Peter Banki is founder and director of the Festival of Death and Dying and of Erotic Living. He has also been a member of the Philosophy Research Initiative at the University of Western Sydney, where he has lectured and tutored in the School of Humanities and Languages. He holds a PhD from New York University (2009). His book The Forgiveness to Come: The Holocaust and the Hyper-Ethical came out in 2018 with Fordham University Press. His research interests include the intersections between philosophy and sexuality, and the politics of reconciliation and forgiveness in relation to personal and cultural trauma.
A.J. Carruthers is a poet, literary critic and journalist. In 2024 he was the recipient of the Cy Twombly Award for Poetry from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. He is author of Literary History and Avant-Garde Poetics in the Antipodes: Languages of Invention (Edinburgh University Press, 2024), Stave Sightings: Notational Experiments in North American Long Poems (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), three volumes of a long poem: Axis Z Book 3 (Cordite, 2023), Axis Book 2 (Vagabond, 2019) and Axis Book 1: ‘Areal’ (Vagabond, 2014), and the sound poem Consonata (Cordite, 2019). He has worked as Lecturer at Shanghai University of International Business and Economics (SUIBE), Associate Professor at Nanjing University, and is currently a Visiting Fellow at the Australian National University.
Anthony Cordingley is Robinson Fellow at the University of Sydney, on secondment from the Université Paris 8, France, where he is Associate Professor in English and Translation. He was fortunate to be supervised by Bruce Gardiner for a PhD thesis, which was developed into Samuel Beckett’s How It Is: Philosophy in Translation (Edinburgh University Press, 2018). He teaches across modernist literature, comparative literature, translation studies, and his work has appeared in journals such as Comparative Literature, Modern Philology, PMLA, Twentieth-Century Literature and Translation Studies. On the editorial board of Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui and an editor for the Beckett Digital Manuscripts Project (www.beckettarchive.org), he recently co-authored with Chris Ackerley and Llewellyn Brown, Samuel Beckett’s Comment c’est / How It Is: Annotations (Paris: Lettres Modernes Minard/Classiques Garnier, 2024). His work in translation studies includes the co-/edited volumes Self-translation: Brokering Originality in Hybrid Culture (Bloomsbury, 2013) and Collaborative Translation: From the Renaissance to the Digital Age (Bloomsbury, 2016). He recently completed a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship project, “Genetic Translation Studies” at the KU Leuven’s Centre for Translation Studies, financed by the EU Horizon 2020 research and innovation program.
Jack Cox is the author of the novel Dodge Rose (Dalkey Archive, 2016).
Toby Fitch (he/they) is a leading Australian poet, editor, critic and teacher. He is poetry editor of Overland, a lecturer in creative writing at the University of Sydney and the author of eight collections of poetry, most recently Sydney Spleen (Giramondo, 2021) and Object Permanence: Calligrammes (Puncher & Wattmann, 2022). He is the editor of the anthologies Best of Australian Poems 2021 (with Ellen van Neerven) and Groundswell: The Overland Judith Wright Poetry Prize for New and Emerging Poets 2007–2020. His poetry has been awarded the Grace Leven Prize and the Charles Rischbieth Jury Prize, while his PhD, consisting of a poetry book, The Bloomin’ Notions of Other & Beau, and a thesis, “Themparks: Alternative Play in Contemporary Australian Poetry”, won the University of Sydney’s Dame Leonie Kramer Prize for Australian Poetry.
Adam Gall teaches Australian environmental history at NYU Sydney, and academic writing and research at the University of Sydney. He writes on Australian cinema, literature, and cultural politics, as well as investigating the relationship between mediated attachment and ethico-political commitment in settler-colonial city and suburban environments.
Bruce Gardiner’s career summary, “Bruce Gardiner: Educational and Academic History”, is found in Appendix 1 of this volume.
Peter Godfrey-Smith is an Australian philosopher of science and writer, who is currently Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Sydney. He works primarily in philosophy of biology and philosophy of mind, and also has interests in general philosophy of science, pragmatism (especially the work of John Dewey), and some parts of metaphysics and epistemology. Elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2022, Godfrey-Smith has taught at Harvard University, Stanford University, Australian National University and the CUNY Graduate Center. He was the recipient of the Lakatos Award for his 2009 book, Darwinian Populations and Natural Selection (Oxford University Press), which discusses the philosophical foundations of the theory of evolution. His most recent book is Metazoa: Animal Life and the Birth of the Mind (HarperCollins, 2020).
