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Professor Almond’s current research interests include apocalypticism in early modern England; and demonic possession, exorcism and witchcraft in early modern England. He has particular interests in themes in religious cultural history in the early modern period.

Professor Almond holds the following qualifications: B.D. (Hons.) (London), M.A. (Lancaster), Ph.D. (Adelaide), F.A.H.A.

He is the author of The British Discovery of Buddhism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006, paperback edition); The Witches of Warboys: An extraordinary Story of Sorcery, Sadism, and Satanic Possession (London: I.B.Tauris, in press); Demonic Possession & Exorcism in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Adam and Eve in Seventeenth-Century Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), Heaven and Hell in Enlightenment England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); The British Discovery of Buddhism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); Heretic and Hero: Muhammad and the Victorians (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1989); Rudolf Otto: An Introduction to his Philosophical Theology (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984); Mystical Experience and Religious Doctrine: An Investigation of the Study of Mysticism in World Religions (Berlin: Mouton, 1982).

Recent articles include “Adam, Pre-Adamites, and Extra-Terrestrial Beings in Early Modern Europe,” Journal of Religious History 30(2006), 163-74; “‘The Witches of Warboys’: A Bibliographical Note,” in Notes and Queries 52 (2005), 192-3; “Western Images of Islam, 1700-1900, Australian Journal of Politics and History 49(2003), 412-24; “Modern Imaginings of Islam,” St Mark’s Review 192(2003), pp.24-9, reprinted in The Sceptic 24(2004), 6-10. “Fundamentalism, Christianity, and Religion,” The 2001 Sir Robert Madgwick Lecture, Armidale: The University of New England, 2002, Broadcast on ABC Radio National, Encounter, 7.4.02, www.abc.net.au/rn.relig/enc/stories/s520400.htm; " Druids, Patriarchs, and the Primordial Religion”, The Journal of Contemporary Religion 15(2000), 379-94.

He is currently working on a book on apocalypticism in early modern England.

Nicholas Aroney is Professor of Constitutional Law at The University of Queensland, Director (Public Law) of the Centre for Public, International and Comparative Law and a Senior Fellow of the Centre for Law and Religion at Emory University. In 2010 he received a four-year Future Fellowship from the Australian Research Council to study comparative federalism and in 2021 he secured an Australian Research Council Discovery Grant to investigate the nature and function of constituent power in federal systems. He has held visiting positions at Oxford, Cambridge, Paris II, Edinburgh, Durham, Padua, Sydney, Emory and Tilburg universities.

Professor Aroney has published over 160 journal articles, book chapters and books in the fields of constitutional law, comparative constitutional law and legal theory. He has led several international research projects in comparative federalism, bicameralism, legal pluralism, and law & religion, and he speaks frequently at international conferences on these topics. His most notable publications in these fields include: The Constitution of a Federal Commonwealth: The Making and Meaning of the Australian Constitution (Cambridge University Press, 2009), Shari'a in the West (Oxford University Press, 2010) (edited with Rex Ahdar), The Future of Australian Federalism (Cambridge University Press, 2012) (edited with Gabrielle Appleby and Thomas John), The Constitution of the Commonwealth of Australia: History, Principle and Interpretation (Cambridge University Press, 2015) (with Peter Gerangelos, James Stellios and Sarah Murray), Courts in Federal Countries (Toronto University Press, 2017) (edited with John Kincaid), The Routledge Handbook of Subnational Constitutions and Constitutionalism (Routledge 2021) (edited with Patricia Popelier and Giacomo Delledone) and Christianity and Constitutionalism (Oxford University Press, 2022) (edited with Ian Leigh).

Professor Aroney is a former editor of The University of Queensland Law Journal (2003-2005) and International Trade and Business Law Annual (1996-1998), and a past secretary of the Australian Society of Legal Philosophy. He is a past member of the Governing Council and the current Co-Convenor of the Queensland Chapter of the Australian Association of Constitutional Law. He is also a member of the editorial advisory board of the American Journal of Jurisprudence, Public Law Review, Australian Journal of Law and Religion and International Trade and Business Law Review. He has made numerous influential submissions to government and parliamentary inquiries and in 2013 undertook a review of the Crime and Misconduct Act for the Queensland Government with the Hon Ian Callinan AC QC, a former Justice of the High Court of Australia. In 2017 he was appointed by the Australian Prime Minister to an Expert Panel to advise on whether Australian law adequately protects the human right to freedom of religion.

