Welcome to our new member, postgraduate student Kasey Scouller, who has commenced her PhD this year.

Kasey’s thesis, titled ‘Banned Books: The Politics of Poetics in Fiction Texts Across Time in Western and European Countries’, will explore fiction texts that have been banned by Governments in Western and European countries. It will argue that the common agreement, that texts are banned because of their ‘explicit’ themes, is in fact an oversight. Instead, the thesis will posit, the books are banned because of the persuasive and appealing way in which they are written. It is not what the books say, but how they say it that lands them in the shredders. That is, they are written beautifully, poetically, charmingly, and above all, convincingly.