Liam Benison
Originally from Melbourne, Australia, I arrived in Portugal in 2016. I have a BA (Hons) and MA in early medieval English poetry in cultural context from the University of Melbourne, and graduated with a joint doctorate from the University of Porto and University of Kent (UK) in 2020. In my PhD thesis, I brought together my passions for poetry, languages, maps, utopian literature, and visual art to analyse the geographical poetics of pre-colonial European ideas of “Australia” in the context of Indigenous knowledges of place.
My current research includes the unfunded project, Privacy and Utopia, which focuses on the representation and narrative significance of intimate spaces and architectures in utopian literature. I seek to understand how people in other places and times have reimagined the balance between private and public interests in their efforts to reshape and enhance their societies. My aim is to contribute to historical privacy studies and highlight productive ways to envision the possibilities of social change in utopian and sustainability discourses.
I also work as a freelance editor and writer.
Further information on my CV is available at: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4989-4370
Publications
Benison, L. ‘Geographical Poetics’, in Palgrave Handbook of Utopian and Dystopian Literature, edited by Peter Marks, Jennifer Wagner Lawlor and Fátima Vieira (Palgrave, 2022), pp. 515–522.
Benison, L. ‘Early Medieval Science: The Evidence of Bede’, Endeavour 2000; 24.3, 111–16.
Benison, L. ‘Translation during King Alfred’s Reign: The Politics of Conversion and Truth’, in The Medieval Translator 6: Traduire au Moyen Age, ed. by Roger Ellis, René Tixier, and Bernd Weitemeier (Brepols, 1998).
Forthcoming publications
‘Dissimulation and Conversation in Early Modern Utopia’, chapter for publication in a multi-author volume, Talking in Private: Tracing Everyday Conversations in Early Modern Europe, edited by Johannes Ljungberg and Natacha Klein Käfer.
‘Negotiating the Public–Private Boundary in Early Modern Utopia’, article for publication in a special issue of a peer reviewed journal on the theme of ‘Practices of Privacy: Knowledge in the Making’, edited by Natacha Klein Käfer and Natália da Silva Perez.