Professor Aroney joined the Law School in 1995 after working with a major national law firm and acting as a legal consultant in the field of building and construction law.

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.

Deborah Brown is Professor of Philosophy and Director of the University of Queensland Critical Thinking Project. She is a fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities and past President of the Australasian Association of Philosophy. Her research interests include philosophy of mind, with a particular focus on philosophical perspectives on pain, the history of philosophy, and applications of critical thinking in education and leadership development programs. Together with neuroscientist, Professor Brian Key, she helped establish UQ's first Neurophilosophy Lab and is on the steering committee for the Centre for Innovation in Pain and Health Research (CIPHeR), the largest consortium of pain health researchers in Australasia.

Professor Peter Cryle’s research interests include representations of psycho-sexual pathology in popular and middle-brow French fiction of the fin-de-siècle. He also has a strong interest in the literature of libertine enlightenment in French.

BA (Queensland), MA (Queensland), DU (Nice)

Chevalier dans l'Ordre des Palmes Académiques, FAHA

Peter Cryle is the author of Bilan Critique : "L'Exil et le royaume" d'Albert Camus. Essai d'analyse (Paris: Lettres Modernes, 1973); Roger Martin du Gard, ou De l'intégrité de l'être à l'intégrité du roman (Paris: Lettres Modernes, 1984); The Thematics of Commitment: The Tower and the Plain (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985); Geometry in the Boudoir: Shifting Positions in Classical French Erotic Narrative (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994); The Telling of the Act: Eroticism as Narrative in French Fiction of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (Delaware: Delaware University Press, 2001); La Crise du plaisir, 1740-1830 (Lille: Septentrion, 2003). He is co-editor, with Lisa O'Connell, of Libertine Enlightenment: Sex, Liberty, and Licence in the Eighteenth Century (London: Palgrave, 2003).

Recent articles and book chapters include "Etat présent de la critique sadienne", Dix-Huitième Siècle, 31, 1999, 507-524; "Beyond the Canonical Sade", Paragraph, Vol. XXIII, 1, March 2000, 15-25; "Making Room for Women in Pornographic Writing of the Early Nineteenth Century: Entre chien et loup, by Félicité de Choiseul-Meuse", in Lloyd and Nelson (eds) Women Seeking Expression, Monash, Monash Romance Studies, 2001, 11-23; "Petite-maîtrise: The Ethics of Libertine Foppery", Esprit Créateur, 2003, and "Le Marbre féminin", Revue des Sciences Humaines, 2003.

He is currently preparing a book on representations of psycho-sexual pathology in popular and middle-brow French fiction of the fin-de-siècle, tentatively entitled The Pathological Unknown.

political philosophy, methodology of science, the disciplines

Fred D'Agostino was educated at Amherst College (BA, 1968), Princeton University (MA, 1973), and the London School of Economics (PhD, 1978). He was Research Fellow in Philosophy at the Australian National University from 1978 to 1984, and worked at the University of New England from 1984 to 2004, where he was Associate Professor of Philosophy, Associate Dean of Arts, Head of the School of Social Science, and Member of the University Council. He is now Professor Emeritus of Humanities and was President of the Academic Board and Executive Dean of Arts at The University of Queensland. He has edited the Australasian Journal of Philosophy and PPE: Politics, Philosophy and Economics and has published four books--Chomsky's System of Ideas (Clarendon Press, 1986), Free Public Reason (OUP, 1996), Incommensurability and Commensuration (Ashgate, 2003), and Naturalizing Epistemology (Palgrave, 2010). He is co-editor of the Routledge Companion to Political and Social Philosophy. His current research is on disciplinarity and complexity. He is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities.

Pete is currently a Lecturer in Philosophy specialising in the philosophy of science, particularly the philosophy of physics. His research interests include time and causation in modern physics, especially quantum foundations, and the epistemology and methodology of science, especially analogue experimentation. He completed in 2021 an ARC Discovery Early Career Research Award project, "A philosophical exploration of simulating and controlling the quantum world", which examines how a novel laboratory technique, analogue quantum simulation, illuminates the epistemology of analogue experimentation. In 2023 he was a collaborator in the FQxI project "Information as fuel" based in the School of Mathematics and Physics. Pete's philosophical research is informed by the latest experimental and theoretical results from the physical sciences.

