Chris Rudge is a postdoctoral research associate at The University of Sydney. Chris holds a Bachelor of Arts (Honours First Class) (2006), Bachelor of Laws (2008) and a PhD from The University of Sydney’s Department of English (2015). Chris also holds a Graduate Diploma of Legal Practice. He was a Short-Term Project-to-Publications Fellow with the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions, Europe 1100‒1800 (CHE) from January to July 2017, and is now an Honorary Fellow of CHE.
Chris’s PhD thesis addressed the relations of literature and psychiatry. It placed a variety of twentieth-century novels and philosophical works concerned with mental experience in wider contexts, considering them alongside the long history of psychiatry (from the fourteenth century to the 1900s), the modern development of psychopharmacological interventions for mental disorders, the rise and fall of twentieth-century psychoanalysis, and the development of neuroscience in the early twentieth century.
Following his PhD, Chris worked as a research assistant in Sydney Law School, where he contributed to the development of a new master’s unit called LAWS 6335: Mind, Law, and Brain. This research led Chris to become involved in and help launch the Australian Neurolaw Database, a ‘co-badged’ project that brings together researchers from Macquarie University and The University of Sydney (see https://neurolaw.edu.au/). As one of only two University of Sydney researchers working on this ongoing project, Chris is responsible for identifying new Australian legal cases that feature neuroscience evidence (usually neuroimaging), and assisting to ‘code’ those cases in the online database.
Chris’ three current research focuses are as follows: (1) the history of devices and technical instruments in psychiatry, including emotion-reading devices, and their representation in literature; (2) the development of neurology in nerve and pain science in the late nineteenth century and its continuing effects on the classification of injuries at law, particularly in compensation claims; and (3) the erasure of emotions and emotionality from the psychiatric and neurological nosologies of the twentieth century following the late nineteenth-century turn away from Romanticism.
As part of his research, Chris has recently produced a book chapter titled ‘Novel Readings: Mind- and Emotion-Reading Devices in the Mid-Twentieth Century’, and has participated in the Sixth International Symposium of the Aldous Huxley Society in Spain, presenting a paper on Huxley and neuropsychiatry that he will also produce as a book chapter at the end of the 2017.
Since 2015, Chris has been editor (and now managing editor) of Philament, a peer-reviewed, open access, online journal of postgraduate scholarship in literature, cultural studies and the arts. In 2016, Chris redesigned the journal’s website (www.philamentjournal.com) and continues to design and typeset the journal. Chris has also been responsible for the 2016 redesign of the Australasian Journal of American Studies, and continues to design, typeset and proof the journal.
Since 2013, Chris has also been a teaching fellow at The Women’s College within The University of Sydney. He was the developer and sole unit coordinator for a master’s level unit of study on literary genre in The University of Sydney’s Department Of English in 2016. Chris was lecturer and unit coordinator for two units of study in media law and management law at the music colleges the Australian Institute of Music and the School of Audio Engineering. He has lectured and tutored in more than five undergraduate units at The University of Sydney, and received a teaching award in 2013. Chris has also been a law tutor with The University of Sydney’s Indigenous Tutorial Assistance Scheme since March 2017.
Contact
christopher.rudge@sydney.edu.au
Literature, Law, Psychiatry, and Politics blog
Research Projects
Pain, Nervousness, and the Neurology of Emotion, 1650–1900.
Aldous Huxley and the Nonhuman (book project).
Pain in the Brain: Worker’s Compensation in Australia from Victorian Railways Commissioner v Coultas (1888) to present.
Refereed Publications
Rudge, C. ‘Novel Readings: Mind- and Emotion-Reading Devices in the Mid-Twentieth Century and in Philip K. Dick’s The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch’. In Portable Prose: The Novel and the Everyday, edited by J. Cogle, N. C. Fischer, L. S. Rofail and V. Smith, pp. 37–56. Plymouth: Lexington Books, 2019 (published 2018).
Rudge, C. ‘“The Shock of Dysrecognition”: Biopolitical Subjects and Drugs in Philip K. Dick’s Science Fiction’. In The World According to Philip K. Dick, edited by A. Dunst and S. Schlensag, pp. 30–47. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.
