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AASRN Members' Biographies
Ivy
Alvarez is the author of Mortal (Red Morning Press,
2006) and three chapbooks: what's wrong;catalogue:
life as tableware and Food for Humans. She also edited
A Slice of Cherry Pie (Wales: The Private Press; New York:
Half Empty/Half Full, 2006), a chapbook anthology of poems inspired
by David Lynch's Twin Peaks. Both the Australia Council
for the Arts and Academi recently awarded her writing grants to
write poems for her second manuscript. Her poetry appears in journals
and anthologies worldwide and online, including Meanjin,
Famous Reporter, Poetry Wales and In Posse.
She has read her poetry at literary events and festivals in Australia,
Ireland, Scotland and Wales. Link: Ivy Alvarez's Homepage
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Adam Aitken is a Sydney writer, reviewer, and was Associate Poetry Editor for HEAT magazine. His second poetry collection, In One House, published by HarperCollins, was mentioned three times as a Best Book of 1996 in the review pages of The Australian and The Sydney Morning Herald. The latest, Romeo & Juliet in Subtitles was shortlisted for the South Australian Arts Festival Awards and The Age Book of the Year. Adam lectures in the Writing and Cultural Studies Department, University of Technology Sydney and has also taught English in Indonesia. His research interests include postmodern poetics, Asian Australian writing and film. Adam holds a Doctorate in Creative Arts, a MA in Applied Linguistics and is currently working on his fourth collection of poetry.
Link: Adam Aitken's Homepage Blog: adamaitken.blogspot.com
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Ang Chin Geok holds a BA and BA Hons (Anthropology) from the University of Queensland and a MA (Hons) from Macquarie University, New South Wales. In 1993, she became a full-time writer and is the author of Wind and Water (Sydney: Minerva, 1997) and Aung San Suu Kyi: Towards a New Freedom (Sydney: Prentice Hall, 1998). Wind and Water won the Braille Book of the Year Award in 1998. She is currently enrolled in a PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Queensland. Geok's research interests include the representations of Asian women in literature.
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Michelle Antoinette received her PhD in Interdisciplinary Cross-Cultural Research through the Humanities Research Centre at the Australian National University, Canberra, and her BA (Hons) in Visual Culture from Monash University, Melbourne. Following her earlier research on Indonesian Modern art and politics, Michelle’s PhD thesis examined Southeast Asian contemporary art (artists from Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Singapore) of the 1990s and after, and offered a critique of their representation in international art exhibitions of this period. More broadly, Michelle’s major research interests include modern and contemporary visual cultures; histories of art; Southeast Asian and Asian studies; colonialism and postcolonialism; theories of race; hybrid and creole cultures; modernity and globalisation; migration, diaspora, transnationalism and cosmopolitanism; memory discourse and practice; theories of the body and embodiment; gender and sexuality; popular culture and cultural studies. Michelle is presently located at the Gender Relations Centre, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, Australian National University.
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Tom Apperley is a PhD candidate and sessional lecturer in the Media and Communication Program at the University of Melbourne. His research interests include localised variants in the global video games market; how games are used to construct identities/explore subjectivities; games as transnational and diasporic spaces; and the the influence of Asian popular cultures on the video games genres.
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Carol Archer is an Australian artist and researcher who has lived in Hong Kong and Macao since 1998. She is an Assistant Professor in the Visual Studies Programme at Lingnan University, Hong Kong. Archer has written Asia Artnotes for Art Monthly Australia for several years.
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Andrea Ash is a visual artist currently based in Brisbane. She is concerned with painting images of women that incorporate Eastern and Western cultural icons. She gained her PhD in 2006 (Central Queensland U); her thesis focused on Chinese Australian art and globalisation. Andrea has lectured in visual arts theory and practice at universities in Australia and Asia, particularly in relation to social and identity issues.
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Michelle Bakar completed her PhD at the University of Technology Sydney in 2007. Her writing centres on Asian Australian identities in a postcolonial/globalised context. She has been published in the online journals: EnterText (Brunel University UK); Graduate Journal of Asia Pacific Studies (Auckland University NZ); Postcolonial Text and Antipodes: North American Journal of Australian Literature (2005), UTS Anthology (2006) and in Southerly Australian Literary Journal twice in 2007. She was a recipient of the Gallery 4A Asian Australian Literature Fellowship in 2003 and of an Australia-China Council Hong Kong University Residency in 2006. She has written three unpublished novels, two of which received Highly Commended in The Australian/Vogel Literary Award for 2003 and 2004. She is working on a project about the Asian-Australian writing community, and is in the midst of writing a novel about a Chinese family in Australia.