Melissa Hardie is Associate Professor in the School of Arts, Communication and English, University of Sydney. With Meaghan Morris and Kane Race she edited The Year’s Work in Showgirl Studies (Indiana University Press, 2024). That collection offers both a history of the reception of Showgirls and new angles on the film, and includes her new essay, “Fifty Shades of Showgirls”. Recently she has published an article on Todd Field’s Tár in Film Quarterly, on Charlie’s Angels and blockchain in Australian Humanities Review and, with Amy Villarejo, on the 1970s drama Family and historical homophobia in Television Studies in Queer Times (Routledge, 2023). She is currently working on Patricia Nell Warren’s 1970s bestselling gay trilogy The Front Runner, The Fancy Dancer and The Beauty Queen, and finishing a book about the closet and styles of its remediation.
Alexis Harley is the Graduate Research Coordinator for Creative Arts and English at La Trobe University, where she lectures in literary studies. She writes about the ways in which literary and aesthetic cultures have shaped scientific research, natural history writing, and the theorisation of nature itself, with particular focus on the long nineteenth century, a period of intensified literary, ecological and cultural change. This work ranges across subjects as diverse as literary influences on colonial specimen collecting practices, colonial representations of rabbits and the origins of invasion ecology, the ways in which Romantic aesthetic culture manifests in Charles Darwin’s early writing, and how the poetics of the sublime influenced early nineteenth-century writing about geology and climate. She is the author of Autobiologies: Charles Darwin and the Natural History of the Self (Bucknell University Press 2014), recently co-edited Bees, Science and Sex in the Literature of the Long Nineteenth Century (Palgrave 2024), and is currently working with colleagues on an account of the complicated outworking of Romanticism in colonial Australia to the present day. Like so many of his students, Alexis Harley remains transfixed by the recollection of Bruce Gardiner’s extraordinary teaching: by his daring, dazzling curricula; his inimitable textual analysis; by the care with which he treated students’ ideas and writing. In 1998, Bruce referred to one of a then-undergraduate Alexis’ sentences as a grenade. He went on to find in several of her subsidiary sentences the resultant “shrapnel”. As she thought, then (and still), if anyone knows what it is to pull the safety pin on a sentence ...
Peter Hutchings (Emeritus Professor) – Bachelor of Arts (Hons), PhD, University of Sydney – was the Dean of the School of Humanities and Communication Arts at Western Sydney University from 2011 to 2021, and the Pro Vice-Chancellor of the Humanities and Social Sciences from 2020 to 2021. His career included positions at the University of Sydney (1988–91), Boston University in Sydney (1992), the University of Hong Kong (1992–95), and the Australian Learning and Teaching Council (2008–10). His research interests are in the arts, cinema, critical legal studies, cultural studies, literature and philosophy, as well as the history of Chinese migration and cultural exchange in Australia. His publications have appeared in Australian and international refereed journals and in the mainstream print media, and he is the author of The Criminal Spectre in Law, Literature and Aesthetics: Incriminating Subjects (Routledge, 2001). Currently, he is researching issues of sovereignty and cinema in the post-9/11 period.
Michelle Kelly is a writer and administrator living on unceded Awabakal land. Her Honours thesis “Reading Smut: Anaïs Nin’s Erotica on the Market” (2002) was supervised by Bruce Gardiner, as was her PhD thesis, “Library Encounters: Textuality and the Institution” (2012).
Kate Lilley is a poet and a scholar of queer, feminist textual history and theory from seventeenth-century women’s writing to contemporary poetry and poetics. From 2013 to 2021, she directed the Creative Writing program at the University of Sydney, where she is now an Honorary Associate Professor. Lilley has published three books of poetry, tilt (Vagabond, 2018; winner of the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards, 2019), Versary (Salt, 2002; winner of the Grace Levin Prize, 2002) and Ladylike (University of Western Australia Publishing, 2012), as well as two Vagabond chapbooks, Round Vienna and Realia. She is the editor of Margaret Cavendish: Blazing World and other writings (Penguin Classics, 2014) and Dorothy Hewett: Selected Poems (University of Western Australia Publishing, 2010). Lilley is also the poetry editor of Southerly.
Jessica Lim teaches English at St Andrew’s Cathedral School, Sydney. She previously supervised English literature at the University of Cambridge where she was a Director of Studies in English at Lucy Cavendish College. Her research centres on women’s writing and children’s literature from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with a particular focus on theological and pedagogical concerns. Alongside Louise Joy, she co-edited Women’s Literary Education, 1690–1850 (Edinburgh University Press, 2023), and her work has appeared in L. M. Montgomery’s “Emily of New Moon”: A Children’s Classic at 100 (University Press of Mississippi, 2024), Journal for Eighteenth Century Studies, The Charles Lamb Bulletin, Notes and Queries and Oxford Research in English. Jessica was supervised by Bruce Gardiner during her Honours year at the University of Sydney (2013), where she composed her thesis on the works of George MacDonald.
