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Honorary Professor, Centre for the Government of Queensland, School of History, Philosophy, Religion and Classics.

Professional Activities:

Executive Director, T.J.Ryan Foundation (2013 onwards)

Project Director, "Queensland Speaks" Oral History web-site, (2009 onwards)

Board Member, Youth + Marlene Moore Flexi-learning Centre Network, Edmund Rice Education Australia (2013 onwards).

National Fellow of the Institute of Public Administration Australia (since 1990).

Former editor of The Public Interest (Brisbane).

Former co-editor of the Australian Journal of Public Administration.

Former Review Editor for Politics (now AJPS).

Member/chair of several Quality Assessment Panels of the Queensland Office of Higher Education and formerly member of similar bodies operating in several states during the CAE era.

Member of several Federal Government committees of enquiry into education, including management education (Ralph Committee), aboriginal education (Yunipingu Committee) and university management (Linke Committee).

Former panel member of the Commonwealth Government Review Tribunal on Non-state Schooling.

Former consultant to international aid organizations, providing advice on public sector reform - Uganda, Kazakstan and Nepal.

Background:

1962-1965 : Rhodes Scholar at the University of Oxford; fieldwork for thesis on the development of trade unions in Uganda completed while Rockefeller Teaching Fellow at the University of East Africa, Kampala.

1965-1977 : Lecturing at University of Sydney, the Queen's University of Belfast, and the Canberra College of Advanced Education (Principal Lecturer in Politics in the School of Administrative Studies).

1977-1987: J.D.Story Professor of Public Administration, University of Queensland. President of the Academic Board, 1986-1987.

1987-1990: Principal of the Canberra CAE, Foundation Vice-Chancellor of the University of Canberra.

1990-1994 : Director General of Education, State Government of Queensland.

1994 : Visiting Professor, Graduate School of Management, Griffith University.

1994 - 2000: Dean of Arts, Queensland University of Technology.

2000 - 2002: Professor of Public Management, Faculty of Business, QUT.

2003 - 2011: Professor Emeritus and Teaching Fellow, School of Political Science and International Studies.

Research Interests:

• The practice of public policy in Queensland.
• Political history of Queensland.

Dr. Manu P. Sobti is a landscape historian and urban interlocutor of the Global South with research specialisations in South Asia, South East Asia, Central Asia, and the Middle East. Within the gamut of the Global, the Islamic, and the Non-Western, his continuing work examines borderland transgressions and their intertwinement with human mobilities, indigeneities, and the narratives of passage across these liminal sites. From his perspective, ‘land-centered’ and ‘deep’ place histories replete with human actors serve as critical and de-colonizing processes that negate the top-down master-narratives wherein borders and boundaries simplistically delineate nation states and their scalar range of internal geographies. He was previously Associate Professor at the School of Architecture & Urban Planning (SARUP), University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee USA (2006-16). He has a B.Dipl.Arch. from the School of Architecture-CEPT (Ahmedabad - INDIA), an SMarchS. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Cambridge - USA), and a Ph.D. from the College of Architecture, Georgia Institute of Technology (Atlanta - USA).

As a recognized scholar and innovative educator, Sobti served as Director of SARUP-UWM’s India Winterim Program (2008-15). This foreign study program worked intensively with local architecture schools in Ahmedabad, Delhi and Chandigarh, allowing students and faculty to interact actively, often within the gamut of the same project. He also set up a similar, research-focused program in Uzbekistan, engaging advanced undergraduate and graduate students to undertake field research at sites, archives and cultural landscapes. In partnership with the Art History Program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and SARUP colleagues, Sobti also co-coordinated the Building-Landscapes-Cultures (BLC) Concentration of SARUP-UWM’s Doctoral Program (2011-13), creating opportunities for student research in diverse areas of architectural and urban history and in multiple global settings. He served as the Chair of SARUP's PhD Committee between 2014-16, leading an area of BLC's research consortium titled Urban Histories and Contested Geographies.

