Originally from the States, I've been lecturing at UQ since 2017. I teach Multimedia and Digital Project in the Bachelor of Communications, both of which center on embedding critical perspectives on media into creative and collaborative design and production processes. My research focuses on the relationship among gender, technological change and space. My methodological approaches combine textual analysis (looking at media content) with more industry-facing, hands-on approaches.
The current book projects turn to representations of gender violence in popular media. My second book, Representing Gender Violence in Contemporary Screen Media: Cutting Through the Park, is under contract with Routledge and it studies themes of surveillance technology in representations of stranger rape in television and film. My third book project, Feeling Safe: Gender Harm and Safety DIscourses in Platform Media, studies themes in gender safety discourses across various platforms including safety apps and dating apps.
My first book The Aesthetics of TV Nostalgia (Bloomsbury, 2019) is an industry study of the people designing sets and costumes for nostalgic US television programmes. I address how questions around gender play out on television alongside larger concerns around historical progress and regress that are attached to technological change. You can find my other publications in the areas of television representations of gender, the female body in narratives around nationhood, digital archives, and creative production in Adaptation, Television & New Media, Feminist Media Studies, Cinema Journal, Continuum, Surveillance & Society and Convergence.
Dr Cassandra Byrnes (she/her) is a History Lecturer at the University of Queensland, Australia, and researches histories of gender and sexuality focusing on reproductive rights and control. She is working on a history of reproductive coercion in Australia’s recent past, and how that directly influences our current understandings of laws and social practices. Her past research has examined reproduction regulation in Queensland in the mid-to-late twentieth century, illustrating how political, moral, and social control over contracepting bodies influenced broader attitudes regarding agency and autonomy. She was a National Library of Australia Summer Scholar and a Global Change Scholar at UQ, collaborating with peers in interdisciplinary networks, and has recently completed a Postdoctoral Fellowship on the interdisciplinary project The Limits of Consent.
Marguerite Johnson is a cultural historian of the ancient Mediterranean, specialising in sexuality and gender, particularly in the poetry of Sappho, Catullus, and Ovid, as well as magical traditions in Greece, Rome, and the Near East. She also researches Classical Reception Studies, with a regular focus on Australia. In addition to ancient world studies, Marguerite is interested in sexual histories in modernity as well as magic in the west more broadly, especially the practices and art of Australian witch, Rosaleen Norton. She is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities.
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 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. She is also a member of the Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Committee for the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences.
