I am a media studies scholar studying current smart technologies and consequent ontological conundrums we face as these machines become smarter than us at telling how things are within ourselves and around our worlds. My previous research on the Internet of Things (IoT) was about these hidden arrangements of things in our background that machines constantly remind us of as those we should always be a little paranoid of, and how this normalized paranoia leads us to accept the IoT as a new smarter technique of self-governance. My first book Internet-ontologies-Things: Smart Objects, Hidden Problems, and their Symmetries (2023) argues these popular narratives of smart lives as our strategic and speculative responses to such common feelings: "Something is there, so embedded in our bodies, homes, and neighbourhoods. We feel it but cannot grasp it!"
Digital ontology is the term that best describes the nature of my research but it's less relevant to a pure philosophical inquiry about how things are in the world. Ontology in my practical and critical concern is rather related to the new capitalist ideology (or realism) that runs media industries’ current speculative economy. So, my critical reading of the ontological turn in humanities and social sciences focuses on its strategic dimension. How does this turn draw our attention to the things that our too-human perception always fails to pay the right attention to? How does this in turn mobilize our constant speculation about things beyond our perceptions and control, not only as the inexhaustible source of our anxieties but also as the inexhaustible resource of cultural production?
My current research interests include Digital Ontology, New Materialism, Speculative (Capitalist) Realism, Quantum Physics as Cultural Imagination, Science and Technology Studies, Actor-Network Theory, French Philosophers (e.g. Foucault, Deleuze, and Badiou), Eco- and Geo-philosophy/criticism, new materialist film and videogame studies.
Dr Stephan Atzert is Senior Lecturer in German Studies in the School of Languages and Cultures. To date Dr Atzert has contributed two monographs to the study of the reception of Schopenhauer's philosophy. His first book Schopenhauer in the works of Thomas Bernhard. The critical appropriation of Schopenhauer's philosophy in Thomas Bernhard's late novels was published in German in 1999 (Rombach). Since then, Dr Atzert contributes to the international scholarship on Schopenhauer with journal articles and book chapters, with a focus on Schopenhauer's role in the development of psychoanalysis and for the understanding of Buddhism in Europe. His second monograph in German In Schopenhauer's Shadow (Königshausen & Neumann 2015, 209 pp) investigates the role of Schopenhauer's philosophy in the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche, Paul Deussen and Sigmund Freud. At present (2019) he is developing a monograph on K.E. Neumann's reception of Schopenhauer in his translations of the Pali discourses into German.
Literary authors on which Dr Atzert possesses specialist expertise include Thomas Bernhard and Heiner Müller. Supervision interests other than those related to the areas of expertise referred to above include the work of Th. W. Adorno and the Frankfurt School, the German student movement and the Red Army Faction.
Professor David Carter's research interests include Australian literature and publishing history, cultural history, the history of the book, magazines and periodical studies, middlebrow cultures, and studies in modernity.
Professor Carter was Director of the Australian Studies Centre at the University of Queensland from 2001 to 2006, then Professor of Australian Literature and Cultural History in the School of Communication and Arts.
He is the author of Australian Books and Authors in the American Marketplace, 1840s-1940s (2018) with Roger Osborne, Almost Always Modern: Australian Print Cultures and Modernity (2013), Dispossession, Dreams and Diversity: Issues in Australian Studies (2006) and A Career in Writing: Judah Waten and the Cultural Politics of a Literary Career (1997), winner of the Walter McRae Russell Award for literary scholarship. His edited books include the co-edited Fields, Capitals, Habitus: Australian Culture, Inequalities and Social Divisions (2020); Making Books: Contemporary Australian Publishing (2007) with Anne Galligan; The Ideas Market: An Alternative Take on Australia's Intellectual Life (2004); Culture in Australia: Policies, Publics and Programs, with Tony Bennett (2001); and Outside the Book: Contemporary Essays on Literary Periodicals (1991).
He is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities and Series Editor, Anthem Studies in Book History, Publishing and Print Culture, Anthem UK.
Professor Carter has extensive experience in teaching and developing programs in Australian Studies internationally. He was President of the International Australian Studies Association from 1997 to 2001; Manager of the Australian Studies in China program of the Australia-China Council (2002-16); a board member of the Australia-Japan Foundation (1998-2004); and Visiting Professor in Australian Studies at Tokyo University (2007-08 & 2016-17). He is a Board Member of the Foundation for Australian Studies in China.
