an editor at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). She has presented papers and seminars in Australia, Europe, the United States and the United Kingdom, and has worked across media and publishing as well as higher education.

    Her teaching reflects her interest in literature as a form of intellectual and imaginative encounter. She teaches and convenes courses in literary studies, literary theory and creative writing.

  • Teaching areas

    Deborah Pike teaches and convenes the following courses:

    • Text and Tradition
    • Modernism and the Avant-Garde
    • The Poetic Imagination: Reading Poetry Across Time
    • Author-Text-Reader: Literary Criticism and Theory
    • Narrative Writing; Fictions of the Self: Life Writing
    • Experience the World: Paris Immersion
    • Tokyo Immersion

  • Research expertise and supervision

    Deborah is available to supervise in the areas of Modernism, Nineteenth and Twentieth Century English and American Literature. She is also interested in supervising transdisciplinary projects.

    PhDs

    • An Exploration of the Functions of Swearing in Jack Davis’s No Sugar and Meyne Wyatt’s City of Gold.
    • The Art of Image and Text as First and Second Voices of Communication and The English Figurative Artist
    • ‘Assent as an Expression of Faith: Correspondences Between Newman’s Illative Sense and Hopkins’ Poetics in light of the Philosophy of John Duns Scotus’

    Masters and Master of Philosophy

    • ‘Bedrooms and Battlefields: Negotiating Gendered Arenas of Power within Le Roman de Silence’
    • ‘At the Heart of Leviathan: A Hobbesian Reading of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness’
    • ‘Reinterpreting the Villain: Changing the Pattern of the Fairy Tale through Sleeping Beauty’s Maleficent’
    • ‘“Strange scribblings:” Tracing the Gothic in Australian Poetry’

    Honours

    • ‘Feeling the Modern’ Modernist art and emotion
    • ‘Hands off My Body! Postmemory, Fragmentation and the bodily expression of trauma in literature’
    • ‘“Thought and Affliction, Passion, Hell Itself”: Feminine Madness and Sexual Agency in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Hamlet, and The Two Noble Kinsmen’
    • The Haggadah: visual and historical analysis
    • Evelyn Waugh, Vile Bodies and Modernism
    • Drago Jančar, Slovenia and Postmodernism

  • Books

    • Pike, D. & Vickery, A. (2026). Modernism Beyond the Canon. London, Bloomsbury (forthcoming).
    • Pike, D. (2017). The Subversive Art of Zelda Fitzgerald. Columbia: University of Missouri Press.
    • Pike, D., Lynch, S. & a’Beckett, C. (eds) (2017). Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Play: From Birth to Beyond. Singapore: Springer Publishing Company.
    • Pike. D., Nelson, C. & Ledvinka, G. (eds) (2015). On Happiness: New Ideas for the Twenty-First Century. Crawley: UWA Publishing.

    Edited Journal Special Issue

    • Pike, D. Harvey, M. & Sykes, G. (2000). Colloquy, Issue 5, Special Issue: Curious Eyes – The Sites and Scenes of Modernism.

  • Book chapters

    • Pike, D. (2017). ‘You Can Leave Your Hat On: Teaching Literature at University and the Playground of the Mind’ in Pike, D., Lynch, S. & a’Beckett, C. (eds), Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Play: From Birth to Beyond. Singapore: Springer Publishing Company.
    • Pike. D., Lynch, S. & a’Beckett, C. (2017). ‘Playing with Theory’ in Pike, D., Lynch, S. & a’Beckett, C. (eds), Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Play: From Birth to Beyond. Singapore: Springer Publishing Company.
    • Proud, D., Pike, D. & a'Beckett, C. (2017).'Muckabout: Aboriginal Conceptions of Play' in Lynch, S., Pike, D. & a'Beckett, C. (eds), Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Play: From Birth to Beyond. Singapore: Springer Publishing Company.
    • Pike, D. (2015).‘Objectless Love: The Vagabondage of Colette and Katherine Mansfield’ in Harvey, M. & Ailwood, S. (eds). Katherine Mansfield and Influence. Edinburgh: The University of Edinburgh Press.
    • Pike, D. (2015).‘The Russian Way of Happiness: Choice, Love and Community.’ Nelson, C., Pike, D. & Ledvinka, G. (eds). On Happiness: New Ideas for the Twenty-First Century. Crawley: University of Western Australia Publishing.
    • Nelson, C. & Pike, D. (2015). 'This Book Will Not Make You Happy' in Nelson, C., Pike, D. & Ledvinka, G.(eds). On Happiness: New Ideas for the Twenty-First Century. Crawley: University of Western Australia Publishing.
    • Pike, D. (2011). 'Politics and Bare Life in Yvonne Vera’s The Stone Virgins’. In P. Marks (Ed.) Literature and Politics: Pushing the World in Certain Directions (pp. 155-165). Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