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Julius Bautista is a Filipino Australian who is currently Lecturer in Religious Studies at the Southeast Asian Studies Programme at the National University of Singapore (NUS). He concurrently holds a Visiting Research Fellowship at the Asia Research Institute, NUS. Julius is an anthropologist with degrees from the Australian National University and the University of Sydney. His research interests include Christianity in Asia and the theoretical and methodological issues pertaining to the study of religion. He has published on religious practice in Southeast Asia, with a focus on Christian iconography, religious piety, the relationship between religion and the state. He has also written about cultural, political and economic issues in the Philippines in various scholarly forums. He remains passionately interested in the methodological implications of diasporic or heritage scholarship in the social sciences.
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Angie Bexley is completing a PhD in the Department of Anthropology, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies at the Australian National University on the politics of belonging and cultural production in postcolonial Timor Leste. Over the years, Angie has developed a strong interest in intercultural exchange and actively collaborated with art and media workers from Australia, Indonesia and Timor Leste while writing on intercultural collaboration, performance, politics and visual anthropology. Angie received first class honours (specialist: Indonesia) from the Faculty of Asian Studies, ANU.
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Writer-performer Merlinda Bobis has received various awards and prizes for her prose, poetry and plays. Among them the Prix Italia; the Australian Writers' Guild Award and the Ian Reed Radio Drama Prize for Rita's Lullaby; the Steele Rudd Award for the Best Published Collection of Australian Short Stories; the Philippine National Book Award and the Judges’ Choice Award in the Bumbershoot Arts Festival, Seattle for White Turtle (Australian edition) / The Kissing (US edition); the Pamana Presidential Award; and the Philippine Balagtas Award. Her first novel Banana Heart Summer was short-listed for the Australian Literary Society Gold Medal and her poetry collection Summer Was A Fast Train Without Terminals for The Age Poetry Book Award. Her plays have been performed in Australia, Philippines, France, China, Thailand and the Slovak Republic. Her next novel The Solemn Lantern Maker is published in March 2008. She teaches creative writing at the University of Wollongong. She is originally from the Philippines.
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Gay Breyley is a Faculty of Arts Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of Music-Conservatorium at Monash University. Her project focuses on musical and literary cultures in Iran and among Persian-speakers in Australia. Publications include articles and book chapters in the Journal of Australian Studies; Borderlands; Altitude; Ethnomusicology Forum; Women’s Life Writing and Imagined Communities edited by Cynthia Huff (Routledge, 2005); and The Regenerative Spirit: Volume Two: (Un)settling, (Dis)locations, (Post-)colonial (Re)presentations-Australian Post-colonial Reflections, edited by Sue Williams et al (Lythrum Press, 2004).
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Adam Broinowski is a performer/director, researcher, translator and writer
based in Melbourne. He made the award-winning documentary Hell Bento!
(SBSiTV, 1995) with Tetrapod and has performed, written and directed
independent solo (Vivisection Vision, Gherkin) and group shows (Know No
Cure, Hotel Obsino, The Great Gameshow of Pernicious Influences, H20) and
with many Australian theatre companies (Company B, desoxy, Dramalab, La
Mama, Magpie, nyid, Playbox, Salamanca, Snuff Puppets, Stalker) and Japanese
company Gekidan Kaitaisha, touring to festivals in South America, Europe,
UK, US, Singapore, Malaysia, Korea, Taiwan and around Australia. Recently he
has returned from living in Japan for five years where he was a core member of
Gekidan Kaitaisha and a research fellow at University of Tokyo. He is a PhD
candidate at University of Melbourne/VCA, studying Japanese avant-garde
theatre and the connection between political philosophy and art. |
Scott Brook is a PhD candidate in Cultural Studies at the University of Melbourne. His doctoral research focuses on the expansion of tertiary writing programs in Australia after the Dawkins reforms. He also has a long-standing research interest on the relations between the Vietnamese diaspora and cultural policy, and has published numerous articles on Vietnamese-Australian cultural production in relation to cultural planning, media policy, public history, and tourism. In 2006/07 he was a contributor to the development of an Arts strategy for the City of Maribyrnong, Melbourne.
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Anne Brewster teaches at UNSW. Her research interests include the study of indigenous literature, critical race and whiteness theory, fictocriticism, language writing and Singaporean and Malaysian Literature in English. Her books include Literary Formations: Postcoloniality, Nationalism, Globalism (MUP 1995), Towards a Semiotic of Postcolonial Discourse: University Writing in Singapore and Malaysia 19491965 (Heinemann Asia, 1988), Notes on Catherine Lim’s Little Ironies: Stories of Singapore, with Kirpal Singh (Heinemann Asia, 1987). She has been a judge for the Commonwealth Writers Prize (Southeast Asian and South Pacific) 2004 and 2006.