Rudge, C. ‘Actants at any Depth: Bruno Latour and Henri Bergson at the Surface of Science’. Philament: A Journal of Literature, Arts and Culture 19 (2013): n. p.
Edited Volumes and Editorials
Rudge, C. and P. Condliffe, eds. ‘Editorial Preface’. ‘Humour’. Special issue, Philament: A Journal of Literature, Arts and Culture 20 (2015): 1–19.
Rudge, C., ed. ‘Whence Terror Australis?’. ‘Terror Australis’. Special issue, Philament: A Journal of Literature, Arts and Culture 21 (2015): 1–17.
Rudge, C., ed., ‘Facing Precarity’. ‘Precarity’. Special issue, Philament: A Journal of Literature, Arts and Culture 22 (2016): 1–26.
Rudge, C. and B. Worthy, eds. ‘New Waves: Twenty-first-century Feminisms’. Special issue Philament: A Journal of Literature, Arts and Culture 23 (forthcoming).
Non-refereed publications
Rudge, C. ‘Darkness and Delusions: Tripping the Gothic Syntagm’. Das SUPER PAPER 32 (2014): 54–56.
Rudge, C. ‘The Goldwater rule prevents psychiatrists diagnosing Trump from afar but some say there’s too much at stake’. The Conversation, 4 August 2017.
Rudge, C. ‘Emotions and Publishing’. Literature, Law, Psychiatry, Politics: Notes by Chris Rudge, 13 January 2017.
Rudge, C. ‘The Emotional Economy of Busywork’. Literature, Law, Psychiatry, Politics: Notes by Chris Rudge, 8 January 2017.
Rudge, C. ‘Diagnosis at a Distance’. Literature, Law, Psychiatry, Politics: Notes by Chris Rudge, 1 February 2017.
Rudge, C. ‘Aldous Huxley and Neuropsychiatry’. Literature, Law, Psychiatry, Politics: Notes by Chris Rudge, 25 April 2017.
Various case summaries on The Australian Neurolaw Database, https://neurolaw.edu.au.
Other Academic and Publishing Service
Proofreader and layout designer, Australasian Journal of American Studies, Paul Giles and David Goodman, eds. July 2016–present.
Managing editor, webmaster and designer, Philament: A Journal of Literature, Arts and Culture, 2015–present.
Invited public lectures
Rudge, C. ‘Philip K. Dick’s Weird Objects: The Unsettling Lives of Radio Receivers and Psychiatric Devices’, University of NSW SAM Seminar Series, September 2014.
Conference papers
Rudge, C. ‘Pain in the Brain: Worker’s Compensation Claims for CRPS-I in Australia’, 'Neuroscience and Society: Ethical, Legal & Clinical Implications of Neuroscience Research' conference, 15 September 2017.
Rudge, C. ‘Irradiated Inscriptions of Life: Melanin and the Formation of Fungi and Birthmarks (Melanocytic Nevi)’, ‘Neolife’: The Inaugural (Rest of World) Meeting of the Society for Literature, Science and the Arts, The University of Western Australia, 3 October 2015.
Rudge, C. ‘Prophecy’s Profits: The Master, L. Ron Hubbard, and Scientology’s Cinematic Shadow’, ‘Camero/Stylo: Intersections in Literature and Cinema’ conference, The University of Sydney, April 2015.
Rudge, C. ‘Bitter Laughing Through Chemistry: Synthetic Happiness in the Narco-Literary Imagination’, ‘Happiness, Joy, and Pleasure’ conference, The University of Sydney, November 2014.
Rudge, C. ‘Doctored Images: Doctors and Devices in Philip K. Dick’s 1960s Novels’, ‘The Prosaic Imaginary: Novels and the Everyday, 1750‒2000’ AULLA conference, The University of Sydney, July 2014.
Rudge, C. ‘A Letter to a Diagram: On Diagrams and the Scopic Regime’, ‘Experimental’: A Poetics Symposium, The University of Sydney, July 2014.
