Advisory Group

Constellation by Gail Mabo. © Gail Mabo/Copyright Agency, 2021

Dr Robert Clarke

Robert is a senior lecturer who teaches in the English program in the School of Humanities at the University of Tasmania. He is the former Head of Discipline, English (2017–20), English; executive member of the Australian University Heads of English (AUHE), Executive Member for the Association for the Study of Australian Literature, and co-editor of JASAL: the Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature. Robert is the Director of the Hedberg Writer-in-Residence Program.

He is the author of Travel Writing from Black Australia (2016), and editor of The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Travel Writing (2018), and Celebrity Colonialism (2009). His articles and reviews have been published in international peer-reviewed journals. He is the editor of the Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature (JASAL).

Robert’s research foci include: travel writing, postcolonial studies, book groups, contemporary Australian fiction, representations of Aboriginality in writing. He has also published on the scholarship of teaching and learning in English Studies, and digital storytelling.

Dr Geoff Rodoreda 

Geoff is a lecturer in the Department of English Literatures and Cultures at the University of Stuttgart, Germany. He originally studied politics, media theory and journalism in the city he grew up in, Sydney, Australia, and worked as a journalist with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation in Adelaide, Sydney and Darwin before moving to Germany in 1996. He joined the University of Stuttgart as a part-time lecturer in 2009, and completed his PhD on post-Mabo fiction in 2016. The resulting monograph, The Mabo Turn in Australian Fiction (Peter Lang, 2018), was awarded the ASAL’s inaugural Alvie Egan Award 2019, a prize for the best first book of literary scholarship on an Australian subject. His new book, co-edited with Eva Bischoff, is Mabo’s Cultural Legacy: History, Literature, Film and Cultural Practice in Contemporary Australia (Anthem, 2021).

Dr Adelle Sefton-Rowston

Adelle lectures in literature & communication in the College of Indigenous Futures, Arts and Society. She coordinates the Bachelor of Arts and supervises postgraduate projects in literature and creative writing. Adelle is particularly interested in how art and literature address global problems like mass incarceration, and her research examines prison writng alongside prison education programs in Australia and the US. Adelle is one of the founding editors of the new NT literary journal ‘Borderlands Magazine’. She is winner of the NT Literary Awards Essay Prize and publishes in high quality international journals such as ‘Hypatia’ and ‘Text’. Adelle is currently the president of the Australasian Universities Language and Literature Association (AULLA).

Associate Professor Sandra Phillips

Sandra is an Aboriginal woman from the North Burnett region of Queensland. Raised on-Country, Sandra takes her First Nations status from her mother’s lineages of Wakka Wakka and Gooreng Gooreng. Sandra’s late father was from the Aboriginal community of Cherbourg. An Arts graduate from 1980s UQ, Sandra became a leader in Australian book editing and publishing through work with Magabala Books, the University of Queensland Press, and Aboriginal Studies Press. Sandra has also held leadership roles in Indigenous arts and culture including Deputy Chair of the former Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Arts Board of the Australia Council and twice-elected Chairperson of the First Nations Australia Writers Network (FNAWN). Sandra chose a full-time career in academia ensuring completion of a PhD in Creative Industries and Literary Studies, before holding full-time lectureships at the University of the Sunshine Coast then QUT Creative Industries before a leadership role at UTS Jumbunna Institute for Indigenous Education and Research, and now as Associate Dean (Indigenous Engagement) with the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at The University of Queensland. Broadly speaking, Sandra’s research focusses on Indigenous creativity and she is published in scholarly and diverse outlets. Sandra is a member of the Library Board of Queensland which governs the State Library of Queensland. Sandra has three adult sons and a granddaughter.

Associate Professor Maggie Nolan

Maggie is an Associate Professor in the National School of Arts, based on the Brisbane campus of ACU. She holds a PhD from the University of Stirling in Scotland, which she received in 2000 as a Commonwealth Scholar to the United Kingdom. She also has a Graduate Certificate in Higher Education. Her research and teaching are mainly in Australian literary studies but also reflect a deep and genuine commitment to interdisciplinarity. She has also taught in history, sociology and politics. All her research is focused on questions of race, identity and justice and is committed to the small ways in which engaging with stories can make the world a better place.

Associate Professor Victoria Kuttainen

Victoria is an Associate Professor of English and Writing in the College of Arts, Society and Education at James Cook University. She holds a BA Honours and Masters of Arts from the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, and earned a PhD in postcolonial literature at the University of Queensland.  In 2017, as part of her exploration of the nexus between secondary and tertiary English, she completed a Graduate Diploma of Education (Secondary) at James Cook University.

Her books include Unsettling Stories: Settler Postcolonialism and the Short Story Composite (Cambridge Scholars Press, 2010) and The Transported Imagination: Australian Interwar Magazines and the Geographical Imaginaries of Colonial Modernity (co-authored with Susann Liebich and Sarah Galletly, Cambria, 2018).

Dr Kuttainen is actively researching in three key areas: settler colonialism and the literature of colonial modernity; scholarship of learning and teaching; and creative writing/life writing as a mode of engaging public audiences with complex issues in the humanities. 

Emily Direen

Before joining the University of Tasmania, Emily was Co-Director and Lecturer in the Bachelor of Arts Extended (BAX), an undergraduate program jointly run by the University of Melbourne and Trinity College.During her time at the University of Melbourne, Emily also undertook postgraduate studies (an MA and PhD) in English Literature. She is currently in the process of completing her PhD thesis, provisionally titled Upheaval and Revivification: The Dynamics of Affect between Adults and Children in Contemporary Middlebrow Fiction. Emily completed her undergraduate studies, BA/BFA(Hons) with majors in English/Screen Studies and Photography, at the University of Tasmania and was awarded a University Medal for outstanding academic excellence. Her research interests centre on literary and filmic representations of children and adolescents; contemporary literature; middlebrow fiction; First Nations literature and film; neo-Victorian fiction; film and adaptation studies; affect and emotion; space and place; children’s geographies.

We acknowledge the palawa/pakana and Gadigal people, the traditional custodians of the land upon which we live and work. We honour their enduring culture and knowledges as vital to the self-determination, wellbeing and resilience of their communities, and to shaping a just, inclusive and equitable Australian society.