Tania Peitzker

Tania Peitzker, (born 1 March 1970), is a writer, literary scholar and publicist. Dr Peitzker is also an investor in high tech, specifically web-based Artificial Intelligence as defined by the Turing test when a robot or "chatbot" seems humanlike.

Muse & Model: early portrait photography by the artist Jun Chen,© 1992-1993. Photos taken on the University of Melbourne campus and in a Carlton apartment, published from the private collection of Tania Peitzker, Sydney, 2012.

© John Webber, Australian photographer, formerly of the music magazine for Countdown (Australian TV series). Photo taken at Elizabeth Bay Marina, Sydney Harbour, 2012.

Business & technology interests

Tania Peitzker became a businesswoman in 2006 when she founded a strategic communications, investor liaison and capital raising consultancy for the Creative Industries, EU PR, http://www.eupublicrelations.com in Berlin, Germany.^[1]

The URL for "EU PR" was ranked number one by Google from 2007 to 2014, giving it a high value according to the search engine's algorithm and SERPs.^[2] The domain name for EU PR is still at the top of First Page Results in Yahoo's and Bing's organic rankings for the long-tail strategic keywords "eu public relations" and core keywords "eu pr".^[3]

In pursuit of her e-commerce interests, Peitzker became an expert in chatterbot or chatbot technology due to her co-ownership of velmai Company Limited, which incorporated the two beta test sites and Intellectual Property of myownreporter.com and viledge.com in 2015.^[4] velmai's AI bots can be considered a disruptive innovation and its 2012-2014 releases "Charlie" and "Sophia" utilise variations of the code or algorithm VAIP (Virtual Artificial Intelligence Patois), which is held by http://www.velmai.com.

A fully scaled up commercialised version of a sales and marketing chatbot is currently in production for a food retailing eshop in the UK. "Sir Loin, Your Virtual Butcher" will be assisting customers at a farm shop in Kent and will be publicly released in summer 2015. ^[5]

Broadcasting & reporting

From 1989 to 1990 in Australia, she became known for the country's first regular radio show devoted to female composers of classical music from around the globe, “Why Not Women?”. The monthly radio programme was broadcast live on the public radio station for classical music, 4MBS in Brisbane, Queensland, and was created in collaboration with the International League of Women Composers (ILWC) in New York, USA.^[6]

During this intensive period of community and volunteer work in broadcasting, Peitzker pioneered the establishment of the first Australian archive for the original recordings of contemporary compositions and historic classical music by women composers from around the world, most of which the American ILWC had sent to 4MBS in the 1980s and 1990s.

She was also the initiator of a live, free public concert featuring the acclaimed Brisbane composers, Mary Mageau and Betty Beath, whose classical music was performed by local musicians in the auditorium of the State Library of Queensland. The concert took place through Peitzker getting sponsors, State Government patronage and organizing the performances by other volunteers, as an extension of her work as a community broadcaster at 4MBS, then based on a local university campus.^[7]

In the early 2000s, Dr Peitzker was a regular correspondent for the London-based Times Higher Education Supplement, now THE, reporting on R&D and tertiary education issues from Berlin, Zurich and the United Nations' departments in Geneva. She also featured in a supplement of The Wall Street Journal Europe as a guest writer for Business Education, specifically MBAs offered in the EU compared with American Masters of Business courses. ^[8]

Academic achievements & publications

Dr. phil. Peitzker was awarded a PhD in 2000 by the University of Potsdam for her Cultural Studies analysis of the twentieth-century Australian author, Dymphna Cusack.^[9]

In 1998, her uncompleted dissertation won the inaugural "Australia Award" of the International Federation of University Women in Geneva, Switzerland. The IFUW prize and grant had been created especially to acknowledge Peitzker's first empirical study and poststructuralist analysis of the internationally known humanitarian Dymphna Cusack, who had been a widely respected public cultural figure throughout the Cold War in Europe. Australia's largest independent publishing house Allen & Unwin recently created a national revival of Dymphna Cusack, whose work had been largely out of print for decades, making her a "forgotten author". From June to October 2012, the publishers reprinted six of her best known novels and they have been steadily promoting Cusack's reputation as a significant Australian author.^[10]

After her 1999 lecture at the Einstein Forum in Potsdam,^[11] the famous American philosopher, Judith Butler - upon whose work Peitzker's textual analysis of gender was based - personally appraised the Australian scholar's original "Cusack thesis" as the first in the world to apply Butler's poststructuralist philosophy to the fields of literary history and Cultural Studies. Peitzker's Auseinandersetzung with Butler's philosophical theories was a continuation of the concerns in her earlier, postgraduate, primary research: “A Genealogy of Australian Cultural Studies” and a history of female sexuality in Australia, acquired by the Fryer Library's Special Collections on her leaving Australia for Germany in 1994.^[12]

Upon completion, Peitzker's key arguments of the Cusack thesis were then published as an essay by the historic literary journal, Southerly, University of Sydney. The dissertation is held in the National Libraries of Germany, France and Australia, as well as in the special collections of a number of notable universities in Europe. In 2013, Google Books published these three academic works by Peitzker, in addition to a volume of her collected "Papers" held by the University of Queensland archive.^[13]

After graduating from the University of Potsdam, Peitzker was offered an appointment as Professor of English and Cultural Studies to create a multilingual postgraduate curriculum for the first ever European Masters Degree in Australian Studies, initiated by the English Department at the University of Lodz, Poland, with corporate and Australian Embassy support.^[14] As a postdoctoral academic, Lodz University subsequently commissioned from her a historiography on "The Cultural History of Women and Men in Europe" for an EU-funded university textbook on “European Civilisations” written by Swedish, English, Irish, Wwelsh and Polish academics on a grant from the Brussels-based university research programme TEMPUS.

Plays, poetry & writing

In the field of drama, Tania Peitzker wrote and directed "Life with Marion" (1990) which ran for two seasons due to its popularity: one at the Metro Arts Theatre's dance studios and another at the University of Queensland's Cement Box Theatre. "Life with Marion" deals with contemporary society's ideas of love, religion, health and family. The three act play was first produced through government and university grants, while its second season was funded by box office revenue.

Peitzker later wrote "Gargoyles" - dealing with themes of spirituality, gender, migration and ageing - and the four act, epic drama written in verse, "Crux", which is a metaphorical, mystical work set in an antipodean colony, amongst other scripts for theatre and broadcast. A number of her poems were published in journals as well as recorded and performed by local multimedia artists then broadcast on radio to favorable reviews. Some of her early work was inspired by the "Old Town" of Launceston where she lived for the summer of 1991, after she had been selected during national auditions in Sydney to be the inhouse playwright for the University of Tasmania's Theatre Faculty in Hobart.

Fryer Library has collected her published material as well as her unpublished manuscripts (the latter has restricted access), including the poetry collection "Palinode - Poems from Brisbane and Nuremberg 1990 - 1995" and the novel "Salamandra, or a Tale of a Last Survival", set in Geneva, Berlin, Brisbane and Cairns. These texts, recordings, manuscripts, academic papers and correspondence with "public intellectuals" of note are held in the Tania Peitzker Collection ^[15] by the Fryer archive at the University of Queensland Library.

References