Humanities and social sciences

“So many of my teachers at ACU have been hugely influential. I can say with complete confidence that I am a far different person now than who I was at the beginning of my degree.

Being a smaller university, you have an opportunity to really get to know your teachers. In my experience, all of them are genuinely interested in getting to know their students too. This has been invaluable to my learning.

Coming here I made a conscious effort to get involved in the things I was interested in, rather than the things I thought had some practical value to help me reach some destination. It has allowed my university experience to be much more about discovering my passions and making my career fit me, rather than the other way around ”

Dr Marguerite (Maggie) Nolan is a Senior Lecturer in the humanities in the National School of Arts and Humanities, and Deputy Head at ACU’s Brisbane campus. She joined ACU in 2002 after completing her PhD at the University of Stirling as a Commonwealth Scholar to the United Kingdom. She also holds a Master of Arts from the University of Queensland.

Her current research project explores the role of book clubs as civic spaces in Australian cultural and social life.

In addition to her work on reading and reception, Dr Nolan’s research interests include contemporary Indigenous literatures, representations of race and ethnicity in Australian cultural history and the complex issues raised by hoaxes and imposture in Australian post-war literary history.

A widely published author both in Australia and internationally, Dr Nolan is also an editor of the peer-reviewed Journal of Australian Studies, and is an executive member of both the International Australian Studies Association (InASA) and the Australian Universities Literature and Languages Association (AULLA).