I am a classicist and a theatre and performance studies scholar, and am a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and the Royal Historical Society. My area of expertise lies in the performance of Greek tragedy in contemporary theatre, and I am particularly interested in experimental, immersive, and postdramatic adaptations of tragic texts. My most recent research was supported through the Arts and Humanities Research Council in the UK, via a UKRI Innovation Fellowship titled Punchdrunk on the Classics. The research project built upon my prior work as academic consultant on Punchdrunk’s Kabeiroi (2017) and involved me going on secondment to Punchdrunk in a knowledge-exchange arrangement during which I worked as dramaturg on their production The Burnt City (2022-23). My monograph Punchdrunk on the Classics: Experiencing Immersion in The Burnt City and Beyond documented the intersection between immersion and ancient literature within the development and audience experience of the production, and was published with Palgrave Macmillan in 2023. My collaboration with Punchdrunk on The Burnt City was profiled in the New York Times here.
Other current research projects include an edited collection titled Experiencing Immersion in Antiquity and Modernity: From Narrative to Virtual Reality (Bloomsbury), a student edition of Euripides' Women of Troy for Methuen Drama, an invited chapter on dance, immersivity, and translation in Punchdrunk's The Burnt City and, together with Professor Chris Hay (Flinders University) a special issue of Contemporary Theatre Review on the theatre director Simon Stone.
My previous publications include the monograph Postdramatic Tragedies through the Classical Presences series at Oxford University Press (2019), and the co-edited collection Adapting Translation for the Stage (with Geraldine Brodie, for Routledge's Advances in Theatre and Performance Studies series, shortlisted for the 2019 TaPRA prize for editing). I have also published articles and chapters on Punchdrunk, Sarah Kane, Martin Crimp, and Katie Mitchell. My pieces for a general audience have appeared in popular publications including The Theatre Times, The Conversation, and Exeunt Magazine. Dictionary and encyclopedia entries include the 'drama, reception of' entry for the Oxford Classical Dictionary, and the 'Ancient Greek Drama in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Century' in the Methuen Drama Encyclopedia of Modern Theatre (2024).
I joined the University of Queensland in 2023. Prior to this, I worked at the University of Bristol from 2015-2023. Alongside academia, I work as a dramaturg and academic consultant on new writing and classical adaptation projects, and welcome contact from potential collaborators.
Dr Roberto H. Esposto is a Senior Lecturer in the Spanish and Latin American Studies program in the School of Languages and Cultures at the University of Queensland.
Roberto’s research output focuses on Argentinean and Latin American literature. His work also centres on Latin American thought, with a particular attention to decolonial thinking. His research publications deal with questions of Argentinean and Latin American cultural identity and intellectual history and problematizes the ways in which Latin American intellectuals grapple, from a situated perspective, with a colonial legacy that underpins Western modernity today.
Due to Roberto’s significant contribution to the study of 20th century Argentinean literature, in 2015 he was nominated Corresponding Fellow of the Argentinean Academy of Letters. Roberto is the first Australian Hispanist to be awarded such an honour by an academy of the Spanish language, of which there are twenty-four around the world.
He is an internationally recognized expert on the Argentine novelist and diplomat Abel Posse (1934-2023). Roberto has also published on the -Argentine philosopher Günther Rodolfo Kusch (1922-1979). Kusch is a philosophical anthropologist who made a significant contribution to the articulation of Argentinean and Latin American philosophy, harnessed from indigenous and popular thinking, which has influenced a broad set of disciplines, including metaphysics and theology, art and literary studies, and decolonial thought.
More recently Roberto has contributed to make better known the poetry of the Argentinean Hugo Caamaño (1923-2015), by leading an edited publication in collaboration with numbered members of the academy and published by the Argentinean Academy of Letters, titled Hugo Caamaño, poeta de mundo propio.
Roberto engages regularly with Latin America, by participating in conferences in Argentina, Brazil and Chile.
Since 2003, Roberto has made a significant contribution to fostering the learning and use of Spanish in the international community, by writing the popular, high impact, bestselling Lonely Planet Latin American Spanish Phrasebook and Dictionary, which has seen many editions, including the 10th which appeared in September 2023. This publication has also been translated into French and Italian.
