Bridget Vincent

Bridget Vincent is a Lecturer in English at the Australian National University, having previously taught at the Universities of Cambridge and Nottingham. Her research focuses on the civic dimensions of modern and contemporary literature. She is currently undertaking a Research Fellowship at the Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies. Her first book, Moral Authority in Seamus Heaney and Geoffrey Hill, was published by Oxford University Press in 2022. She has also published literary journalism and op-eds in The Guardian, The Age, Cordite, Australian Book Review, and The Times Higher Education.

Bridget Vincent reviews ‘Kin: Family in the 21st century’ by Marina Kamenev

March 2024, no. 462 • 23 February 2024

Marina Kamenev’s Kin begins with a calmly unadorned outline of the nuclear family’s recent fortunes. In the space of just a few pages, she gives a condensed tour of the concept’s history, concluding with US historian Stephanie Coontz’s suggestion that the nuclear family is a ‘historical fluke’ – one that has, as Kamenev puts it, ‘been idolised long after its use-by date’. The int ... (read more)

'Child Adjacent', by Bridget Vincent

June 2023, no. 454 • 23 May 2023

I feel like I need to come out every day. I’m pushing the stroller, fishing out the dummy, pointing out dogs, but this isn’t what it looks like. At the playground or the checkout, I take the nods and maternal solidarity, staying inside the parenting illusion until it feels slightly disingenuous. I am not the mother. I am an aunt instead, if ‘instead’ is even the right word. There are cat ... (read more)

Bridget Vincent reviews 'Broken Hierarchies: Poems 1952-2012' by Geoffrey Hill

January-February 2015, no. 368 • 16 December 2014

In his November 2010 lecture delivered as Oxford Professor of Poetry, Geoffrey Hill tested the idea that poetry might constitute a form of perjury. He acknowledged that ‘this is a deeply pessimistic view: many would say anachronistic’. Showing that language is an imperfect and even fallen medium which presents moral hazards to its users was not, however, the session’s most challenging propos ... (read more)