John Frow

Who is John Frow?

John Frow is an Australian professor and Chair of English Language and Literature at the University of Melbourne. He was educated at Wagga High School and the Australian National University, and has lived and worked in South America in 1970 and 1971 and then did graduate studies from 1971 to 1975 in the Comparative Literature Program at Cornell University, including a year at the University of Heidelberg. He worked at Murdoch University in Western Australia from 1975 to 1989, and was then appointed to a Chair at the University of Queensland, where he worked from 1990 to 1999. From 2000 to 2004 he was the Regius Professor of Rhetoric and English Literature at the University of Edinburgh. He has held visiting research and teaching positions at the University of Minnesota, the University of Michigan, and the University of Chicago.

As well as teaching and researching in areas as diverse as literary theory and cultural studies theory, discourse analysis and genre theory, Frow has a broad interest in contemporary literature and poetry, and in questions of intellectual property and the commodification of culture. He was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities in 1997.