University of Sydney Provost and Deputy Vice Chancellor Professor Annamarie Jagose describes receiving an OAM as an ‘unexpected honour’.
“It feels less a personal accolade than an acknowledgment of the collective effort that goes into advancing higher education in Australia. I’m proud to contribute to a sector that transforms lives and shapes futures, both individual and collective,” she told Indian Link.
Growing up as the middle child of five in New Zealand’s Waikato region, Professor Jagose remembers her early years as filled with ‘curiosity and openness to difference’, owing to her mixed Parsi and Irish Catholic upbringing, something which would go on to inspire her second published story, ‘Milk and Money’.
“We were very familiar at home with the milk-and-money story of the how the Parsis came to settle in India (milk and sugar in some tellings but always money in ours) by sliding a gold coin into a brimful pitcher of milk to persuade the local rulers that they would not disrupt the existing society and would add richness,” she said.
“Like the mix of our family, that story also helped me value diversity, even when I was too young to know that word.”
Advancing queer discourse
Completing her PhD in 1991, she found herself drawn to lesbian and gay studies – a field emerging from feminist studies’ examination of gender norms – as a vehicle to reevaluate fixed notions of the world.
“Feminist Studies and Queer Studies are often treated as successive waves of critical thinking, but I like to think of them together. I was drawn to the analytic power of these two frameworks because they offered intellectually rigorous ways to question taken‑for‑granted assumptions about identity, power and social norms,” Professor Jagose says.
“Their openness to rethinking the world—and my place in it—was energising and generative for my academic life.”
Holding academic positions at the University of Melbourne, and then University of Auckland, Professor Jagose would go on to be a leading voice in this fledgling area of study, with her groundbreaking 1996 book ‘Queer Theory: An Introduction’ cited over 6000 times.
Straddling both fiction and academic works, Jagose would come to be known for her subversive approach to form resisting simplistic views of lesbianism, described by peer Toni McCallum as ‘a wry, intellectual humour’, and ‘one of the most exciting writers to have come from Aotearoa.’
In 2003, Professor Annamarie Jagose took a risk, taking a year of leave without pay to write a historical novel on nineteenth-century sea voyages, Christian missionaries and colonial law.
The result, Slow Water, went on to win The Vance Palmer Prize for Fiction at the Premier’s Literary Awards in Victoria, and was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award.
“I think Slow Water resonated because it brings readers inside an intimate story that has moral complexity for twenty-first-century readers even as it unfolds against a descriptively rich slice of colonial history,” she reflects.
“The novel’s focus on human entanglements—tender, fraught and imperfect—seems to have prompted reflection that stays with readers.”
Rethinking higher education
Six years into her time at the University of Sydney, in 2017, Professor Jagose was made Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, where she led their FutureFix research program suite, and saw the faculty through a challenging stint for the higher education sector during the pandemic.
With the period bringing mass restructuring and shifts to online learning across every institution in the country, Professor Jagose came under fire for her response at the time.
“Slightly to my surprise, I find I don’t need to be liked; I need to measure up to myself at the end of every day,” wrote Professor Jagose in a piece from 2019.
But Professor Jagose has remained steadfast in her approach to education and the mission of universities.
“We must retain our core purpose: the continued free and unfettered development of new knowledge in an environment also committed to student learning,” she said in a 2023 address published in The Australian.
Becoming Senior Deputy Vice-Chancellor and Provost last year, after five years as Deputy Vice-Chancellor and Provost, Professor Annamarie Jagose is optimistic about the future of Australia’s oldest university and the potential of collaboration.
“To realise our considerable potential, we must act collaboratively right across our large and complex organisation,” she says.
“Collaboration and collectivity are very enlivening frameworks for action. We know we are best when we are aligned in our purpose and help each other succeed,” she says.
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