Professor Helen Groth

I am an expert on the history of literature, with particular expertise in nineteenth-century literature, literary sound studies, and literature & photography. My current book projects explore aspects of literature's enduring engagement with riotous activity.  My monograph Riotous Lives and Literary Writing is in progress and a recently published co-edited collection Writing the Global Riot. Literature in a Time of Crisis (Oxford University Press, 2023) draws together scholars from across the globe to consider the various ways writers over time and in different contexts have shaped cultural perceptions of the riot as a distinctive form of political and social expression. The Edinburgh Companion to Literature and Sound Studies, co-edited with Julian Murphet, has also recently been published by Edinburgh University Press in 2024.

After completing my PhD at the University of Cambridge, I taught at the University of Exeter before returning to Australia where I have held positions at the University of Melbourne, Macquarie University, and an Australian Research Council Fellowship at the University of Sydney. I came to UNSW in 2010 to take up an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship (2010-2014) in the School of Arts and Media. I am a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities and was Associate Dean (Research) of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences from 2017-2019.   

I am the sole author of 2 monographs Victorian Photography and Literary Nostalgia (Oxford University Press, 2003/2004) and Moving Images. Nineteenth-Century Reading and Screen Practices (Edinburgh University Press, 2013), as well as the co-author of a third book (with Natalya Lusty), Dreams and Modernity. A Cultural History (Routledge, 2013; pb 2013). The latter research on dreams and the history of the science of mind was funded by an ARC Discovery Grant (2010-2013). I have also coedited a number of other books and special issues of journals, including a special issue of Textual Practice ‘On Anachronism’ (2012), Mindful Aesthetics. Literature and the Science of Mind (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013; pb 2014), a special issue of JASAL on 'Critical Soundings. Voice, Space, and Sound in Australian Literature' (2015), and Sounding Modernism (Edinburgh University Press, 2017; pb 2017).

My recent research on rioting and the literary archive is funded by an Australian Research Council Grant (2018-2021).