Penny Boumelha

Penelope Ann Boumelha is an English literature academic, and emeritus professor at Victoria University of Wellington. She was Deputy Vice-Chancellor at the University of Adelaide and at Victoria University of Wellington. She was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities in 1997.

Academic career

Boumelha completed a PhD at Lady Margaret Hall, University of Oxford. Her thesis was titled Female sexuality, marriage and divorce in the fiction of Thomas Hardy, with special reference to the period 1887–1896, and was supervised by Mary Jacobus.

Boumelha was appointed Jury Chair of English Language and Literature at the University of Adelaide in 1990. She was, at that time, the university's only female professor. During her time at Adelaide, Boumelha engineered the amalgamation of the Women's Studies with the Department of Labour Studies, and the creation of a chair of women's studies, to which Chilla Bulbeck was appointed in 1996. Boumelha left Adelaide in 2009 to take the position of Deputy Vice-Chancellor at Victoria University of Wellington, where she remained until 2014. She is an emeritus professor of Victoria.

Boumelha's research focuses on feminist criticism, gender and class in British and Irish fiction. Her 1982 book on Thomas Hardy and women was described as "illustrat[ing] the strange modernity of many of the issues raised by Hardy’s fiction" despite having an "unpromising start'. Boumelha contributed the chapter on Hardy to The Cambridge companion to English novelists.

Boumelha was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities in 1997.

Selected works