Peter Harrison was educated at the University of Queensland and Yale University. In 2011 he moved to Queensland from the University of Oxford where he was the Idreos Professor of Science and Religion. At Oxford he was a member of the Faculties of Theology and History, a Fellow of Harris Manchester College, and Director of the Ian Ramsey Centre. He is a Professorial Research Fellow at the Universityof Notre Dame, Australia, and a Senior Research Fellow at Oxford's Ian Ramsey Centre. He has published extensively on the philosophical, scientific and religious thought of the early modern period, and is interested in secularization theory and historical and contemporary relations between science and religion. He has been a Visiting Fellow at Oxford, Yale, Princeton, and the University of Chicago, is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, a founding member of the International Society for Science and Religion, and a corresponding member of the International Academy for the History of Science. In 2003, he recieved a Centenary Medal for 'service to Australian Society and the Humanities in the Study of Philosophy and Religion’. In 2011 he delivered the Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh. He was awarded a DLitt by the University of Oxford in 2013, and delivered the Bampton Lectures at Oxford in 2019. From 2015-20 has was an Australian Laureate Fellow.

His twelve books include, most recently, Some New World: Myths of Supernatural Belief in a Secular Age (Cambridge, 2024), After Science and Religion (Cambridge, 2022), co-edited with John Milbank, and The Territories of Science and Religion (Chicago, 2015), winner of the Aldersgate Prize.

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).

Professor Ian Hunter is currently pursuing two research themes, one concerns the history of early modern political and philosophical thought, and the other concerns the history of theory in the modern humanities academy.

Ian Hunter is a distinguished international scholar working on the history of early modern political and philosophical thought, and on the emergence of theory in the 1960s humanities academy. His Rival Enlightenments appeared in 2001 and his most recent monograph is The Secularisation of the Confessional State: The Political Thought of Christian Thomasius (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). In collaboration with Thomas Ahnert (Edinburgh) and Frank Grunert (Halle), he completed the first English translation of Thomasius’s works: Christian Thomasius: Essays on Church, State, and Politics (Liberty Fund, 2007). He has recently edited and introduced two volumes for the German edition of Thomasius's Selected Works.

Recently published articles include ‘Kant’s Religion and Prussian Religious Policy’, Modern Intellectual History, vol. 2, 2005, 1-27; ‘The History of Theory’, Critical Inquiry, vol. 33, 2006, 78-112; ‘The Time of Theory: The Return of Metaphysics to the Anglo-American Humanities Academy’, Journal of Postcolonial Studies, vol. 10, 2007, 5-22; and 'A Jus Gentium for America. The Rules of War and the Rule of Law in the Revolutionary United States', Journal of the History of International Law 14, 2012, pp. 173-206. Recent book chapters include 'Natural Law as Political Philosophy', in Desmond Clarke and Catherine Wilson (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy in Early Modern Europe, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011, pp. 475-99; and 'Kant’s Political Thought in the Prussian Enlightenment', in Elizabeth Ellis (ed), Kant’s Political Theory: Interpretations and Applications, Pittsburg: Penn State Press, 2012, pp. 170-207.

He is currently working on the theme of the persona of the philosopher, and the intellectual history of 1960s humanities theory.

Simon is an intellectual historian specialising in the history of legal, political and religious ideas. He is currently working on a number of projects: the political uses of the fifth commandment ("Honour your father and mother") in the early modern period, resistance theory in the Reformed Protestant tradition, and the idea of constituent power in the early modern period. He was a Visiting Fellow at the Mathias Corvinus Collegium in Budapest in early 2023, and is a Non-Resident Fellow at the Danube Institute, also in Budapest. His first book was published with Edinburgh University Press in 2022, and is entitled Reforming the Law of Nature: The secularisation of political thought, 1532-1689. His second book is on education, entitled Against Worldview, and published with Lexham Press.

Dr James A. T. Lancaster is an intellectual historian who received his PhD from the Warburg Institute, University of London. He is presently Lecturer in Studies in Western Religious Traditions in the School of Historical and Philosophical Inquiry, as well as the Editor (special issues) of Intellectual History Review. Previously, he was a UQ Research Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Queensland. As a member of the Editorial Board of the Oxford Francis Bacon edition, he has published widely on the philosophical and religious thought of Francis Bacon. His research and teaching interests and experience include the history of science and religion, the history of atheism and irreligion in the early modern period, and the history of the psychology of religion.

Dylan Lino researches in constitutional law and colonialism, especially in their historical and theoretical contexts. Much of his research has focused on the rights and status of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples within Australia's settler constitutional order. He has also written on the imperial entanglements of British constitutional thought, focusing on the work of Victorian jurist AV Dicey. He holds a Bachelor of Laws (Honours) and a Bachelor of Arts from UNSW, a Master of Laws from Harvard University and a PhD from the University of Melbourne.

