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Associate Professor Richard Hutch is an Honorary Associate Professor and Reader in Religion and Psychological Studies in the School of Historical and Philosopical Inquiry. His research interests include psychology of religion, sport and spirituality, self-narrations and life-writing, and death and dying.

His current research projects include:

• The American Civil Rights Movement: A Personal Narrative
• Sport, Spirituality and Productive Ageing
• History and Phenomenology of Religion

TO NOTE: Richard Hutch presented the keynote address at a symposium on the American Civil Rights Movement held at Gettysburg College, Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, in the United States on the 150th anniversary of the end of the Civil War, 9 April 1865. It was also the 50th anniversary of the "Summer Community Organization and Political Education" project (SCOPE), which was sponsored by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), founded and led by Martin Luther King, Jr. Richard volunteered for the SCOPE project in rural counties in Alabama and Louisiana in the summer of 1965. The project spearheaded a massive voter registration drive throughout the South after "Bloody Sunday," the violent racial conflict that occurred at the beginning of the Selma to Montgomery march on March 7th that year. Through the efforts of SCOPE volunteers and others, who often faced life-threatening incidents of racial violence (as Richard himself did), the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was finally passed by the American Congress and signed by the President in August. The keynote address at Gettysburg College presented Richard's experiences in the South during his harrowing time there. He was honoured by his alma mater on the occasion with the establishment of an archive in his name in the Musselman Library at Gettysburg College, including the journal he kept during his summer in the South and other unique materials from the Civil Rights Movement. It can be noted at the town of Gettysburg was the site where the Civil War "Battle of Gettysburg" took place in July, 1863. Northern Union troops pushed the Southern Confederate troops from their so-called "high-water mark" back south across the Mason-Dixon Line (which separated "slave" states from "free" states, and was drawn on maps just beyond the southern border of the state of Pennsylvania near Gettysburg). The battle represented the beginning of the end of the Civil War, with the final defeat of the Confederacy by Abraham Lincoln's Union Army two years later on 9 April, 1865 at 3:15 in the afternoon, when church bells rang out throughout the North.

Associate Professor Hutch was the Director of Studies for the Faculty of Arts (2001-05) and Head of the School of History, Philosophy, Religion and Classics (2005-08) at the University of Queensland. Before taking up his appointment at UQ in 1978, he was Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Southern Illinois University in the United States (1974-78). He graduated from Gettysburg College (BA, 1967), Yale University (BD, 1970) and the University of Chicago (MA, 1971; PhD, 1974).

Jacobs has an international reputation as a historian of television drama, its institutions, technology and aesthetics. He has taught film and television studies at the University of East Anglia, the University of Warwick, and Griffith University. His first book, The Intimate Screen (Oxford University Press, 2000) is a pioneering study of early television drama; his second book Body Trauma TV (British Film Institute, 2003) explores the aesthetics of the hospital drama in relation to the contemporary cultural imagination. More recently he published Deadwood (Palgrave Macmillan/British Film Institute, 2012), as part of the BFI TV Classics series. He is currently working on an Australian Research Council funded project called ’The Persistence of Television: How the Medium Adapts to Survive in the Digital World', and is writing a book on David Milch, the author of Deadwood (Manchester University Press).

Professor Sandra Kaji-O'Grady is an architectural educator, academic leader and researcher with a PhD in Philosophy from Monash University (2001) and professional architectural qualifications and experience. She led the design and delivering of a new progressive design education while Head of School at UTS (2005-2009) and in September 2013 commenced as Head of School and Dean of Architecture at the University of Queensland. She is committed to critical approaches to design learning and to preparing students for a radically volatile professional future.

