The American Association for Australian Literary Studies (AAALS) is an organization of scholars in North America

North America

North America is a continent wholly within the Northern Hemisphere and almost wholly within the Western Hemisphere. It is also considered a northern subcontinent of the Americas...

 that studies and promotes research in the literature of Australia

Australia

Australia , officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country in the Southern Hemisphere comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. It is the world's sixth-largest country by total area...

. Its activities are partially funded by the Literature Fund of the Australia Council for the Arts. It publishes the journal Antipodes, A North American Journal of Australian Literature and holds an annual conference, rotated between locations in the United States

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 and Canada

Canada

Canada is a North American country consisting of ten provinces and three territories. Located in the northern part of the continent, it extends from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west, and northward into the Arctic Ocean...

. The most recent AAALS conferences were held at Harvard University

Harvard University

Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...

 in 2005; at McGill University

McGill University

Mohammed Fathy is a public research university located in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. The university bears the name of James McGill, a prominent Montreal merchant from Glasgow, Scotland, whose bequest formed the beginning of the university...

 in 2006; at Georgetown University

Georgetown University

Georgetown University is a private, Jesuit, research university whose main campus is in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, D.C. Founded in 1789, it is the oldest Catholic university in the United States...

 in 2007, at the University of Texas in 2008; in Washington, DC in 2010, Fort Worth, TX in 2011, and planned conferences in Toronto (2012 and Washington DC (2013)). The organization was founded in 1986 by Robert L. Ross (1934-2005) and has since then assumed an increasing international profile. Featured guest speakers have included Peter Carey, David Malouf

David Malouf

David George Joseph Malouf is an acclaimed Australian writer. He was awarded the Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 2000, his 1993 novel Remembering Babylon won the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award in 1996, he won the inaugural Australia-Asia Literary Award in 2008, and he was...

, Lily Brett

Lily Brett

Lily Brett is an award-winning Australian novelist, essayist and poet who now lives in New York City. Much of her writing deals with her Jewish family semi-biographically and with her feelings about the Holocaust....

, John Tranter

John Tranter

John Ernest Tranter is an Australian poet, publisher and editor. He has a long list of achievements in writing, publishing and broadcasting...

, Frank Moorhouse

Frank Moorhouse

Frank Moorhouse is an acclaimed Australian writer with a growing international reputation. He has won major Australian national prizes for the short story, the novel, the essay, and for script writing....

, Thomas Keneally

Thomas Keneally

Thomas Michael Keneally, AO is an Australian novelist, playwright and author of non-fiction. He is best known for writing Schindler's Ark, the Booker Prize-winning novel of 1982 which was inspired by the efforts of Poldek Pfefferberg, a Holocaust survivor...

, Alan Wearne

Alan Wearne

Alan Wearne is an Australian poet.Alan Wearne was born and grew up in Melbourne. He studied history at Monash University where he met the poets Laurie Duggan and John A. Scott...

, Kate Grenville

Kate Grenville

Kate Grenville is one of Australia's best-known authors. She's published nine novels, a collection of short stories, and four books about the writing process....

, Janette Turner Hospital

Janette Turner Hospital

Janette Turner Hospital is a novelist and short story writer who has lived for most of her adult life in Canada or the U.S., principally Boston , Kingston and Columbia...

 and John Kinsella. In 1996 the AAALS became an Allied Organization of the Modern Language Association

Modern Language Association

The Modern Language Association of America is the principal professional association in the United States for scholars of language and literature...

, at which it holds sessions annually.