Charting the Australian Fantastic
What is it?
“Charting the Australian Fantastic” is an online research and teaching project dedicated to analysing the wide range of Australian Speculative Fiction. This includes many popular genres such as fantasy, science fiction and many more.
Who are we?
We are Bettina Burger and Lucas Mattila, the two Digital Fellows of the HHU. Together with our student assistant Anika Klose and our close colleague from the University of Cologne, David Kern, we produce e-learning content as well as our own research into Australian Speculative Fiction.
Bettina Burger
Lucas Mattila
What do we offer?
Aside from two courses, “Exploring Australian Speculative Fiction” (mostly online and asynchronous) and “Blogging Australian Speculative Fiction” (mostly in presence and synchronous), we maintain a blog where students and lecturers can post their findings on Australian Speculative. In addition, we produce a video series on Australian Speculative fiction, as well as a podcast and an interview series with Australian authors. In the winter term of 2021/2022, we are organising a lecture series with various Australian authors and scholars - the events will be advertised here and the videos will be made available as OER in due course.
What makes it possible?
We have been funded twice by the E-Learning Förderfonds (ELFF), which allowed us to hire our previous student assistants, Tiana Matanovich, Jill Bomanns, and David Mocken. In late 2020, we were granted the “Fellowship für Innovationen in der digitalen Hochschullehre“ for 2021, which allowed us to continue our work and improve the quality of our output considerably - as a result, we will be uploading most of our material to the new OER platform ORCA.nrw.