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Dr. Lesley Speed

Senior Lecturer, Humanities

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Campus

Mt Helen Campus

Biography

Dr Lesley Speed is a senior lecturer in humanities. She specialises in media and screen studies, areas in which she has a wide range of expertise. She has taught units in digital literacy, media studies, screen studies, adaptation studies, communication and cultural studies, professional knowledge and interdisciplinary honours units. She also supervises research students from honours to PhD level. Before teaching at Federation University and the University of Ballarat, she taught at La Trobe University, the University of Melbourne and three campuses of Monash University.

This wide range of experience is reflected in Lesley’s research, which is published in Australia and internationally and cited in many countries and various languages. Her research is required reading in tertiary courses on various continents.  

Lesley’s recent research relates to Australian video games and indie games. Her publications also include the books, Clueless: American Youth in the 1990s and Australian Comedy Films of the 1930s: Modernity, the Urban and the International. Lesley is a peer reviewer for many journals and publishers internationally. She has been a Scholar in Residence at the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia and a judge in the ATOM (Australian Teachers of Media) Awards. 

Fields of research

  • Screen media
  • Computer gaming and animation
  • Historical studies not elsewhere classified
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More about Lesley

Qualifications

  • Doctor of Philosophy, Monash University 
  • Bachelor of Arts (First Class Honours), Monash University 

Areas of interest

  • Popular screen genres and genre-mixing 
  • Cultural value and popular screen texts 
  • Video games, especially Australian games and indie games 
  • Australian and international screen histories 
  • Age, generations and popular culture 
  • Popular screen representations of history 

Grants

  • Scholar in Residence, National Film and Sound Archive of Australia, 2010. “Make Us Smile: Australian Comedy Film’s Early Peak and Its Challenges to Cultural Values in the 1930s” (in kind) 
  • City of Ballarat Community Development Grant, 2007. “Development and Evaluation of a Film-Making Intervention Involving Rural Adolescents with Mental Illness”, in collaboration with Dr Candice Boyd ($8,045) 
  • Internal Research Grant, School of Behavioural and Social Sciences and Humanities, University of Ballarat, 2007, “Digital Video, Rural Youth and Mental Illness: A Film Studies Perspective”, in collaboration with Dr Candice Boyd ($3,000) 

Current

  • PhD student, Federation University, ‘Intersecting Epistemologies: A Braided Autoethnographic Study of Science, Arts, and Pedagogy in a Migrant and Gendered Academic Context’, principal supervisor. 
  • PhD student, Federation University, ‘A Fine Line: Representations of Non-Mainstream Body Modification in Popular Media’, associate supervisor. 
  • PhD student, Federation University, ‘Turing’s Mirror: Navigating Nonconformity and AI Ethics Through Speculative Biography’, associate supervisor. 
  • PhD student, Federation University, ‘Judgement and fortitude against the machine: aesthetics, automation and the ethical human agent in emergent technology’, associate supervisor. 

Past

  • PhD student, Federation University, ‘The good, the bad, the ambivalent: investigating patriarchal and complex representations of motherhood in crime television series’, principal supervisor. 
  • PhD student, Federation University, ‘Diegetic Wounds: The Representation of Individual and Collective Trauma in Found Footage Horror Films’, principal supervisor. 
  • PhD student, Federation University, ‘Bi what means: paratextual and filmic representations of bisexuality in contemporary cinema’, principal supervisor. 
  • PhD student, Federation University, ‘Kemo Sabe: Tonto as a developing construction of the Indian character type’, principal supervisor. 
  • Master’s student, Federation University, ‘The Warrior Woman in Contemporary Romance Fiction’, associate supervisor. 

  • Media and screen studies 
  • Digital humanities 
  • Cultural and literary studies 
  • Honours coursework 
  • Professional knowledge 

Specialist roles

  • Course coordinator, Bachelor of Arts 

  • Publications

Adventures in fantasy Australia: Australian settings, international video games

When Clemente Met Histotainment: Teaching Film and History in Clemente Ballarat