Sandra's research is in the architectural humanties and seeks to understand the political and philosophical contexts for contemporary architecture. She has recently completed a project with Chris L. Smith on the architectural expression of contemporary science and its ideologies in laboratory buildings. This research was supported by the Australian Research Council, through the Discovery Grant ‘From Alchemist’s Den to Science City: Architecture and the Expression of Experimental Science’. Laboratory Lifestyles, the first of two major book outcomes from the study, examines the history, ambitions and and effects of the addition of gymnasia, cafes, and social spaces to scientific esearch campuses and will published by MIT Press in 2018. Life science laboratories also incorporate Animal Houses and our consideration of these has led to a new research project, in its early stages. This research will explore the ways in which buildings designed to house animals evidence and determine the relationships we have with non-human animals. Previous work has been published in leading journals including the Journal of Architecture, The Journal of Architectural Education, Architecture &, and le Journal Spéciale’Z. She has presented invited lectures and peer-reviewed conference papers in the USA, Japan, Australia and New Zealand, Finland, Amsterdam, France, Belgium, Germany, England and Scotland, where she was a Visiting Fellow at the University of Edinburgh (2012). Her own artwork investigating serial systems using pianola rolls and commercial paint samples has been exhibited in Singapore and Australia.

Sandra has been a member of the College of Experts of the Australian Research Council (2010-2011) and has reviewed submissions for several scholarly journals and sits on the editorial boards of Architecture and Culture, Studies in Material Thinking, Ardeth, and Architecture Theory Review. She is a reviewer for DrawingOn Journal and regularly contributes as a critic to Architecture Australia, Architecture Review Australia, Monument and Artichoke. Actively engaged with the architectural profession, she has written over fifty reviews for the design press and co-directed the AIA National Conference in 2013.

Associate Professor Eve Klein’s compositions have been called vivid, revolutionary, inclusive, moving and must-see. Winner of the 2023 Art Music Award for Experimental Practice, Klein brings orchestral music into dialogue with immersive and interactive technologies for screen, art music and mass festival audiences. Klein's work has been experienced by hundreds of thousands of people globally at Salisbury Cathedral, Burning Man, New York University, VIVID Sydney, MONA, GOMA, Brisbane Festival, World Science Festival, the Arts Centre Melbourne and the State Library of Queensland. As Lead Composer for Textile Audio, Eve crafts City Symphony, an interactive AR music experience overlaying Brisbane CBD (available via iOS and Android app stores).

Klein creates artworks in collaboration with community groups, festivals, researchers, and NGOs to achieve community transformation goals. Recent projects have explored gendered and racial violence, climate change, disaster recovery and refugee rights. Klein's work, Vocal Womb, is an example of this practice, allowing the audience to explore the relationship between voice, identity and power by stepping into and directly manipulating the voice of another. The premier was called the "#1 coolest thing at MOFO 2018" (Timeout Melbourne) and "One of the must-see music/artworks of the 2018 festival... a deeply considered engagement with the history and traditions of opera" (The Conversation).

Klein is Associate Professor of Music Technology, leading an interactive music and spatial audio research cluster at the University of Queensland, guiding postgraduate composers on the creation of immersive, interacitve, virtual reality and augmented reality concert works and operas.

"This is contemporary music at its most relevant – it is simultaneously inward and outward focused in addressing the challenge of its existence and its capacity to produce something great.” - Melonie Bayl-Smith, Cyclic Defrost, Issue 31

“Excellence in Experimental Practice was awarded to Eve Klein for City Symphony, a Brisbane sound walk revolutionising audiences' engagement with urban environments, underpinned by an ethos of collaborative inclusivity and accessibility.” -Australian Music Centre

“One of the must-see music/art works of the 2018 festival was Eve Klein’s Vocal Womb … a deeply considered engagement with the history and traditions of opera.” - Svenja J. Kratz -The Conversation

Dr Julius Kotir is a Senior Scientist with the Queensland Government Department of Agriculture and Fisheries and also an Adjunct Senior Fellow in the School of Agriculture and Food Sustainability. His academic and research interest is focused on understanding and managing the complex and long-term sustainability of coupled socio-economic-environmental systems. A particular interest is how to use this understanding to design decision support tools in the form of models to evaluate the impact of different options under an uncertain global future. His work takes an interdisciplinary approach, combining participatory co-design and field-based methods with systems thinking tools and system dynamics modelling to develop qualitative and quantitative simulation models that can support decision making. Julius has is currently using these tools and methods to address a wide range of complex agri-environmental problems including international and rural development issues, food security, economics of farming systems, agrifood and digital twin supply chains, climate-smart agriculture, water resources management, farmer adoption of new practices, and agribusiness policy design and analysis.