Sobti's research has been supported by multiple funding bodies, including the Graham Foundation of the Arts (USA), the Architectural Association (UK), the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research (USA), the French Institute of Central Asian Studies (UZBEKISTAN), the US Department of State Fulbright Foundation (USA), the Aga Khan Foundation (SWITZERLAND), the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation (USA), the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (USA), the Centre for 21st Century Studies University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (USA), the Institute for Research in the Humanities University of Wisconsin-Madison (USA), Stanford University (USA), in addition to city governments in New Delhi/Chandigarh/Ahmedabad (INDIA), Samarqand/Bukhara (UZBEKISTAN), Erzurum (TURKEY) and New Orleans (USA). He has also served as a United States Department of State Fulbright Senior Specialist Scholar and received 7 Research Fellowships at important institutions worldwide. He is a nominated Expert Member of the ICOMOS-ICIP (Interpretation and Presentation of Cultural Heritage Sites) International Committee, responsible for debate and stewardship on contentious cultural heritage issues globally.

Beth Spacey is a Lecturer in Medieval History in the School of Historical and Philosophical Inquiry. Beth is a historian specialising in the religious cultures of Europe and the broader Mediterranean region. Her expertise lies in the history of the crusades and the Latin East, and she has broader research interests in medieval ideas about the supernatural, violence, gender, landscapes, and colonialism. She has published on the medieval Latin Christian historiography of the crusades, especially on ideas of the miraculous and masculinities, and is currently conducting research into attitudes towards nature and God's Creation in crusade texts. Her first book, The Miraculous and the Writing of Crusade Narrative, was published in March 2020 by Boydell and Brewer and was released in paperback in 2023.

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.

Martin Stuart-Fox is Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Queensland. After completing a BSc in evolutionary biology, he worked in PNG, Hong Kong and Laos before joining United Press International as a foreign correspondent covering the Second Indochina War. On returning to Australia he tutored and lectured in Asian history at UQ while undertaking an MA (on the rationale for an evolutionary theory of history) and PhD (developing an evolutionary theory of history). As Head of History at UQ, Professor Stuart-Fox taught courses on History, Time and Meaning, and Theory of History at the Honours level. He is currently pursuing research on evolutionary theory of history.

Stephen Townsend is a lecturer in sport sociocultural studies with the School of Human Movement and Nutrition Sciences. Stephen joined HMNS in 2019 after completing his PhD in Sport History. His current research examines social, cultural, and historical aspects of sports concussion.

His previous research has interrogated the ways that racial, religious, gendered, and political ideologies are transmitted through sports media, in addition to digital history epistemologies. He has published widely in academic journals and books, with his most recent publications analysing historical representations on sports concussion in the Australian newspaper press. His teaching and research interests span multiple spheres of sport and culture, as he seeks to critically understand the ways that people have historically constructed and transmitted meaning through sport and physical activity.

Dr Akiko Uchiyama specialises in translation studies and her research interests include postcolonial translation theory, gender in translation, girls’ fiction in translation and the history of translation in Japan. She is the Convenor of the Master of Arts in Japanese Interpreting and Translation (MAJIT) program, and is accredited by the National Accreditation Authority for Translators and Interpreters as a professional translator.

Deborah van der Plaat is a Senior Research Fellow with the School of Architecture, The University of Queensland. She was formerly a Senior Research Fellow and Manager of the Architecture Theory Criticism History Research Centre (ATCH), UQ (2015-2019). Her research examines the architecture of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and its intersection with theories of artistic agency, climate, environment and race. Writing histories of Queensland architecture is also a focus within her work and, with John Macarthur, she continues to develop and expand the Digital Archive of Queensland Architecture (DAQA, launched in 2014, https://qldarch.net/)

Her most research outputs include:

