Duc Dau

I specialise in literature from the nineteenth century onwards, literature and (queer) theology, biblical reception, religious eroticism, and sexualities. Further, I started writing poetry in 2025 (at least in a serious capacity), and have since won the Jan Dean Members Prize of the Newcastle Poetry Prize along with the Annette Cameron Award for an unpublished poet in Western Australia. 

Author of Sex, Celibacy, and Deviance: The Victorians and the Song of Songs (2024) and Touching God: Hopkins and Love (2012), as well as co-editor of Queer Victorian Families: Curious Relations in Literature (2015), my articles have appeared in such journals as Critical Social Policy, Media International Australia, Disability Studies Quarterly, QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking, Australian Literary Studies, Victorian Literature and Culture, Victorian Poetry, Religion and Literature, and Literature and Theology.

My latest book, Sex, Celibacy, and Deviance: The Victorians and the Song of Songs (2024), is published with The Ohio State University Press. Appearing in their series 'Literature, Religion, and Postsecular Studies', the book explores how the Song of Songs was used to fashion, and to contest, the norms of romance, sexuality, gender roles, and marriage in Victorian and early twentieth-century literature and culture. The project was funded by an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (ARC DECRA) and smaller pools of funding along the way. It received the Australasian Victorian Studies Association's Barbara Garlick Book Prize (Runner-up) and was a finalist for the American Academy of Religion Book Award: Textual Studies. (The American Academy of Religion is the largest scholarly society dedicated to the academic study of religion.)

Forthcoming pieces include a chapter on Amazon’s Alexa smart speakers, domestic violence, and surveillance capitalism for Surveillance and Social Justice: Big Data Politics, Predictions and Potentials; a chapter on religious eroticism for The Oxford Handbook of Thomas Hardy; a revised chapter on gender and sexuality for The Routledge Companion to Victorian Literature: 2nd Edition; and a chapter on queer forms of care in Contemporary Love Studies, Volume 2: What’s Sex Got to Do with It?

I have poems published or forthcoming in Island Online, Newcastle Poetry Prize Anthology 2026, TEXT, Mascara Literary Review, Electric Pink, and elsewhere. 

As lead or sole investigator, I have attracted $420,000 in research funding. The main sources are listed below:

University of Western Australia
Alumni Fund Grants (2016)
Total funding: $20,000

Australian Research Council
Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (ARC DECRA) (2013-2016)
Total funding: $295,363

University of Western Australia
UWA ECR Fellowship Support Program (2013-2016)
Total funding: $29,142

University of Western Australia
Australian Postgraduate Award (APA) (2000-2003)
Total Funding: $60,295

University of Western Australia
Winthrop Scholarship (2000)
Total funding: $7,500

Travel awards from the North American Victorian Studies Association, Australasian Victorian Studies Association, UWA Faculty of Arts, UWA Alumni Funds.