Rudge, C. ‘“The Shock of Dysrecognition”: Toward the Identification of a Philosophy of Psychiatry, Psychosis and Drugs in the Life and Writing of Philip K. Dick’, ‘Worlds Out of Joint: Reimagining Philip K. Dick’, the First International Philip K. Dick Conference, TU Dortmund University, Dortmund, Germany, September 2013.
Rudge, C. ‘Making Madness Before America: Saint Peter’s Snow, Psychotomimetics, and the German Experimental Imaginary’, ‘Tonics, Elixirs, Poisons: Psychoactive Substances in European History and Culture’ conference, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, September 2012.
Rudge, C. ‘Madness in Mad Time(s): Delirium, “Non-pulsed” Time, and the Nonhuman’, Nonhuman: The 26th Meeting of the Society for Literature, Science and the Arts, Milwaukee University, September 2012.
Rudge, C. ‘Psychopathologies of Time: Philip K. Dick, Madness, and the Biochemistry of Spatio-Temporal Alterity’, Philip K. Dick in the Twenty-First Century Festival, San Francisco State University, September 2012.
Rudge, C. ‘Invention and the Tekhne-color Labcoat: Scientific History’s Psychotropic Trace’, ‘Pharmakon’ the 25th Meeting of the Society for Literature, Science and the Arts, University of Waterloo, Canada, September 2011.
Other conferences
Rudge, C. ‘Some Indulgent Remarks on my PhD, and ‒ Who Knows? ‒ Perhaps a Few Tips of Some Use’, Postgraduate Symposium, The University of Sydney, December 2015.
Rudge, C. ‘Psychotropes: A Pharmacography of Authorship in the Works of Philip K. Dick and Aldous Huxley’, Nikolas Rose and Biopolitics, The University of Sydney, August 2014.
Rudge, C. ‘From Psycho to Bio: Anatomising the Biopolitical Turn’, Science and the Politics of Emergent Life: Foucault and Beyond, The University of Sydney, August 2013.
Selected Awards and Grants
- Short-term Project to Publication Fellowship, Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions, January to July 2017.
- Dean’s Citation for Excellence in Tutorials (2013), The University of Sydney.
- Australian Postgraduate Award (2010–2013), The University of Sydney.
- Society for Literature, Science and the Arts, Travel Subvention (2012).
- Postgraduate Research Support Scheme Travel Grant (2012, 2013), The University of Sydney.
- WC Bundock Academic Scholarship (2004), The University of Sydney.
- Josiah Symon Scholarship for English No II for Second-Year English (2003), Department of English, The University of Sydney.
Teaching
Special roles
- Teaching Fellow, The Women’s College within The University of Sydney (2013–present).
- Tutor in Law for the Indigenous Tutorial Assistance Scheme (2016–present), tutoring in LAWS5128 ‘Defamation and Privacy’, LAWS5151 ‘Contempt and Open Justice’, LAWS3430 ‘Environmental Law’, LAWS1014 ‘Civil and Criminal Procedure’.
Postgraduate teaching
- LAWS6335 ‘Mind, Law, and Brain’ (The University of Sydney, 2017), guest lecturer.
- ENGL6101 ‘Approaches to Genre’ (The University of Sydney, 2016), sole unit coordinator for this unit in the Master of English Studies (MES) postgraduate degree program.
Undergraduate teaching
- ENGL2627 ‘Screening Sexuality’ (The University of Sydney, 2013, 2015).
- ENGL2658 ‘Love and Desire in Early Modern England’ (The University of Sydney, 2013).
- ENGL2617 ‘Postmodernism’ (The University of Sydney, 2012, 2014)
- BCM220 ‘Basics of Law’ (School of Audio Engineering, 2010‒2012), lecturer and unit coordinator.
- M1AL1 ‘Introduction to Entertainment Law’ (Australian Institute of Music, 2010, 2011).
- M1AL2 ‘Intellectual Property Law’ (Australian Institute of Music, 2010, 2011), lecturer and unit coordinator.