• [edited book] Karl Langer: Modern Architect and Migrant in Tropical Australia (with John Macarthur, London: Bloomsbury, 2022), https://www.bloomsbury.com/au/karl-langer-9781350068117/
• [edited book] Light, Space, Place: the architecture of Robin Gibson (with Lloyd Jones, Melbourne: URO Publications, 2022), https://uropublications.com/collections/books-from-uro-publications/products/light-space-place-architecture-robin-gibson
• [book chapter] "Casting Shadows and Seeking Shade," with Nicole Sully in Ryan, Daniel J., Ferng, Jennifer and L'Heureux, Erik G. Drawing Climate: Visualising Invisible Elements of Architecture. Berlin, Boston: Birkhäuser, 2022, pp. 120-149, https://doi.org/10.1515/9783035623611
• [book chapter] "Wireless Architecture: Robert Percy Cummings Early Radio Talks," with John Macarthur in E. Couchez, & Heynickx, R. (Eds.). Architectural Education Through Materiality: Pedagogies of 20th Century Design (1st ed.) London: Routledge, 2022, 221-234, https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003201205-17
• [book chapter ] "Alternative Facts: Towards a Theorization of Oral History in Architecture," with Janina Gosseye and Naomi Stead In Architecture Thinking across Boundaries: Knowledge Transfers since the 1960s, edited by Rajesh Heynickx, Ricardo Costa Agarez and Elke Couchez, 136–148. 136–148. London: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2021, http://dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781350153202.ch-008.
• [journal paper] “Comfort in Australia’s unproductive North and the attendant anxiety of tropical cyclones”, ABE Journal, March 2021 URL: http://journals.openedition.org/abe/9243; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/abe.9243
• [International conference paper] ‘Unrecognised actors and new networks. Teaching Tropical Architecture in mid-twentieth century Australia,’ in Cosmopolitan Others, EAHN2021, 6th International Conference, Edinburgh 2021, June 4, 2021.
• [panel discussion] Queensland Cultural Centre: Then, Now and New. Panel discussion between Michael Rayner, Ruth Woods and Dr Deborah van der Plaat and Lloyd Jones (moderator). Hosted by Queensland State Archives on Saturday March 13th, 2021 as part of the Asia Pacific Architecture Festival. https://vimeo.com/524021925

With John Macarthur, Jane Hunter, Andrew Wilson and industry partners State Library of Queensland, Conrad Gargett Architecture, Bligh Voller Nield, Wilson Architects and Riddel Architecture, Plaat wrote the successful Australian Research Council Linkage application "Architectural Practice in Post-war Queensland: Building and Interpreting an Oral History Archive" (2011-2013). This project resulted in the first comphrensive history on Queensland modernism and outputs included: a major exhibition, Hot Modernism: Building Modern Queensland 1945-1975 (State Library of Queensland, July- October 2014 curated with Janina Gosseye, Kevin Wilson and Gavin Bannerman); the creation and ongoing development of the Digital Archive of Qlueensland Architecture qldarch.net; and a book, Hot Modernism: Queensland Architecture 1945-1975 (London: Artifice Press, 2015 co-edited with John Macarthur, Janina Gosseye and Andrew Wilson). In 2017, the project was awarded the John Herbert Memorial Award and the Gold Heritage Award, Interpretation and Promotion by the National Trust of Australia, Queensland Branch. See also: http://www.uq.edu.au/research/impact/stories/hot-modernism-cool-resource/

From 2009-2011 Plaat was the recipient of the UQ Postdoctoral Fellowship for Women to work on her nominated project, "Tropical environments and Queensland architecture (1850-1914): building historical understandings of the culture of architecture and climate change." This project resulted in a symposium titled Architecture at the Ragged Edge of Empire: Race, Taste and Place and the Colonial Context (State Library of Queensland, Brisbane, 27-28 June, 2013) and a series of papers which explore the insection of architecture, climate and race in Queensland architecture. This research is ongoing.

Plaat has edited 5 books including: Skyplane: What effect do towers have on urbanism, sustainability, the workplace and historic city centres? (with Richard Francis Jones, Lawrence Nield, Xing Ruan, Sydney: UNSW Press 2009); Hot Modernism: Queensland Architecture 1945-1975 (with John Macarthur, Janina Gosseye and Andrew Wilson, London: Artifice 2015); Speaking of Buildings: Oral History in Architectural Research (with Janina Gosseye and Naomi Stead, New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2019); Karl Langer: Modern Architect and Migrant in Tropical Australia (with John Macarthur, London: Bloomsbury, 2022) and Light, Space, Place: the architecture of Robin Gibson (with Lloyd Jones, Melbourne: URO Publications, 2022). From 2010 to 2014 she was editor, with Paul Walker and Julia Gatley, of Fabrications: The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians of Australia and New Zealand. She has also published extensively in national and international journals.

Awards

American Society of Environmental Historians (ASEH) Travel Award 2019.

Graham Foundation Grant 2018.

John Herbert Memorial Award for the Most Outstanding Nomination, Hot Modernism: Exhibition, Digital Archive and Book, National Trust, Queensland, 2017.

