Russell McDougall is a graduate of the University of Newcastle, the University of Adelaide (where he completed a Masters thesis on Xavier Herbert), and Queen's University, Canada, where he completed a PhD thesis on West African and Caribbean literatures.
Between 1984 and 1990, he served on the Management Committee of the Centre for Research in New Literatures in English at Flinders University, the first centre of its kind established in Australia.
At the University of Adelaide in 1988, he founded the Australian Studies Research Co- operative, comprising specialists from all of the relevant campuses in South Australia. He also proposed the formation of the Adelaide Centre for Australian Studies (ACAS), convened the first working party to establish it, served as its director, and prepared the ground for its becoming the Centre for Australian Studies at the University of Adelaide (CASUA).
He served as Deputy Director of the Centre for Australian Language and Literature Studies (CALLS) at the University of New England in 1991 and 1995, and as Director from 1996 to 1998, and continued in that position after the centre was remodelled and renamed CALLS: UNE Australian Studies Centre in 1998.
He co-edited Notes and Furphies and has published widely in the area of postcolonial and Australian studies. He served as overall academic co-ordinator for production of the thirteen-part broadcast series (ABC Radio/Open Learning) Your Desert, Not Mine. Australian Literature 1950 to the Present (1995), involving approximately 90 academics, writers and actors across Australia, and was a research consultant for the ABC radio documentary Xavier Herbert (winner of the inaugural Moving Portrait Documentary Award).
In 2015, he was Professor of English in the School of Arts at the University of New England, where he had formerly been Head of School (in the then School of English, Communication and Theatre Studies).
See notes for works not individually indexed in AustLit.