Research interests
20th Century Argentinean literature and the historical novel; Latin American literature; Latin American intellectual tradition and decolonial thought
Carole Ferrier is a Professor of Literature and Women's Studies. Her research interests are in Women's and Gender Studies, and Critical and Cultural Studies, especially Black women authors; Australian women writers and Migrant writers; feminist and Marxist theory, and the theorising of race and ethnicity in relation to culture.
After gaining a BA Honours (London) and a PhD (Auckland), she moved in 1973 to teach in the Department of English (now the School of Communication and Arts) at The University of Queensland.
She was Director of the Women, Gender, Culture and Social Change Research Centre from the 1990s, and President of the Australian Women's and Gender Studies Association in the late 90s and early 2000s. She has been convenor of Women's/Gender Studies at UQ since the early 1990s and contributed to the growth and development of the discipline in Australia and beyond. She was also instrumental in the founding of Creative Writing as an academic research discipline at the University, and served as Director of the Australian Studies Centre.
In 1975 she was the founding editor of one of the first international second-wave feminist journals, Hecate: A Women's Interdisciplinary Journal , now in its forty-second volume, and also took over the editorship of the Australian Women's Book Review in 1999 (https://hecate.comunications-arts.uq.edu.au). She is also on the editorial boards of eight other national/ international journals.
She has published more than a hundred articles and book chapters, presented papers at seventy conferences in Australia and overseas, and regularly organised conferences at The University of Queensland. Books include: Gender, Politics and Fiction: Australian Women's Novels (UQP); The Janet Frame Reader (London: Women’s P); Jean Devanny: Romantic Revolutionary (Melbourne UP); As Good As a Yarn with You; Letters Between Miles Franklin, Katharine Susannah Prichard, Jean Devanny, Marjorie Barnard, Flora Eldershaw and Eleanor Dark (Cambridge UP); Radical Brisbane: An Unruly History (Melbourne: Vulgar P).
Lucy Fraser is a Senior Lecturer in Japanese at the School of Languages and Cultures, St Lucia campus, UQ. Her research interests include depictions of animal-human relationships in fiction, fairy tales and fairy tale retellings in Japanese and English, and ideas of gender--especially the figure of the girl--in contemporary Japanese literature, manga, film, and television. She is also interested in Japan-Australia literary and cultural connections, and editing and translation of literature and literary criticism.
Will is a lecturer in Chinese translation within the University of Queensland’s Master of Arts in Chinese Translation and Interpreting programme and a practicing NAATI accredited professional translator. Having completed his BA (Hons) from the School of Oriental & African Studies (SOAS) in London, Will worked in Beijing at the British Embassy and then subsequently completed his PhD at the University of Queensland. In addition to Will’s teaching and research roles at UQ he is also a practicing commercial translator currently specialising in the translation of Chinese medical research into English.
Greg Hainge is a leading expert in cultural studies whose work reaches into the realms of French literature, film and philosophy, the films of David Lynch, sound and noise studies, the music of Radiohead and much much more. The analysis of challenging and difficult texts is the connecting thread that links the very diverse range of topics he has published on. Greg believes that engagement with difficult texts or objects of study are important because they require us to engage deep critical thinking, forcing us to formulate a response to something that we do not understand. Why does this matter? Because if we only engage with what we already know, we are not learning. Because we need to learn how to engage with things and people who are not like us if our societies are going to be healthy and thrive.
As Professor of French and Head of the School of Languages and Cultures at the University of Queensland, Greg is also passionate about the importance of languages and knowledge of other cultures in education and is driving a large-scale program of work that seeks to flip the script on the importance of languages, which he sees as a critical skill for the future, never more so than right now given the rise of generative AI.
The author of three monographs and over 50 academic chapters and articles, Greg has also written articles for The Australian, and catalogue essays for major international exhibitions, including ‘David Lynch: Between Two Worlds’ at the Gallery of Modern Art, Queensland and 'Audiosphere' held at the Reina Sofia National Museum in Madrid.
Greg is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities and a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. He is editor in chief of Culture, Theory and Critique and serves on the editorial boards of Contemporary French Civilization, Études Céliniennes, Corps: Revue Interdisciplinaire and French Screen Studies.
The continuing interest underpinning my research is that of the self-presentation of the non-native speaker, in different genres. This has led me to work on: culturally determined practices; cross-cultural comparisons; and on intercultural behaviour, how this is conceptualized and how, in practice, encounters between different expectations of appropriate behaviour play out.
