Dr. Thomas Vranken
Position title: Lecturer in Literary Studies
Contact Info
Phone #: +679 323 1026
Email: thomas.vranken@usp.ac.fj
Office location: SPACE building, Room 319
Qualifications: PhD (The University of Melbourne)
Expertise: Genre Fiction; Literature and Technology; Pacific Popular Culture
BIOGRAPHY
Thomas Vranken joined USP in 2022. Before coming to USP, he completed a postdoctoral fellowship (at The University of British Columbia) on the role of robots in nineteenth-century literature. He’s interested in Pacific Science Fiction, comics, Robert Louis Stevenson/colonial adventure fiction, and obsolete technology.
Thomas is currently supervising postgraduate students researching the literature of the nuclear Pacific, ideologies of Pacific sexuality, and the depiction of the Pacific and Pacific Islanders in video games. He welcomes inquiries from students looking to do graduate research in literary studies or on popular culture more broadly.
With Tarek Wazni, Thomas also edits USP’s student magazine, Niu, and he encourages interested students to email him their writing, drawing, and comics for inclusion in future issues of the journal.
RECENT PUBLICATIONS
Books
Simulating Antiquity in Boys’ Adventure Fiction: Maps and Ink Stains (Cambridge University Press, 2022).
Literary Experiments in Magazine Publishing: Beyond Serialisation (Routledge, 2019).
Edited Collections
Thomas Vranken and Suzy Anger eds., Victorian Automata: Mechanism and Agency in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge University Press, 2024).
Book Chapters
‘‘An Afterthought on Victorian Automata as Afterthought (and Signifier)’’, in Thomas Vranken and Suzy Anger eds., Victorian Automata: Mechanism and Agency in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge University Press, 2024).
Thomas Vranken and Stephen Knight, ‘‘The Automaton Detective”, in Thomas Vranken and Suzy Anger eds., Victorian Automata: Mechanism and Agency in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge University Press, 2024).
‘‘‘A Well-Preserved Piece of Useless Antiquity’: The Gentleman’s Magazine and Anti-Emotional National Identity’’, in Jock Macleod, William Christie, Peter Denney eds., Politics and Emotions in Romantic Periodicals (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019).
Journal Contributions
Thomas Vranken, Asela Tuisawau, and Paul Geraghty, “The Phantom Speaks Fijian: Cultural and Political Ambivalence in Bera-na-Liva”, The International Journal of Comic Art (forthcoming).
Thomas Vranken and Atele Dutt, ‘‘Speaking in Tongues: The Texts Haunting Stevenson’s Samoan Adaptation of ‘The Bottle Imp’”, Victorian Popular Fictions 6.2 (Autumn 2024). Link.
‘‘‘A Medium More Important than Bodily Sense’: Wilde, the Antipodes, and the Techno-Imagination’’, Volupté: Interdisciplinary Journal of Decadence Studies 4.1 (2021). Link.
‘‘‘Oscar Wilde’s Book’: Early American Reviews of The Picture of Dorian Gray’’, PMLA 133.1 (2018).
‘‘A Century’s Worth of Huckleberry Finn: Commerce, Property, and Slavery in The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine’’, Nineteenth-Century Contexts: An Interdisciplinary Journal 40.2 (2018).