Marc Mierowsky is a Lecturer and ARC DECRA Fellow in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne. He is an associate editor of The Cambridge Edition of the Correspondence of Daniel Defoe (2022), and co-editor with Nicholas Seager of Defoe’s The Fortunate Mistress (Roxana) (2024) for Oxford World’s Classics. With Sarah Balkin, he is co-author of Comedy and Controversy: Scripting Public Speech (Cambridge University Press, 2024). His book A Spy Amongst Us: Daniel Defoe’s Secret Service and the Plot to End Scottish Independence is forthcoming with Yale University Press.
Benjamin Miller is a Lecturer in English and Writing at the University of Sydney. He has published on representations of blackness and Aboriginality in US and Australian theatre, film, music and writing in journals such as JASAL, Journal of Australian Studies and Ab-Original. His work explores the alternative modes of rhetoric used by Indigenous artists, from David Unaipon (Ngarrindjeri) to Adam Briggs (Yorta Yorta).
Brett Neilson is Professor and Deputy Director at the Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University. With Sandro Mezzadra, he is author of Border as Method, or, the Multiplication of Labor (Duke University Press, 2013), The Politics of Operations: Excavating Contemporary Capitalism (Duke University Press, 2019) and The Rest and the West: Capital and Power in a Multipolar World (Verso Books, 2024).
Christopher Richardson has a Bachelor of Arts (Hons) in English literature from the University of Sydney. His Honours year was wisely spent under the supervision of Bruce Gardiner, exploring the nonsense verse of Edward Lear. Christopher attained a Master of International Security (with Merit) from the University of Sydney and Master of Teaching (Secondary) from the University of New England, Armidale. His PhD from the University of Sydney explored the childhood policies and practices of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea). Christopher has taught English and IB Global Politics at Santa Sabina College in Strathfield since 2021. He is the author of seven published books for young readers, including the epic maritime fantasy novel Empire of the Waves (Penguin, 2015).
Nick Riemer is a Senior Lecturer in the department of English and Writing and of Linguistics at the University of Sydney, and a member of the Histoire des théories linguistiques laboratory, Université Paris Cité. His research is in semantics and the history and philosophy of the language “sciences”. He is the author, among other books, of L’emprise de la grammaire: Propositions épistémologiques pour une linguistique mineure (ENS Éditions, 2021) and Boycott Theory and the Struggle for Palestine: Universities, Intellectualism and Liberation (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023).
Monique Rooney teaches US literature and television in the English Program at the Australian National University. She is the author of Living Screens: Melodrama and Plasticity in Contemporary Film and Television (Rowman & Littlefield, 2015), and her recent essays have appeared in Textual Practice, New Review of Film and Television Studies and Angelaki. Currently, she is working on two projects: preparing her second monograph, Brow Work: Tastemaking and Networked Being in Contemporary Literature and Art and researching the papers of Ruth Park in preparation for writing a literary biography.
Liz Shek-Noble is a researcher and educator specialising in disability studies and contemporary Australian literature. Her most recent appointment was at the University of Tokyo, where she was a Project Assistant Professor in the Center for Global Education. Her work has appeared in peer-reviewed publications including Journal of Australian Studies, Genre and Journal of Postcolonial Writing. She has served as a guest editor of Antipodes and Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies for its special issues on explorations of disability in Australian genre fiction and intersections between critical animal studies and disability studies respectively.
Rodney Taveira is Senior Lecturer in American Studies and Academic Director at the United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney. His research on American fiction, television, art and cinema has appeared in The Journal of Popular Culture, Cultural Studies Review, Comparative American Studies and in edited collections. He writes popular pieces on American society and culture, and he has been interviewed on national television and radio. His current monograph, “The Cinematic Face of American Literature”, argues that new critical perceptions on violence, sexuality, and the way writing makes meaning are observed in contemporary American fiction when it is read through the lens of visual culture. He directs the American Studies program at the University of Sydney.
Susan E. Thomas is the founder of the WRIT program and Writing Hub at the University of Sydney. Her research focuses primarily on theories of writing, grounded in cognitive rhetoric, with a particular interest in affect. She is also interested in life writing, feminist and global rhetorics, writing across the curriculum, and writing centres. Her work has appeared in TEXT, Across the Disciplines, Rhetoric Review and Composition Studies, and her current monograph Navigating the Unexpected: Writers and Writing Programs in Times of Change is forthcoming in 2024 by the University Press of Colorado. Susan currently directs the Student Writing Fellows Program in the Writing Hub and is past president of the American Council of Writing Program Administrators.