Gold Heritage Award, Interpretation and Promotion, Hot Modernism: Exhibition, Digital Archive and Book, National Trust, Queensland, 2017.

Annual Conference Senior Scholar Fellowship, Society of Architectural Historians 2013.

Postdoctoral Fellowship for Women (University of Queensland) 2009-2012.

Memberships

Member, Society of Architectural Historians (SAH)

Member, European Architectural History Network (EAHN)

Member, the Architectural Humanities Research Association (AHRA)

Member, COST Action ISO904 European Architecture Beyond Europe

Member, Society of Architectural Historians of Australia and New Zealand (SAHANZ)

Member, Art Association of Australia and New Zealand (AAANZ)

Dr Walters has published on Cavendish, Shakespeare, and Renaissance women in relation to science, philosophy, gender, sexuality and political thought. She welcomes research proposals relating to these topics.

She is author of Margaret Cavendish: Gender, Science and Politics (Cambridge University Press, hardback 2014, paperback 2017) and is co-editor of Margaret Cavendish: An Interdisciplinary Perspective (Cambridge University Press, 2022), which won Co-Honorable Mention for the 2022 Collaborative Project Award from the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women and Gender. Dr Walters is also one of the joint editors of the Restoration section of the Palgrave Encyclopedia of Early Modern Women's Writing.

Her edition, The Blazing World and other Writings, is forthcoming with Oxford World's Classics (Oxford University Press, 2024). She is currently co-editing Cavendish and Milton, which is under contract with Oxford University Press.

Dr Walters is also Deputy Chair of the Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Committee for the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences (HASS).

She obtained her doctorate and masters degree from the University of Edinburgh, Scotland and her BA from the University of California Santa Cruz. Previously, she was a postdoctoral research fellow at Ghent University, Belgium. She has also held academic positions in England, America, and Scotland and was a visiting professor at Université Catholique de Lille, France. Between studies, she worked in Tokyo, Japan.

In 2016 she won a Teaching and Innovation Award from Liverpool Hope University, UK and has served on the Education Committee for Shakespeare North, a world-class Jacobean replican theatre in England.

Currently, she serves on the Editorial Board of ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes and Reviews, Anthem Press, and was President of the International Margaret Cavendish Society. She is the founder and managing editor of Margaret Cavendish: A Multidisciplinary Journal.

Tony is an expert mining structural geologist who applies his skills to problems of deep earth mass mining, giant open pits, near-mine exploration, and the local and regional lithostructural controls on complex metalliferous mineral deposits. As a Senior Research Fellow in mining and engineering geology at the University of Queensland, Tony’s pioneering research focussed on the geological modelling and data inputs required for planning deep cave mining operations, an area that had received little previous consideration from geologists. He led the Geology and Mass Mining Project (GMM), which examined the geoscientific inputs required for exploring, defining, establishing, and mining block and sub-level caving operations that were being developed on giant porphyry copper-gold systems and IOCG deposits. While much research was being done in Australia to explore the deep earth environment, very little was being done to model the geology of large and deep mineralized systems, and then to use the new data and models to plan and extract any large discoveries made. Tony’s pioneering work was some of the first and most comprehensive to be done in this field.

• Fellow and chartered professional (geology) of the Australasian Institute of Mining and Metallurgy
• Fellow of the Society of Economic Geologists
• Fellow of the Geological Society
• Fellow of the Australian Institute of Geoscientists
• Member, Geological Society of Australia
• Member, Australasian Society for Historical Archaeology

Tony is presently a Principal Structural Geologist with a Brisbane-based geophysical and geological consulting group.

I am an Australian Research Council Future Fellow working in the field of bioarchaeology in Australia and New Guinea.

I am a scholar, curator, educator and designer.

My research is at the inter-section of cultural anthropology- material and visual culture- and museum studies with specialisms in the anthropology of art and design, and the 21st century 'ethnographic' museum. I research and publish on the role of colours as carriers of thought in art and in everyday creative design practices, and colours as local ecology and time. My additonal current research include Australian Indigenous art and the market; the role of museum management in institutional policy and history; digital imaging of museum objects and intellectual property; collection ecologies and bio-cultural materials; research led exhibtiions and contemporary exhibition curation and design. I have a long-standing association with the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara Lands (APY Lands) in South Australia where I carried out my doctoral fieldwork whilst a student at University College London, as part of the material culture group. I welcome doctoral students who wish to work on material and visual cultural research and musuem studies, or the interesction of these.

