Dr Danielle Clode, author and Senior Research Fellow in the College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences, has been especially busy with a host of recent works in the spotlight.

Her young adult fiction book Tellurian Blue – completed last year under the Max Fatchen Fellowship from the SA Literature Awards – was runner-up for the Text Prize, for which the esteemed Melbourne-based independent publishing house Text recognises Australia’s best new, unpublished, young adult novel.

The subject of this book was also tied to The Conversation’s recent Friday essay, presenting Dr Clode’s discussion of the latest Avengers movie, Endgame, around an argument based on her research on climate change stories.

Dr Clode has co-written a new book with Dr Gillian Dooley – an anthology of new work on first coastal contact in Australia. It will be officially launched in London on June 20 2019, then published locally by Wakefield Press in August.

Dr Clode’s latest work focuses on her maritime history expertise. She is currently in Paris to complete research for a biography of Jeanne Baret, the first woman to sail around the world, in the late 1760s (a book commissioned for Picador). She will then head to Brittany for additional research on Baret, and to conduct research with Flinders’ University’s Dr Christele Maizonniaux about other exploration voyages that left from Brittany, bound for the Pacific. This research will focus on the Breton origin of explorers such as Kerguelen, and how writers such as Jules Verne (20,000 Leagues Under the Sea), Pierre Loti and Robert-Martin Leisure represented historical Pacific voyages in French literature.

To conclude her journey, Dr Clode will meet with researchers from Nantes and the University of Western Brittany at Brest, as well as from Quai Branly, the Maritime Museum, and Museum of Natural History in Paris and the Port Museum at Dournenez.

This visit has been funded by the Bretagne Fellowship, one of six grants provided through the South Australia-Brittany Research Collaboration Grant projects that have built on several Flinders University French connections, including defence research and education agreements.