Jessica is an award-winning author of fiction, creative nonfiction, and memoir. Her research expertise spans creative and critical writing, life writing studies, Australian literary studies, disability studies, and climate fiction and the environmental humanities more broadly. Jessica was a 2022-2023 Arts Leader for the Australia Council for the Arts, and is co-founder of a journal of creative writing inspired by science, Science Write Now. She is Chief Investigator on the Australia Research Council Discovery Project Finding Australia's Disabled Authors: Connection, Creativity, Community (DP240103154).
Jessica's short fiction, essays and poetry have won awards and shortlistings and appeared in national and international literary ... Read more
About me
Jessica is an award-winning author of fiction, creative nonfiction, and memoir. Her research expertise spans creative and critical writing, life writing studies, Australian literary studies, disability studies, and climate fiction and the environmental humanities more broadly. Jessica was a 2022-2023 Arts Leader for the Australia Council for the Arts, and is co-founder of a journal of creative writing inspired by science, Science Write Now. She is Chief Investigator on the Australia Research Council Discovery Project Finding Australia's Disabled Authors: Connection, Creativity, Community (DP240103154).
Jessica's short fiction, essays and poetry have won awards and shortlistings and appeared in national and international literary journals. Jessica is also the recipient of funding and residencies from the Australia Research Council, Creative Australia, Arts Queensland, Arts South Australia, the Copyright Agency, the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society and the IASH Environmental Humanities group at the University of Edinburgh.
Jessica's critical writing has been published in national and international journals in the fields of Australian literature, ecocriticism, nineteenth century literature, life writing and literary representations of disability. From 2016-2019 she was an Australia Research Council DECRA fellow at The University of Queensland, during which time she oversaw the creation of the Writing Disability in Australia dataset in the AustLit database to draw attention to representations of disability in Australian literature. Jessica is currently writing an ecobiography about Western Australia botanist Georgiana Molloy (1805-1843) and the plants that transformed her life. Her collection of essays, Silence is my Habitat: Ecobiographical Essays, will be published in 2025.
About me
Association for the Study of Australian Literature
Association for the Study of Environment, Literature and Culture (Australia and New Zealand)
Australian Society of Authors
Writers SA
International Auto/Biography Association (IABA)
About me
Doctor of Philosophy University of London
Master of Arts in Writing University of Technology, Sydney
Bachelor of Arts (Honours) University of Wollongong
Writing, Gender and the Natural World
‘Nature writing’ is a popular genre in Britain and the United States, but it does not translate easily to an Australian context. The continent’s long lineage of First Nations’ custodianship, and brief history of colonisation, has arguably given rise to writing about the environment in complex ways.
Through a speaker series featuring nine female and non-binary writers, this project explores how writing about the environment manifests in Australia. This project has been funded by the Copyright Agency and the Creative People, Products and Places research centre, and takes place from July - December 2022.
Research
Excludes commercial-in-confidence projects.
Sir Terry Pratchett Awards Scholarship, Sir Terry Pratchett Awards, 03/09/2024 - 31/12/2027
Research
Research outputs for the last seven years are shown below. Some long-standing staff members may have older outputs included. To see earlier years visit ORCID or Scopus
Open access indicates that an output is open access.
| Year | Output |
|---|---|
| 2021 |
37
|
| 2021 |
1
|
| 2021 |
|
| 2019 |
|
| 2019 |
|
| 2018 |
Open access
|
| 2018 |
|
| 2017 |
|
| 2014 |
|
| Year | Output |
|---|---|
| 2025 |
Open access
|
| 2024 |
Open access
1
1
|
| 2022 |
Open access
|
| 2021 |
Open access
2
|
| 2020 |
Open access
|
| 2020 |
Open access
4
1
|
| 2020 |
Open access
12
1
|
| 2019 |
Open access
4
|
| 2017 |
Open access
|
| 2016 |
Open access
|
| 2015 |
Open access
|
| 2015 |
Open access
|
| 2014 |
|
| 2014 |
Open access
|
| 2013 |
Open access
|
| 2013 |
|
| 2010 |
|
| 2010 |
White, J 2010, 'Body language', M/C Journal, vol. 13, no. 3.
Open access
|
| Year | Output |
|---|---|
| 2020 |
White, J 2020, How deafness shaped my love of music, Kill Your Darlings, Kill Your Darlings. |
| 2019 |
White, J 2019, Hearing Maud, University of Western Australia Press. |
Research
Writing, Gender and the Natural World
‘Nature writing’ is a popular genre in Britain and the United States, but it does not translate easily to an Australian context. The continent’s long lineage of First Nations’ custodianship, and brief history of colonisation, has arguably given rise to writing about the environment in complex ways.
