Dr Joseph Steinberg is a Forrest Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Western Australia. His articles and reviews have appeared in Australian Literary Studies, JASAL, The Cambridge Quarterly, AHR, and The Cambridge Companion to the Australian Novel. He is currently at work on two book projects. The first, titled The Program Goes South: Australian Prose and the University, 1970-2020, is a literary history of the rise of creative writing as a subject in Australian universities. Told through the novels of some of the discipline's best-known graduates and teachers, including Thea Astley, Tim Winton, Kate Grenville, Alexis Wright, and Gerald Murnane, this book argues that the process of institutionalization has reshaped creative practice in ways so diverse that it in fact constitutes the emergence of a new literary period. His second book project moves from the contexts of production to those of reception, in order to explore the history of Australian literary prizes. In 2024 he held visiting fellowships at the University of Queensland the Australian National University. He teaches casually in person at UWA, and online for Literature Cambridge.