Brian McFarlane

Biography

Brian McFarlane graduated with a BA and Dip Ed from the University of Melbourne, where he subsequently completed his MA in Australian literature. He undertook his PhD, in the field of literary adaptation to film, at the University of East Anglia, Norwich.

He has had three sometimes overlapping careers. The first was as a schoolteacher after graduating from the University of Melbourne. McFarlane taught in schools in Australia and England, ending this career with fifteen years at Trinity Grammar, Victoria. This stint was intermitted when he won a Fulbright Scholarship to teach at Northwestern Michigan College, USA. Second, he became a full-time academic after several stints as a part-time tutor at the University of Melbourne and La Trobe University while still at Trinity, and he spent his last ten years at Monash University, where he taught literature and film with emphasis on British cinema and literary adaptations on screen. Third, he has become a writer, and writing incessantly is what he does – when, that is, he is not reading the books and watching the films he needs to read or watch in order to write about them.

He was Visiting Professor at the University of Hull, UK from 2007-09. In 1999 he was elected Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities and in 2003 he was awarded the government’s Centenary Medal for ‘services to the arts and literature’. He is currently an Honorary Associate Professor at Monash University. He serves on the editorial board of several film-related journals in the UK, the US and Australia, and also examines PhD theses and book proposals from those countries.