Dr Adam Casey
Higher Education Leader / Creative Industries / Creative Practice / Applied Research
After receiving first class honours at Victoria University in 1999, Dr Casey graduated with his PhD in creative writing at Deakin University in 2009. As a part of the requirements of his PhD, Dr Casey wrote an exegesis looking at representations of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder in the literature of Toni Morrison and Margaret Atwood as well as his own writing project, a novel entitled ‘The Silence of the Seventh Floor’, which was also submitted for examination.
Across the last 20 years, Dr Casey has worked as a lecturer at various tertiary institutions including Deakin University, Victoria University, RMIT, NMIT and, currently, as senior lecturer and Head of Program for the Master of Creative Industries program at Melbourne Polytechnic. Dr Casey has a broad teaching base, delivering and writing curriculum across such diverse areas as creative writing, literary studies, professional writing, creative industries, gender studies, research design (with practice led and practice based research methodologies as his main focus) and sociology.
Presently, Dr Casey teaches primarily within the Research Stream of the Melbourne Polytechnic Master of Creative Industries program, working with interdisciplinary creative arts students on major practice-based research projects.
Click here to visit Dr Casey’s Public Academic record via his Orcid page.
Academic Leadership
As a Head of Program for the Bachelor of Writing and Publishing, and most recently, the Master of Creative Industries, Dr Casey has led expert teams to prepare and deliver innovative cross-disciplinary content to an eclectic student cohort over the last seven years. Strongly embracing blended and flipped classroom models, Dr Casey’s pedagogic approach to education lies in the intersection of student agency and accessing and utilising our natural voices.
Dr Casey has most recently worked in the capacity of Acting Department Manager in Higher Education, and, led a large team in successfully securing several Commonwealth Supported Places valued in the millions.
Curriculum Development
From the ground up, Adam has designed both Writing and Publishing and Creative Industries courses (both undergraduate and postgraduate levels) to address the void he perceived lay between the creative practitioner and (1) meaningful creative practice, (2) a sense of place and belonging within the Creative Industries and (3) the now necessary spirit of entrepreneurship required to make an impact in the Creative Industries.
Via the three streams—applied research, creative practice, and, entrepreneurship and creative enterprise—a holistic curriculum approach to addressing the common problems faced by mid-career creative practitioners was developed.
With a marked focus on project based curriculum and a rigorous application of practice-based research, Dr Casey has enabled his candidates to not only excel in developing significant, feasible, impactful art projects within the program, but, has seen many of its alumni continue this fine work in the industry.
Alumni in Dr Casey’s programs have gone on to develop socially aware practices, curatorships, businesses and enterprises that allow them to sustainably practice while simultaneously achieving strong cultural impacts across their communities.
Adam is currently seeking opportunities to further his academic ledaership and curriculum development work in the areas of practice based research and holistic approaches to creative development in tertiary education and the creative arts and industries at large.
Research & Academic Writing
PhD Thesis
The Silence of the Seventh Floor: Narratives of Traumatic Experience is a thesis comprising an original creative component and an accompanying exegesis that presents a framework of how traumatic experience and the narratives produced by its victims can be both written and understood.
The novel component explores traumatic experience, firstly, via the minor first-person perspective of the abuser (Part 1), Jon, a thirty year-old man who recently lost his wife while she gave birth to his daughter, and secondly, via the major first-person perspective of the victim (Part 2), Nahua, his daughter, now a nineteen year old woman.
The exegesis further analyses the traumatic themes explored in the creative component. In the first chapter, the key themes (present in the novel) are Sigmund Freud’s theory of repetition compulsion (wherein Nahua ‘remembers’ her experience via ‘acting out’ her past experience), Lenore Terr’s theory of contagion (wherein Nahua transfers her traumatic experience to those around her), and finally the theory of state-dependent learning and abreaction and how these phenomena split the traumatised protagonist’s life into two realities: the ‘trauma reality’ which consists of sublime experience often detailed and ‘documented’ with the use of tropical language and the ordinary experience that sits alongside ‘trauma reality’, and operates as a quasi-continuation of one’s previous life, post-trauma.
After the exegetical component of the thesis examines definitions of trauma, the second chapter examines the five features of the trauma narrative, as postulated by Rosemary Winslow, and positions them as narrative techniques under the headings of disruption, timelessness, speechless terror, animacy/inanimacy, and duality. The purpose and deployment of these techniques and features will be explained in relation to their use in two acclaimed contemporary trauma novels, ‘Beloved’ by Toni Morrison and ‘Cat’s Eye’ by Margaret Atwood, as well as my own employment of them within the creative component of this thesis.
Honours Thesis
Travellers of the Borges Realm: An Examination of the Metaphorical Journey to the Secret Centre in the Literature of Jorge Luis Borges
The ambiguous destination that the traveller within the Borges narrative seeks will be analysed. I will attempt to prove that this unknown destination is always some form of inner realisation or illumination. I will explain how Borges has given birth to this realisation in both his characters and readers. This journey to a truer understanding of one’s self will be related to the Jungian concept of the ‘archetype’ as will the characters, motifs and situations in Borges’s fiction and poetry. I will undertake an investigation of the relation these archetypes have to the Buddhist and Kabbalistic doctrines in an attempt to illustrate how Borges draws from them. This investigation, will establish the intellectual and emotional connection Borges has with his reader, and how this connection enables the reader to travel within the text.