I have curated a number of research generated exhibitions including consultant curator for the 50th anniversary show of Ernabella Arts at Tandanya in South Australia, the retrospective of Kunmanara (Nyukana) Baker and, co-curated the touring show Art on a String with Object, and fifteen collaborative shows for the UQ Anthropology Museum.

I have directed the Master of Museum studies program at UQ for the last 5 years, commissioning a course in digital heritage and carrying out and implementing the recommendations of the academic program review. I continue to partner with GLAMs sector institutions for teaching and research. I am partnering with QAGOMA to collaborate on a new course about Learning and Outreach. I have taught Museum Theory and Practice, Collections, Museum Management, Exhibitions, Work Placement and convened the Masters Dissertation courses. Previously I taught Material and Visual culture and Museum Anthropology in the UQ Anthropology undergraduate program. I have taught at the Australian National University, Chelsea College of Art and University College London in the UK. I was first trained as an architect and worked in the UK construction industry as a designer and project manager.

As the first women to direct the UQ Anthropology Museum in its 75-year history I aimed to promote the work of women makers and artists in the museum’s collection and in the museum’s exhibition program. I am skilled at combining theory and practice, including teaching with objects, and at infrastructure implementation. I led the re configuring of the UQ Anthropology museum’s infrastructure transforming it back into a public institution with a rolling exhibition program generated by research of the museum’s collection. I led the creation of the first online publication of the collection to enable wide collection access. This included a purpose built digital catalogue and the creation and upload of more than 15,000 images of the cultural property cared for in the museum. The publication of the photographic collection in 2017 enabled these images can find new friends and family online. More than 60,000 people visited the UQAM’s new teaching, research and engagement facilities between 2012-2017. I raised more than AUS$1.1 million for the museum.

Professor Zhao (PhD, ANU, 1993; MSc, Univ Adelaide, 1989; BSc, Nanjing Univ, 1985) has ~30 years research experience in isotope geochemistry and geochronology, with research interests straddling across the fields of geological, geochemical, geographical, environmental, ecological and archaeological sciences. He developed the mass spectrometry U-series dating methods at UQ and applied them to dating coral reefs in the Great Barrier Reef and other parts of the tropical oceans, karstic deposits (stalagmites, stalactites, flowstones, etc) and calcite veins across different continents, as well as important hominid and fauna records in China, South East Asia, Australasia, Europe and Polynesia, which have received widespread recognition and public attention. Most recently, his team has been developing laser-ablation ICP-MS in situ U-Th and U-Pb dating methods for applications in earth, environmental and archaeological research. Since 1991, Zhao have authored >350 refereed publications, won more than 50 competitive grants and contracts, supervised or mentored more than 50 research high-degree students and early-career researchers, and received one ARC APD fellowship (1995), one ARC research/QEII fellowship (1998), one UQ research excellence award (2001), one Chinese National Science Foundation distinguished overseas young scholar award (2000), and the prestigious inaugural Australian Museum Eureka Prize for Outstanding Mentor of Young Researchers (2011).

The Radiogenic Isotope Facility (RIF) that Prof Zhao took charge since 2005 is a ~200 m2 HEPA-filtered, fully-automated, ultra-clean low-blank chemistry and mass spectrometer laboratory, housing two Nu Plasma multi-collector ICP-MS instruments, two Thermo iCap-RQ and one Thermo X-series II quadrupole ICP-MS instruments, and two ASI RESOlution SE laser ablation systems for high-precision radiogenic/metal-stable isotope and trace element analysis in both solution and in situ laser-ablation modes. The facility is unique in its design and capabilities in Australia, representing one of only a small number of establishments with its level of analytical sophistication, range and quality of mass spectrometers and proven ultra-low analytical blank performance. It is widely acknowledged by peers in the field as being among of the most advanced facilities of its kind in the world. It services a multidisciplinary research community on campus, nationally and overseas in traditional earth science research, palaeoclimate, palaeoenvironmental and palaeoecological research, coral reef research, environmental science research, archaeological research, and forensic research.