Professor Ivor Indyk appointed the new UWS Whitlam Chair

by Ivor Indyk

Professor Indyk says, 'I've always tried to work the middle ground between the academy and the marketplace in my editing and publishing activities, and the Whitlam Chair gives this activity academic recognition. I'm pleased to be associated with the name of Gough Whitlam, whose initiatives in the arts, particularly in setting up the Australia Council, have been decisive, not only for my generation, but for the continuing development of Australian culture.'

The Whitlam Chair will be based within the College of Arts, Education and Social Science at the University's Bankstown campus and will guide the activities of the 'Writing and Society' research group, to be made up of scholars, writers, postgraduate students and associates from the publishing industry.

Professor Indyk's extensive background in research, teaching, editing and publishing, and his commitment to Australian literature made him an outstanding candidate for the position.

He was awarded first class honours and a university medal in English literature from the University of Sydney, and gained his doctorate in eighteenth-century literature and the conventions of reading from the University of London in 1980.

In addition to his teaching positions in the University of Geneva, the University of Sydney, and the University of Newcastle, Professor Indyk has been a Visiting Fellow at the Humanities Research Centre at the Australian National University and at the Commonwealth Centre for Literary and Cultural Change at the University of Virginia.

Professor Indyk served as co-editor of Australia's oldest literary magazine, Southerly, from 1993 to 1996, but resigned his position to found HEAT, an innovative and accessible literary magazine which quickly gained a reputation for the high quality of its scholarly and creative writing, as well as for its international range and award-winning design.

In order to build on the success of HEAT, and to address the crisis in literary publishing, in 2002 Professor Indyk established the Giramondo imprint, publishing books by individual Australian authors. Most of these have won or been shortlisted for major Australian prizes.

In addition to his work on HEAT and Giramondo, Professor Indyk has edited three anthologies of contemporary Australian writing. He is the author of a highly regarded study of the writing of David Malouf, published by Oxford University Press in 1993, and of essays and reviews on many aspects of Australian literature.

Professor Indyk says he is looking forward to the new appointment, which began this month.

"I've always tried to work the middle ground between the academy and the marketplace in my editing and publishing activities, and the Whitlam Chair gives this activity academic recognition. I'm pleased to be associated with the name of Gough Whitlam, whose initiatives in the arts, particularly in setting up the Australia Council, have been decisive, not only for my generation, but for the continuing development of Australian culture," he says.

"This is an opportunity to build a research centre on the expertise of UWS scholars and the reputation of HEAT and Giramondo, which would address issues relevant to literary publishing in Australia in both a scholarly and a practical way," says Professor Indyk.

"This includes the development of new publishing technologies and forms of distribution, and the important question of how to make scholarly writing more accessible to a general readership.

"We intend to bring scholars together with writers, combine research with an active publishing program, and offer a calendar of literary events, lectures, seminars, readings and conferences. An important part of our activity will be to explore and contribute to the literary culture of the Greater Western Sydney region."