Dr. Anne Levitskyis a scholar and performer of medieval vernacular song, in particular troubadour lyric poetry, and its connections to the larger cultural milieu of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. She is a graduate of Stanford University and earned her PhD in Historical Musicology from Columbia University in May 2018. At present, she is Lecturer in Music at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, and has taught previously at Columbia, Dixie State University (now called Utah Tech), and Stony Brook University. As an academic, she is interested in medieval vernacular song, poetry, and narrative literature, and she is currently at work on two projects. The first, Sound(ing) Bodies: Song and Materiality in Troubadour Lyric Poetry, is under contract with Liverpool University Press for their series Exeter Studies in Medieval Culture. It reads troubadour lyric poetry in the context of philosophical, theological, and medical writings available in the twelfth century, and uses this analytical frame to employ new methods for the analysis of medieval monophonic song. The second project, Singing in the Reign: Song, Grammar, and Politics in the Thirteenth-Century Northern Mediterranean, explores how song is used in the courts of the northern Mediterranean in the thirteenth century to produce specific notions of space and geography, and demonstrates how Occitan song and grammars were involved in the (re)formation of these regimes. Dr. Levitsky is also interested in the presence and role of medievalisms in popular music, especially in heavy metal. She supplements this academic interest in vernacular song with an active performance career, and has studied and performed lyric poetry with the Narbonne-based Troubadours Art Ensemble, and recorded troubadour and trouvère songs both with the group and as a soloist. Dr. Levitsky performs regularly with professional ensemble Fractio Modi (of which she is a founding member), and in Brisbane. Past performances include a June 2013 performance with the Rolling Stones in Washington, DC, tours to Germany with NYC-based chamber ensemble GHOSTLIGHT Chorus, and concerts of monophony and polyphony from the 12th, 13th, and 14th centuries on Columbia's Music at St. Paul's concert series. Dr. Levitsky has also served as the director of the Collegium Musicum, one of Columbia University's leading choral ensembles.

John Macarthur is Professor of architecture at the University of Queensland where he conducts research and teaches in the history and theory of architecture, and in architectural design. John graduated from the University of Queensland with Bachelor (Hons 1st) and Master of Design Studies degrees (1984) before taking a doctorate at the University of Cambridge (1989). He is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities and a Fellow of the Queensland Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was the founding Director of the research centre for Architecture, Theory, Criticism and History (ATCH) and remains an active member of the Centre. He has previously served as Dean and Head of the School of Architecture at UQ and as a member of the Australian Research Council’s College of Experts. He is a past President and a Life Member of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand.

His research in the intellectual history architecture has focused on the conceptual framework of the interrelation of architecture, aesthetics and the arts. His book The Picturesque: architecture, disgust and other irregularities, was published by Routledge in 2007. John has edited and authored a further tenbooks and published over 150 papers including contributions to the journals Assemblage, Transition, Architecture Research Quarterly, Oase and the Journal of Architecture. John's book Is Architecture Art? an introduction to the aesthetics of architecture, was published in December 2024..

Memberships

Fellow, Australian Academy of Humanities Fellow; Queensland Academy of Arts and Sciences; Life Member, Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand

I completed my MA and PhD in Art History at University College London in 2012, and moved to Australia in 2015 to take up my position at UQ. I am an art historian with expertise in the history of photography, artists’ cinema and video. I have written widely on modern and contemporary art and his articles have appeared in Oxford Art Journal, Third Text, Afterall, Philosophy of Photography, Photography and Culture. I am also the author of Documents of Utopia: The Politics of Experimental Documentary (2015). I am in favour of a broader approach to image culture, one which crosses traditional boundaries between disciplines such as art history, media studies, sociology, anthropology, and cultural studies. My research interests are contemporary artists’ use of images for the production of history and memory, and the aesthetics and politics of documentary. I am interested in the history of Australian photography and the role that lens-based images and visual culture have played in advancing social and environmental justice movements in Australia and the Asia-Pacific region.