  • Journal articles and proceedings

    • Pike, D. (2023) Humanities - What Future?' Humanities 2023, 12(4), 85; https://doi.org/10.3390/h12040085
    • Pike, D. (2018) ‘"Masquerading as Herself": The Journalism and Short Fiction of Zelda Fitzgerald’, F. Scott Fitzgerald Review. Vol 16 (1). Pp. 130-148
    • Pike, D. (2006).‘Sharon’s Wall and the Dialectics of Inside/Outside’, Borderlands: New Spaces in the Humanities, Vol. 5 (3), 2006.
    • Pike, D. (2003).‘Love’s Reverberations’, The Australian Review of Public Affairs, June, 2003.
    • Pike. D. & Harvey, M. (eds) (2000).‘Curious Eyes: Sites and Scenes of Modernism,’ Colloquy: Text Theory Critique, Issue 4

  • Conference papers

    • Pike, D. (2024) ‘Edgy Performances and Modernist Flops’: Modernism and Modernity on the Edge. The Australasian Association for Modernism Conference. Hobart, Tasmania, December 2024.
    • Pike, D. (2022) '1922: A Nomadic Reading' Keynote lecture. The Australasian Association for Literatyre. Western Sydney University, June.
    • Pike, D. (2019). 'Minor Moderns.' British Association for Modernisms Conference, Kings College, London, June.
    • Pike, D. (2018) Modernism Beyond the Canon. Literary Networks Conference. Australian National University, June.
    • Pike, D. (2017) “Humanities and the Future of English”, Reading and Writing in the Twenty-First-Century Classroom, The University of Queensland, June.

  • Original creative works

    • Pike, D. The Players. (2024) Fremantle: Fremantle Press. (novel)

  • In the media

  • Professional affiliations

  • Community engagement

    Bookstores

    • Launch, Gleebooks, Sydney 11 May 2024.
    • The Lane Bookshop, In Conversation, 14 November 2024
    • Shakespeare and Company Bookstore, In Conversation, 2 July, 2025
    • Women’s Day, In Conversation, Gleebooks, 8 March 2026

    Literary Festivals

    • Words on the Waves Writers’ Festival Tuggerah Library, 5 June 2024.
    • Big Sky Readers and Writers’ Festival, Geraldton, 10-13 October 2024.
    • Words at Pearls - Words on the Waves Pearl Beach, 2 November 2024.
    • Australian Short Story Festival, Fremantle 24 November, 2024
    • Manly Writers' Festival, 30 March, 2025
    • Emerging Writers' Festival: 17 September 2025

    Libraries

    • The Great Big Book Club, Manning Library, 17 May 2024.
    • Libby Book Club WA State Library, 18 September 2024.
    • Northcote Library, 30 April 2024
    • Cheltenham Library, 1 May 2024
    • Mandurah Central Library, 19 November 2024

    Workshops

    • Writing Unforgettable Characters, NSW Writers' Centre, Rozelle NSW
      29 November 2025;
    • ‘Diving Deep’ Writers’ Salon: Emerging Writers' Festival: 17 September 2025

  • Awards

    • 2019 Nominee, Australian Awards for University Teaching - Teaching Excellence Award
    • 2018 Winner, Australian Awards for University Teaching Citation for Outstanding Contributions to Student Learning
    • 2017 Shortlist, AUHE Award in Australian Literary Scholarship for The Subversive Art of Zelda Fitzgerald
    • 2012 Nominee, Office of Teaching and Learning Citation in Outstanding Teaching
    • 2011 Nominee, Australian Teaching and Learning Council Teaching Excellence Award
    • 2011 Vice Chancellor’s Teaching Award Winner
    • 2009, 2010, Unijobs Lecturer of the Year top 5, UNDA
    • 2008 Katharine Susannah Prichard Writers’ Centre Writer in Residence
    • 1999-2003 Australian Postgraduate Award University of Sydney
    • 2000 Winner: Kath O’Neil Travelling Fellowship