One focus of my attention has been the proliferation of new intercultural encounters which are made possible by online technologies. In particular, Juliana de Nooy and I undertook a project examining discussion fora on media websites, culminating in our 2009 book. The pedagogical implications of this work, and my own teaching practices have allowed me to develop expertise in language learning and technology which I have extended through other collaborations (e.g. Cowley & Hanna, 2013 on Wikipedia) research supervisions and publications which derive from it (Gao & Hanna, 2016, on instructional software; work with Khosravi, Gyamfit et al; and a forthcoming paper with Aljohani).
One current project focuses on another critical area of intercultural contact: Study Abroad experiences. Many institutions encourage Study Abroad participants to share their experiences online with other students, with a view to publicizing the opportunities and providing advice - such testimonials are the primary source for my current work. I am looking at the ‘selves’ which these online testimonials hold up as exemplary (see Hanna 2016 on food; also Hanna & de Nooy 2003 b; 2006). What, the student reader of these testimonials might ask, will I feel like? How will I change? What counts as successful life as a Study Abroad student? How can I be successful too? In order to tackle these questions, I draw on theories of learner motivation and imaginary or ideal selves.
This interest in self-presentation underpins a current project on employability and language students (SLC funded project, undertaken with Alicia Toohey).
Margaret teaches in the literature area in the School of Communication and Arts. Her teaching interests are literary theory, contemporary women’s writing, and postmodern fiction.
Margaret is the author of Marking Feminist Times: Remembering the Longest Revolution in Australia, a study of Australian feminist cultural memory; Kathy Acker: Punk Writer; and co-author with Anthea Taylor of Postfeminism in Context: Women, Australian Popular Culture, and the Unsettling of Postfeminism. She is the co-editor of Terra-Recognita: New Essays in Australian Studies, Manifesting Australian Literary Feminisms: Nexus and Faultlines, and Things that Liberate: An Australian Feminist Wunderkammer. She has also published numerous articles on feminist fiction and culture, and autobiography.
She has been a consultant to the National Museum of Australia, advising on a modern Australian women's movement collection. Her current project is a monograph on women’s punk and post-punk memoirs.
Dr Leah Henrickson is a Lecturer in Digital Media and Cultures at the University of Queensland. She is the author of Reading Computer-Generated Texts (Cambridge University Press, 2021) and other peer-reviewed articles about how we understand text generation systems and output, artificial intelligence, and digital media ecosystems. Dr Henrickson also studies digital storytelling for critical self-reflection, community building, and commercial benefit. She regularly supports projects and organisations in their digital storytelling efforts as consultant and advisor.
Dr Henrickson is especially keen to collaborate on projects involving digital methods and media, hermeneutics, histories of communications media, and unconventional text production and dissemination.
Ian Hesketh is Associate Professor of History in the School of Historical and Philosophical Inquiry at the University of Queensland. Most broadly, his research considers the relationship between history, science, and religion with a focus on nineteenth-century Britain. More specifically, he has written extensively on the Darwinian Revolution, nineteenth-century physics, and large-scale forms of history from the nineteenth century to the present. His latest books include A History of Big History (Cambridge University Press, 2023) and, the edited collection, Imagining the Darwinian Revolution: Historical Narratives of Evolution from the Nineteenth Century to the Present (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2022). He is currently writing a monograph entitled "The Making of Darwin, Darwinians, and Darwinism."
He teaches courses on historiography (HIST2312; HUMN6600), revolutions in history (HIST2024), American history (HIST2023), and British history (HIST2417).
Amy is a specialist in Francophone autobiographies of exile and trauma. She is author of Hoarding Memory: Covering the Wounds of the Algerian War (U of Nebraska P, 2020), Remembering French Algeria: Pieds-Noirs, Identity and Exile (U of Nebraska P, 2015), and A la recherche d'un emploi: Business French in a Communicative Context (Hackett, 2017). She has co-edited several volumes including Places of Traumatic Memory - a Global Context (Palgrave Macmillan 2020), The Unspeakable: Representations of Trauma in Francophone Literature and Art (2013), and Textual and Visual Selves: Photography, Film and Comic Art in French Autobiography (U of Nebraska P, 2011). She is currently working on her new project, Terrorism Testimony: French Narratives of Survival.
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.
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.