Dr. Helen Marshall is an acclaimed writer, editor and book historian. Her first collection of fiction, Hair Side, Flesh Side, takes its name from the two sides of a piece of parchment—animal skin scraped, stretched and prepared to hold writing. Gifts for the One Who Comes After, her second collection, borrows tropes from the Gothic tradition to negotiate issues of legacy and tradition. Collectively, her two books of short stories have won the World Fantasy Award, the British Fantasy Award, and the Shirley Jackson Award for outstanding achievement in the literature of psychological suspense, horror and the dark fantastic.

Her research as both as a creative practitioner and a scholar emerges out of the recent interest in “weird” fiction, a sub-genre of fantasy which blends supernatural, mythical, and scientific writing. Using modern theories of cognition, my work posits weird texts as “emotion machine[s]” (Tan 1996) designed to defamiliarize traumatic experiences so they can be more easily managed. Her debut novel The Migration (Random House Canada/Titan UK, 2019) exemplifies this. It finds parallels between the emergence of the Black Death in the fourteenth century and the ecological crises of the twenty-first century—that is, periods when humanity has had to confront the possibility of widescale loss of life. What interests her about the topic is not its bleakness but its interrogation of how change might take place, particularly for young people. The Migration explores these challenges. It initially presents metamorphosis as a major crisis, terrifying in its transfiguration of death. But, as the novel progresses, it shows the potential for hopeful and radical change.

Over the last five years notions of the apocalypse have emerged as a theme in her work. Her second collection, Gifts for the One Who Comes After addressed the shaping and persistence of memory in the wake of dangerous upheaval. Rather than taking the long view of history in my first collection, it negotiated very personal issues of legacy and tradition, creating myth-infused worlds where “love is as liable to cut as to cradle, childhood is a supernatural minefield, and death is ‘the slow undoing of beautiful things’” (Quill & Quire, starred review). Likewise her most recent edited collection The Year’s Best Weird Fiction argues that the techniques of defamiliarization used by contemporary authors such as Jeff VanderMeer and China Miéville offer routes for engaging in an increasingly destabilized world.

As a creative practitioner she has worked with interdisciplinary teams using narrative skills, worldbuilding and gamification for the UK’s Ministry of Defence (future threat prediction), the Diamantina Institute (storytelling and empathy for medical researchers), CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research (future technologies), and the Department of Defence (innovation and AI – funded $260,000). She has led international workshops to research how creative skills might be applied to wicked problems and she has led a project to apply these skills to technology foresight for the Defence Science Technology Group (Web 3.0 - funded $89,097).

She has further interests in both modern and medieval publishing cultures. Her PhD examined the codicology and palaeography of late medieval manuscripts from England, looking at how Middle English “bestsellers” such as Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and the anonymous Prick of Conscience made use of traceable networks of production and dissemination. This work builds upon the practical experience she gained working in the publishing industry as the Managing Editor for ChiZine Publications, Canada’s largest independent genre press, where she was involved in all aspects of production including editing, marketing and business management. In 2016 she undertook a research project to investigate the publishing history of Stephen King’s Carrie (1974), which provided a snapshot of the changing social, economic and cultural environment of the publishing industry when key editorial and marketing decisions fashioned the King brand.

Her current projects explore worldbuilding, franchise writing, and the application of creative arts methodologies for interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary ideation.

Associate Professor Margaret Maynard’s research is interests include Australian dress, identity and fashion; fashion photography and gender studies.

Her current research includes dress studies, history of fashion, and Australian fashion photography.