Dylan's research can be downloaded from SSRN. He is also on Twitter at @Dylan_Lino.

Dr Morris Low’s research interests include the history of Japanese science and technology, history of Australia-Japan relations, Japanese visual culture, and issues relating to identity.

His current research projects include: the history of nuclear power in Japan; and the history of Japan’s participation in international expositions and Olympic Games.

He is Editor of the East Asia Series of research monographs published by Routledge for the Asian Studies Association of Australia (ASAA).

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

Tim Mehigan is Professor of German in the School of Languages and Cultures at the University of Queensland.

He is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities (elected 2003) and former President of the German Studies Association of Australia (2003-2007). He was Humboldt Fellow at the University of Munich for two years in 1994 and 1995. In 2013 he was awarded the Research Prize of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in Germany. In 2017 he was awarded the Fulbright Senior Scholarship.

From 2013 to 2022 Tim has held a guest appointment as Humboldt Prize Winner at the University of Bonn, Germany. In 2017-2018 he was Fulbright Research Fellow in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago, USA. Previous appointments include Honorary Professor in the School of Languages and Cultures at the University of Queensland in 2011-2012.

Tim’s work is focused on two key periods in German and European literary and intellectual history: on the one hand, the literature and philosophy of the time of Goethe and Kant, which is to say, the late 18th and early 19th century; on the other hand, the literature and philosophy of Austrian modernism in the first three decades of the 20th century.

Beyond such a focus, Tim is vitally interested in the connections that flow between literature and philosophy and has explored these in relation to writers such as Heinrich von Kleist (1777-1811) and Robert Musil (1880-1942) and topic areas such as the deployment of space in literature.

Tim has also recently edited two collections devoted to assessing the work of J.M. Coetzee (Camden House, 2011; Camden House, 2018) and published, with B. Empson, the first English translation of K.L. Reinhold’s major work of philosophy Versuch einer neuen Theorie des menschlichen Vorstellungsvermögens (Walter de Gruyter, 2011). Most recently, with Antonino Falduto (Ferrara), he has edited The Palgrave Handbook on the Philosophy of Friedrich Schiller (Palgrave/Macmillan 2022).

Karolina Mikołajewska-Zając is a Research Fellow in Strategy and Entrepreneurship at the UQ Business School. Her research revolves around patterns of societal crises and their influence on entrepreneurship and the dynamics and systemic effects of digital platforms' growth. Karolina's work uses ecological epistemologies, emphasizing relationality, process, and systemic connection.

Karolina obtained her PhD in Management and Organization Studies from Kozminski University in Warsaw, Poland. During her PhD, she held a 2-year visiting position at the University of California at Berkeley, where she conducted fieldwork tracing the organizational trajectory and ecosystemic effects of digital platforms focused on hospitality (Couchsurfing and Airbnb). Her research has been published in Organization Studies, European Journal of Social Theory, Internet Histories, and The Handbook of the Sharing Economy, among others. Karolina is a member of the editorial collective at ephemera. theory & politics in organization and a member of the steering committee at the International Sociological Association's Thematic Group 10 Digital Sociology.

Elizabeth Stephens is an Associate Professor of Cultural Studies in the School of Communication and Arts. She was previously an Australian Research Council Future Fellow in the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (UQ, 2017-2021), Associate Dean Research at Southern Cross University (2014-2017), and an ARC Australian Research Fellow in the Centre for the History of European Discourses (UQ, 2010-2014). Her background is in gender and sexuality studies, and her current research focuses on three interconnected themes:

• popular histories and representations of science, medicine and technology
• collaborations between the arts and sciences
• the critical medical humanities

Elizabeth is author of over 100 publications, including three monographs: A Critical Genealogy of Normality (University of Chicago Press, 2017), co-authored with Peter Cryle; Anatomy as Spectacle: Public Exhibitions of the Body from 1700 to the Present (Liverpool University Press, 2011), and Queer Writing: Homoeroticism in Jean Genet's Fiction (Palgrave 2009). She has published over 75 research articles and chapters, as well as non-traditional outputs including catalogue essays and curated exhibitions.

She welcomes inquiries from potential PhD students, and can offer supervision in the following areas:

• cultural studies of science, medicine and/or technology
• art/science collaboration
• medical humanities
• digital cultures
• gender and sexuality studies