Sarah Balkin Sarah Balkin i(17125198 works by)
Gender: Female
The material on this page is available to AustLit subscribers. If you are a subscriber or are from a subscribing organisation, please log in to gain full access. To explore options for subscribing to this unique teaching, research, and publishing resource for Australian culture and storytelling, please contact us or find out more.

Works By

Preview all
1 Archival Contingencies: Institutional Afterlives of an Antipodal Library Sarah Balkin , 2022 single work criticism
— Appears in: Textual Practice , vol. 34 no. 10 2022; (p. 1649-1669)

'Ernest Scott (1867–1939), an early history professor at the University of Melbourne, left thirteen thousand books to the university library after his death. This article considers Scott’s books, many of which contain subject-specific newspaper clippings and annotations, as an archive in a state of institutional flux. Scott’s books and clippings give us insight into what historian of the modern research university William Clark calls ‘the material practices of academics’. I examine such practices as they intersect with the kinds of institutional inertia that ‘new institutionalists’ from the fields of sociology and political economy see as scripting human actions and encouraging stasis. The institutional afterlives of Scott’s library focus our attention on mundane, low-stakes, and obsolescent research practices even as they work against the idea of archives as rational and disenchanted. By examining two of Scott’s clipping-filled books, both collections of essays by late nineteenth-century theatre critics, I ask what we can learn from considering provenance, media, and modes of storage and access as part of a collection’s content.' (Publication abstract)

1 Comic Anticlimax in Nat Randall and Anna Breckon’s Set Piece Sarah Balkin , 2022 single work review
— Appears in: The Conversation , 14 June 2022;

— Review of Set Piece Anna Breckon , Nat Randall , 2022 single work drama

'Nat Randall and Anna Breckon’s Set Piece explores female intimacy through the relationship between screen and stage, drawing on dinner party conversation, improvisation and lesbian pulp fiction. Its generic situation and looping repetition combine to stage lesbian fantasy with a comic anticlimax.'  (Introduction)

1 The Nanette Turn : A Stand-up Comic Defies Convention Sarah Balkin , 2022 single work review
— Appears in: Australian Book Review , June no. 443 2022; (p. 10-11)

— Review of Ten Steps to Nanette Hannah Gadsby , 2022 single work autobiography

'Hannah Gadsby’s show Nanette (2017–18) starts out funny but then shifts to long, angry monologues that refuse its audience the release of laughter. By breaking the conventional contract between a comedian and her audience, Gadsby rejected her own former practice of turning her traumatic experiences into jokes. Nanette’s international run and subsequent release as a Netflix special spanned the Australian Marriage Law Postal Survey, which gauged public support for marriage equality, as well as the international #MeToo movement against sexual assault. As high-profile performers such as Louis C.K. and Bill Cosby respectively admitted to and were tried for sexual misconduct, comedians became important figures in public debates about the relationship between artists and their work. Gadsby brought to these debates the perspective of a gender non-conforming lesbian and sexual assault survivor from rural Tasmania. Nanette became an emblem of queer and feminist anger or – depending on one’s point of view – of the humourless, politically correct ‘cancel culture’ many comedians rail against.'  (Introduction)

1 Contemporary and Medieval Women’s Voices Collide in My Dearworthy Darling Sarah Balkin , 2019 single work review
— Appears in: The Conversation , 13 August 2019;

'My Dearworthy Darling is a collaboration between playwright, fantasy novelist, poet, and theatre critic Alison Croggon and feminist theatre company The Rabble (Kate Davis and Emma Valente).'

X