Patricia Plummer is the 2016 ANU Gender Institute and Humanities Research Centre joint Visiting Fellow and is visiting the ANU from 15th February to 15th April 2016. In this seminar she will be exploring some aspects of her research project 'Challenging Authority? Gender, Identity and Power in Contemporary Popular Culture: A Comparative Approach', looking specifically at the Danish political drama series, Borgen.

Biography: Patricia Plummer is Professor of Postcolonial Studies at the University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany. She has been senior lecturer at the University of Mainz and interim professor at the universities of Koblenz and Landau. In 2005 she was Invited Visiting Professor of Interdisciplinary Gender Studies at the University of Koblenz. Patricia Plummer is a member of the newly founded international Research Network on Gender and Sexuality in (Neo-) Orientalism and Occidentalism (rengoo.net) (which is being coordinated by the Centre for Gender and Diversity at Maastricht University). Together with the Pro-Vice Chancellor for Diversity Management and the Essen Centre for Gender Studies she is implementing Diversity Studies at the University of Duisburg-Essen (www.uni-due.de/ekfg/).

Her publications, research and teaching focus on literature and culture of the long eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, on Orientalism, travel writing and transcultural spirituality, postcolonial and gender studies as well as popular culture. She is the author of a monograph on Charles Dickens's Oliver Twist (2003), co-editor of Perspektiven der Frauenforschung (Perspectives in Women's Studies, 1998), Frauen auf der Spur (Female Sleuths, 2001) and Subversive Romantik (Subversive Romanticism, 2004), and has written a book on eighteenth-century English representations of the Ottoman Empire (forthcoming). Patricia Plummer is currently editing the proceedings of an interdisciplinary symposium on transcultural Western encounters with Japan which she hosted in 2012; she is also writing a book on women, art and Theosophy in early twentieth-century Australia.