Address by David Hanan, Monash University, at the Celebration of the Life of Dr Leonie Naughton, Le Pine Chapel, St Kilda, Friday 14 September 2007

I can’t compete with what has gone before, but I will speak about Leonie’s qualities as an academic teacher and colleague.

Leonie really shone at Monash.

Leonie, as we have heard earlier, had a multi-dimensioned, unique and brilliant personality, and this emerged very fully when she began to teach at Monash in the early 1990s. She was only the second full time lecturer to be appointed in Film and TV, and although by then we had many students at later year levels, we still needed to develop courses in first year, in order to build up the Film and Television section. This Leonie did with her first year course Contemporary Popular Film.

Without Leonie’s loyalty and fierce support, which continued all the time she was at Monash, it is a certainty that the Film and Television Studies section at Monash University would not have survived and developed to become what it is today.

Leonie introduced the first year course, Contemporary Popular Film, and also taught, very successfully, courses on German Cinema, on Masculinity, and on Film Theory and Criticism. Her first year course on Contemporary Popular Film had exceptionally high enrolments in the years she taught it, and she played a very important role in building up the Film and Television Studies section, creating student numbers that facilitated further appointments.

One thing about Leonie’s teaching of contemporary popular film is that she had a unique way of understanding how popular cinema was relevant to the lives of her students, and of how facilitating their understanding of it could strengthen their sense of who they were. This she did with subtle humour and discernment.

The numbers of students that Leonie attracted to her first year course were very high. In one year she had 280 students in her course, and the number was always more than 200 students. This is a testament to her skills. Students were drawn to her course by its reputation as an exceptionally well-taught course. The student evaluations of this unit showed the satisfaction that students had with her as a lecturer. All her scores were in the top categories of achievement.

Leonie was a tenacious researcher and an excellent linguist, as well as a formidable lecturer. Her PhD on East German Cinema was published under the title That Was the Wild East: Film Culture, Unification, and the “New” Germany, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, in 2002.

The fact that Leonie’s book was published by the University of Michigan Press testifies to the quality of her research and its international relevance and acclamation. Significantly, the book not only discussed East German cinema, but social attitudes predominant in Germany at the time, showing how the cultural production of the film makers in East Germany was repressed in the 1990s, ignored if not disparaged by most West German critics after unification.

As you know, the circumstances under which Leonie left Monash in 2001 were not happy, and there were many things that contributed to this, most of which I will not go into now. But I should say that the immediate reason that made her leave in late 2001 was that she was not promoted after 11 years, despite having developed and taught a large number of courses, which created positions for others in Visual Arts, and despite having had a book on a foreign language cinema accepted by a prestigious American university press – an achievement that no one else has equalled in Film and Television Studies even today.

There is a deep irony in her not being promoted. In 2001, the then Vice Chancellor decided that you could only be promoted to Senior Lecturer if you had a book in press, at least to galley proof stage. As most of you know, books published by university presses in America can take 3 or 4 years to come out. Leonie had had her book accepted long before 2000, and there was no chance it could be rejected by any reader appointed to further assess it or make suggestions about revisions. It had long passed that stage. But it was still not in galley proof stage. Unfortunately the promotions committee abided by the Vice Chancellor’s stipulations for that year, and Leonie was not promoted, despite the extraordinary work she had done at Monash over the previous eleven years. The deep irony is that shortly afterwards – some time in the next two years – that very same Vice Chancellor, in a notorious case, was forced to resign from Monash, on account of allegations of plagiarism in his own publications.

There were many, many ironies about Leonie’s departure from Monash, but I will say no more about that.

Leonie will be remembered by her students, supervisees and colleagues – and especially by the numerous tutors who helped her teach in first year (many of whom are here today) – for the poise, humour and intellectual clarity and rigor of her lectures, qualities that distinguished all her classes.

In conclusion I will speak further about why Leonie was such a remarkable person to work with.

For those who had her as a lecturer, she was charismatic, stylish, poised, humorous, ironic, sardonic, and provocative. This charisma and all of the qualities I have just mentioned were immensely useful in her teaching. Students respond to these qualities and learn from them.

As a colleague she was loyal, supportive, hard working, perceptive, capable of giving very good advice, and intensely committed to her own discipline and to its place in the university where she taught.

For her friends (and I was one of them) she was intense, generous in her thoughts and actions, funny, passionate, dispassionate, sardonic, a highly perceptive person, and a great and stylish talker.

Thank you Leonie for all of this!

Created on: Thursday, 19 December 2007