John Frow
John Frow (born 1948) is an Australian Professorial Fellow in the Department of English at the University of Sydney. He was educated at Wagga High School and the Australian National University, and has lived and worked in South America in 1970 and 1971 and then did graduate studies from 1971 to 1975 in the Comparative Literature Program at Cornell University, including a year at the University of Heidelberg. He worked at Murdoch University in Western Australia from 1975 to 1989, and was then appointed to a Chair at the University of Queensland, where he worked from 1990 to 1999. From 2000 to 2004 he was the Regius Professor of Rhetoric and English Literature at the University of Edinburgh. From 2006 to 2013 he was professor and Chair of English Language and Literature at the University of Melbourne. He has held visiting research and teaching positions at the University of Minnesota, the University of Michigan, and the University of Chicago.
As well as teaching and researching in areas as diverse as literary theory and cultural studies theory, discourse analysis and genre theory, Frow has a broad interest in contemporary literature and poetry, and in questions of intellectual property and the commodification of culture. He was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities in 1997.
Selected publications
- Character and Person. Oxford University Press, 2014
- Genre: The New Critical Idiom. London: Routledge, 2006.
- Accounting for Tastes: Australian Everyday Cultures, with Tony Bennett and Michael Emmison, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
- Time and Commodity Culture: Essays in Cultural Theory and Postmodernity. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997.
- Cultural Studies and Cultural Value. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995.
- Timeshift: Intellectual Property and The Means of Reproduction. Valencia: Eutopias/Working Papers, 1994.
- Australian Art Gallery Visitors. Sydney: Australia Council, 1991.