In 2008, the University of Western Australia won the Federal Government tender to host the new National Chair of Australian Literature, with Philip Mead, a distinguished and long-serving professor from the University of Tasmania, receiving the appointment. In 2009 Winthrop Professor Mead (also the Associate Dean of Research for the UWA Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences) took up the position and also published his critically acclaimed study Networked Language: Culture and History in Australian Poetry with Australian Scholarly Publishing. Professor Mead spoke to Ruth Morgan and Brooke Dunnell about the role of the Chair, his personal research interests, and the future of Australian literary studies.