Francesca Rendle-Short

Professor Francesca Rendle-Short is Associate Dean Writing and Publishing in the School of Media and Communication. She is a Professor of Creative Writing, co-founder of non/fictionLab research group and WrICE (Writers Immersion and Cultural Exchange).

Professor Francesca Rendle-Short is a practice-based senior academic in the School of Media and Communication, Associate Dean Writing and Publishing. She is recognised nationally and internationally for her pioneering creative research and scholarship in the field of Creative Writing. She brings to her position and leadership practice a set of creative and critical skills, abilities and sensibilities, embodied experience, and intercultural competencies guided by a shared purpose and set of values.

Francesca’s creative practice is focused on ethical enquiry, trans-national literatures and literary practices, queer thinking and practices, the value of collaboration and collective endeavour, applied creative writing and community building. She is interested in a research practice that seeks to subvert normative practices. Her scholarly praxis pays attention to form as well as content as it relates to the thematics and propositions of the research – voice, style, structure, subjectivities – a practice that is experimental, idiosyncratic and playful in nature, attentive to whimsy and transgression.

Francesca is co-founder of non/fictionLab, a research group experimenting with contemporary realities through story, dialogue, poetics and partnerships, and WrICE (Writers Immersion and Cultural Exchange), an acclaimed international collaborative residency program bringing together writers from around the region. Francesca has initiated and continues to lead numbers of industry-focused integrated scholarship projects and programs with industry partners such as STREAT, a social enterprise assisting young people who are disadvantaged and homeless, and Indonesia’s Jakarta Post B/DNL Studio X-CoLab. She is an award-winning novelist, memoirist, essayist and poet, author and editor of five books including The near and the far (Vol I and II) and Bite your tongue. Her work has appeared in anthologies, literary journals, book chapters, academic journals, online and in exhibitions including TEXT, New Writing: The International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing (Taylor & Francis), Fourth Genre (Michigan State University), Ocean State Review (University of Rhode Island), Life Writing (Taylor & Francis), Axon: Creative Explorations, The Lifted Brow, Best Australian Science Writing (NewSouth), Departures in Critical Qualitative Research, Overland, Rabbit, Killing the Buddha, Margaret Lawrence Gallery, Queensland Historical Atlas, and The Essay Review (Iowa). She is co-author of a limited-edition artist book composed out of iPhone notes with Martina Copley called No notes (This is writing). Her artwork is in the collection of the Queensland State Library.

Francesca has initiated and continues to lead industry-focused integrated scholarship projects and programs such as The Gazette in conjunction with Emerging Writers' Festival, intercultural writing and publishing studios and study tours (she was awarded New Colombo Fund money to take students to China in 2017), and a City of Melbourne Knowledge Week initiative with creative writing students from HE and VE. Francesca is a PhD and Masters supervisor and is currently on the supervisory team for PRS Asia (Practice Research Symposium), an offshore PhD program in creative practice research. She is also part of the Flipped PRS experiment along with her creative writing colleagues, which explores a ‘reverse pedagogic’ model of creative practice as research.

Francesca has a Doctor of Creative Arts from the University of Wollongong, was the recipient of an International Nonfiction Writers' Fellowship at the University of Iowa, USA, and was showcased in the Outstanding Field at Victoria College of Arts, University of Melbourne.

Industry Experience:
Francesca has 30 years of professional experience in the creative industries including radio, writing and publishing, arts journalism, performance, federal government agencies, commercial galleries, cultural institutions and arts organisations, that demonstrates her interdisciplinary skills and aptitude in being able to collaborate, translate, and deliver high impact engaged projects.