The American Association of Australasian Literary Studies (AAALS) invites proposals for a Virtual Seminar Series held during the month of June 2026 over Zoom. This seminar series will take place in lieu of the 2026 AAALS conference.

This roundtable brings together scholars working on Peter Weir’s cinema to reconsider his role in shaping an Australasian cultural imaginary across film, literature, and historical memory. Emerging from the Australian New Wave, Weir’s early films—Picnic at Hanging Rock, The Last Wave, Gallipoli, and The Year of Living Dangerously—articulate persistent concerns central to Australasian studies: the uncanny power of landscape, settler colonial anxiety, mythic history-making, and the fraught inheritance of European epistemologies in the Antipodes.

Rather than treating Weir solely as a “film auteur,” this seminar situates his work within broader literary and cultural traditions, including Australian Gothic, modernist narrative fragmentation, postcolonial historiography, and Indigenous epistemologies. The roundtable format encourages dialogue across disciplines, inviting participants to reflect on Weir’s relationship to literary sources, national mythologies, transnational circulation, and the enduring resonance of his films in Australasian cultural studies.

Discussion topics may include (but are not limited to):

• Landscape as narrative agent and epistemological challenge

• Australian Gothic and the limits of rationalism

• History, myth, and counter-memory in Gallipoli and The Last Wave

• Weir’s engagement with Indigenous presence and absence

• Transnational authorship and Weir’s movement beyond Australia

• Pedagogical approaches to teaching Weir in literary and cultural studies contexts

By foregrounding conversation rather than formal papers, this roundtable aims to generate new critical pathways for thinking about Weir’s legacy and his continuing relevance to Australasian literary and cultural inquiry.