Through a speaker series featuring nine female and non-binary writers, this project explores how writing about the environment manifests in Australia. This project has been funded by the Copyright Agency and the Creative People, Products and Places research centre, and takes place from July - December 2022.
Jessica's first novel, A Curious Intimacy (Penguin/Viking 2007) won a Sydney Morning Herald Best Young Novelist award, shortlistings for the Western Australia Premier's award and the Dobbie award for a first published work by an Australian woman writer, and was longlisted for the international Dublin Literary Award award. Her second novel, Entitlement, was published by Penguin/Viking in 2012. Jessica's most recent work, Hearing Maud (UWA Publishing 2019), is a hybrid memoir about deafness. It won the 2020 Michael Crouch award for debut biography, and was shortlisted for the Prime Minister's Literary Awards, the National Biography Award, and the People's Choice Award and Premier's Award for a Work of State Significance in the Queensland Literary Awards.
External engagement & recognition
| Organisation | Country |
|---|---|
| Flinders University | AUSTRALIA |
| University of Queensland | AUSTRALIA |
| University of South Australia | AUSTRALIA |
External engagement & recognition
| Engagement/recognition | Year |
|---|---|
Nigel Krauth AwardTEXT Journal |
2024 |
MemberInternational Association for the Study of Australia |
2021 |
MemberAssociation for the study of Literature, Environment and Culture (Aust & NZ Chapter) |
2021 |
Newsletter EditorAssociation for the Study of Environment, Literature and Culture |
2021 |
Peer ReviewerDiscovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA), Australian Research Council |
2021 |
MemberInternational Association for the Study of Australia |
2020 |
MemberAssociation for the study of Literature, Environment and Culture (Aust & NZ Chapter) |
2020 |
Michael Crouch AwardState Library of NSW |
2020 |
Newsletter EditorAssociation for the Study of Environment, Literature and Culture |
2020 |
Peer ReviewerDiscovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA), Australian Research Council |
2020 |
Keynote LecturePoetry and Perception in the Anthropocene, University of New England |
2019 |
MemberAssociation for the study of Literature, Environment and Culture (Aust & NZ Chapter) |
2019 |
MemberInternational Association for the Study of Australia |
2019 |
Newsletter EditorAssociation for the Study of Environment, Literature and Culture |
2019 |
Peer ReviewerDiscovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA), Australian Research Council |
2019 |
MemberAssociation for the study of Literature, Environment and Culture (Aust & NZ Chapter) |
2018 |
MemberInternational Association for the Study of Australia |
2018 |
Peer ReviewerARC Discovery, Australian Research Council |
2018 |
Peer ReviewerDiscovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA), Australian Research Council |
2018 |
MemberInternational Association for the Study of Australia |
2017 |
Peer ReviewerDiscovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA), Australian Research Council |
2017 |
Invited LectureA Symposium on Australian Women Writers, State Library NSW |
2016 |
MemberInternational Association for the Study of Australia |
2016 |
Peer ReviewerDiscovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA), Australian Research Council |
2016 |
Invited LectureAustralian and New Zealand Conference for the Education of the Deaf, Brisbane |
2013 |
Jessica is co-president of the Association for the Study of Environment, Literature and Culture (Australia and New Zealand) and the South Australian representative for the Association for the Study of Australian Literature.
Teaching & student supervision
Teaching & student supervision
Supervisions from 2010 shown
| Thesis title | Student status |
|---|---|
| Blackbirding and Cross-Cultural Ties | Current |
| Ecocriticism and fantasy fiction: the importance of cli-fi in a climate crisis | Current |
| Pixels, pandemics and publishing: Australian literary magazines 2017-2022 | Current |
| Radically re-imagining the Anthropocene: The role of memoir in communicating and resisting the climate crisis | Current |
| Sensing the Anthropocene: creative practice, climate change and the sensory world | Current |
| The Magic, the Mundane, and "The Echo of (Im)Mortality" | Current |
| The relationship between humans and the more-than-human world: creative writing, psychology, and healing in the Anthropocene | Current |
| Trailblazers, troublemakers, and pump operators: Using creative non-fiction to explore the stories and experiences of women firefighters in the South Australian Country Fire Service | Current |
| Despair is not an option: artistic affect and the promotion of triple planetary crisis law reform | Completed |
| Pebbles and the great ocean of truth: artificial & unauthorised paratexts of the Discworld | Completed |
| Practicing allyship through writing: challenges of intersectionality in young adult fiction featuring LGBTQIA+ stories | Completed |
| Unmasking the provocatrix: engaging the clandestine literacies of l'écriture kinesthésique to neuroqueer creative writing research | Completed |
| Using a fictional micronation to explore issues in a future Australia | Completed |
| Who is the Anthropos? Writing an existentialist novel in the Anthropocene | Completed |
