Assoc. Prof. Simon Ryan

Simon Ryan is Associate Professor in Literature at the Brisbane campus of Australian Catholic University.

The Cartographic Eye: How Explorers Saw Australia. Cambridge UP.

The Body in the Library (co-ed).  Amsterdam: Rodopi.

Numerous articles on landscape, tourism, the discourses of food poisoning and relevance theory.

Recent research includes:

Ryan, Simon. Contextual Knowledge and Literary Analysis. The International Journal of the Humanities. 8, 2, 2010, 201-209.

_____. Critical Reading, Metacognition and Relevance in the Humanities. The International Journal of Learning, 18, 2, 2011, 159-165.

_____. Relevance and Information Processing in the Humanities, Ubiquitous Learning (4), 2012, forthcoming.

_____. The Location of Knowledge. Journal of Learning, Technology and Society, 2012.

My research interests include travel writing and theory, postcolonial theory and the use of relevance theory in illuminating student reading and comprehension strategies.

I am currently working on the curious figure of Lewis Harold Bell Lasseter and his claim to have found a reef of gold in central Australia. Lasseter's own writings and the portrait of the Lasseter expedition in Ion Idreiss's Lasseter Last Ride are some foci of my investigations.