She is the author of:

• Fashioned from Penury: Dress as Cultural Practice in Colonial Australia, CU Press (Cambridge University) 1994.
• Out of Line: Australian Women and Style, Uni. of New South Wales Press, 2001.
• Dress and Globalisation, Manchester Uni. Press, 2004.

Dr Maynard is a dress historian and an Honorary Consultant of the Queensland Museum.

Samantha’s research and postgraduate supervision centres on historical performance practices and performance cultures. Her published output comprises two main strands. First: the influence and reception of German music and musicians in Australasia, 1850–1950 (including itinerant German bands, and the music of J. S. Bach) and the history of listening cultures in Australasia during the first half of the 20th century (including the impact of the gramophone and radio broadcasting). And, second: early modern German court music (in particular the Württemberg Hofkapelle); professional women musicians in the 17th and 18th centuries; the early history of the orchestra and oboe bands (Hautboistenbande); and John Sigismond Cousser (Kusser) and the musical life of early 18th-century Dublin.

She is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities (from 2012), and has also held visiting fellowships at the Herzog August Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel, Germany (2004); Clare Hall, University of Cambridge (2007–2008); and, as an Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Research Fellow, at the Institut für Musik, Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg (2009–2010) and the Bach-Archiv in Leipzig, Germany (2018).

In 2011–2017, Samantha was an Associate and (from 2015) International Investigator with the Australian Research Council's Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions: Europe 1100–1800. Her monograph, The Well-Travelled Musician: John Sigismond Cousser and Musical Exchange in Baroque Europe (Boydell Press, 2017), was funded by an Australian Research Council Discovery Project grant (2013– 2015). Most recently, she received funding from the Lilburn Trust for hosting a scholarly symposium on Music in Colonial New Zealand Cities (November 2022); an edited volume of the papers is currently in preparation.

From 1994 until 2023, Samantha taught papers on historical performance practice, the history of Western European music of the 17th and 18th centuries, and the history of Western art music in New Zealand, 1850–1950 (including jazz, classical and popular music). She was employed full time at the University of Queensland from 2001 until 2015 (Lecturer–Associate Professor). In 2015 she returned to New Zealand, where she held the positions of Associate Professor (2015–2018) and Professor of Musicology (2019–2024) at the New Zealand School of Music – Te Kōkī.

Samantha has been the editor of numerous scholarly books and works as a freelance indexer; her index for Music at German Courts: Changing Artistic Priorities (Boydell Press, 2011) won the 2012 medal of the Australian and New Zealand Society of Indexers.

I'm an immersive technology researcher developing novel approaches to 3D experiences and research from the perspective of a multimedia creative artist. With a diverse foundation in music production, composition, audio engineering, and game development, I spearhead initiatives that harness creative works for positive societal and environmental impact.

Current projects include:

• Algorithm validation and procedure generation for LiDAR scanning techniques to enable more accurate biodiversity and biomass calculations,
• Prototyping first-person 360 camera technologies and co-producing 360VR simulations for domestic and family violence prevention and education, and
• Investigating AI NPC interactions within immersive simulations to develop interpersonal capabilities within complex situations.

Emeritus Professor Peter Spearritt is the co-editor of five major public websites, Queensland Places (over 1100 places, with their history and economy), Queensland Speaks (interviews with key government ministers and public servants), the Queensland Historical Atlas and Text Queensland, a resource for studying the state. He is also the co-editor of Victorian Places, a project with Monash University, detailing over 1500 settlements in Victoria.

A Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia, his research interests include coastal urbanisation and conservation, housing and the developer-led apartment boom, green space provision in urban areas and the use and abuse of water in our cities.

Beck Wise teaches and researches in professional, technical and academic writing, with specialisations in the rhetoric of science, visual communication, writing in digital environments, and gender studies.

Current research projects include:

• Medical imaging, argumentation and public culture
• Reproductive health and access in Australia
• Writing instruction for diverse academic disciplines