I used to live in Wellington, N.Z. until the early 1990s when I migrated lock, stock and barrel to Melbourne to pursue a doctorate in American Studies.
My research interests are death and violence (and the history and representation thereof). That focus has taken me to some strange places, actual and spiritual: I have hobnobbed with homicide detectives in New York, and with alien abductees too scared to leave the hotel elevator at their conference venue. I’ve done Disney World with an ex-CIA operative with a startle response so acute that the Pink Flamingos had him quivering in fright. An unruly interest in things deathly is reflected in my scholarly book Murder: a Tale of Modern American Life (Duke University Press, 1998) and in the years since I’ve branched out to consider issues to do with the representation of violence and its afterlives more broadly. I do that work as an Associate Professor in the Writing and Society Research Centre in the School of Humanities and Communication Arts at the University of Western Sydney, teaching a wide variety of things to do with the cultural history of death and violence. I’m a glasses-wearing, book-reading lecturer who nevertheless defies most of the professorial stereotypes (my students are always trying to suss out my tattoos but I wave my arms around when I lecture, so they have a hard time of it).
My debut novel The Orphan Gunner (Sydney: Giramondo, 2007) won the Asher Award and was short-listed for the regional Commonwealth Writer’s Prize. Currently, I’m in a fight to the death with a big, brawling novel tentatively titled Very Minor Demons.
You can find my teaching videos on Representing Crime at Vimeo, and they’re well worth the look as I am no believer in the bog-standard video lecture format.
Read my articles and essays on Academia.edu
Follow me on Twitter @saralouiseknox
Contact me: s.knox@uws.edu.au
What I didn't write 
I am 61 year old male remembering my dear friend in Paremata who was a fierce, visionary and wonderfully protective and inclusive playmate able to conjure dramatic and real local social and physical environments with mice, music, rubber bands, flies and flights of fantasy. You rock Sara Knox!
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Thank you Stuart Parkinson, from this 61 year old female remembering the best of friendships, across the great divide of Bayview Road and Oak Avenue. Soccer mags and war comics and racing car sets! You were my English childhood, in NZ.
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