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Marilyne Brun is currently completing a PhD in Australian literature at the University of Melbourne and Université de Toulouse (France). Her thesis focuses on the novels of Brian Castro with particular emphasis on Castro’s use of hybridity. Her research interests include: the discursive construction of racism, hybridity, minority and diasporic literatures, Asian American and Asian Australian identities; Australian literature and literary games. Marilyne has also translated a variety of texts and conferences (French to English and English to French).
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Michelle Burns is a PhD candidate at Curtin University, Perth whose thesis examines the lived experiences of people who identify as 'Eurasian'. Her thesis presents a comparative case study of the people known as the Burghers in Australia and their previous domicile of Sri Lanka. Michelle's work is informed by hybridity theory, border studies and critical whiteness studies. Her research interests include 'mixed' race studies, postcolonial and diasporic theory and multiculturalism. She holds a BA with first class honours in Anthropology and has worked as a research associate on various projects at Curtin University.
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Gilbert Caluya is currently completing his PhD on the spatial politics of everyday fear with the Gender and Cultural Studies Department, University of Sydney where he has lectured on postcolonial feminism and youth cultures. His honours research – an autoethnography of anti-Asian racism on Sydney’s gay scene – received the University of Sydney Medal and the Australian Gay and Lesbian Archives Thesis Prize in 2003. Gilbert’s research interests include: gay Asian diasporas; affect and the body; mediated communities; globalization, migration and violence; culture and ethics. His research draws on postcolonialism and critical race theory; feminist and queer theory; cultural politics; Deleuze, Guattari and Foucault; philosophies of emotion and affect; cultural geography; and pragmatic semiotics.
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Jane Camens is a citizen of the 21st century, currently working towards a PhD in Creative Writing through Griffith University on the Gold Coast, Queensland. Her exegeses focus is on literature and identity, with an emphasis on how Asia is informing new writing in the West, and vice versa. She spent more than 20 years in Greater China where she worked as a journalist, and in both government and public relations. She gained her MA from the University of East Anglia, UK, and in 2001, started Hong Kong’s international literary festival. She also founded and is now Executive Director of the Asia-Pacific Writing Partnership, a new international collaboration of universities, literary organisations and individuals interested in supporting and promoting new writing from Asia and the Pacific.
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Ashley Carruthers is an ARC Australian Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of Archaeology and Anthropology at the Australian National University. His research interests include migration, diasporas, multiculturalism, cosmopolitanism, transnational media, overseas Vietnamese, Lao and Cambodian communities. His ARC project, entitled Intercommunal and Translocal Space in Fairfield: Tracking Indochinese Australian Lives, is a study of Vietnamese, Lao and Cambodian communities in the Fairfield Local Government Area (LGA) of Sydney. Ashley is also Regional Editor (Southeast Asia) of the Asian Studies Review.
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Dean Chan teaches in the honours and postgraduate programmes at the School of Communications and Arts, Edith Cowan University, in Perth, Western Australia. His research and publication interests mainly focus on Asian Australian cultural production and East Asian digital games. At present, he is working on a number of projects focusing on Asian Australian and Asian American visual arts, as well as completing a book manuscript titled “Play Asia: Politics, Practices, and Play in Asian Digital Game Cultures.” Dean has been invited to speak at several national conferences and arts symposia including the 2007 Arc Biennial Symposium; and he is regularly commissioned to write for art journals, monographs, and exhibition catalogues. He has previously served on the boards of Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts, Artists Regional Exchange (ARX), and Art Association of Australia and New Zealand. Dean is currently a Chief Investigator on an ARC Discovery project ("Being Asian in Australia and the United States") with Tseen Khoo and Jacqueline Lo.
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Asha Chand is a Lecturer in Journalism at the School of Communication Arts, University of Western Sydney. She was born in Fiji where she grew up on a sugar cane farm. She began working as a journalist for the Fiji Sun which was shut down at gunpoint during the 1987 coup. She then joined the News Corporation owned national daily, The Fiji Times, where she was chief of staff, before migrating to Australia in 1998. Asha is a PhD candidate at UWS and her research focus is migration, matchmaking and the media in the Fiji Indian community in Sydney. She curated a three-month long exhibition titled The Chutney Generations at the Liverpool Regional Museum in Sydney in 2007. The exhibition, as well as a 48-page colour catalogue, has featured some aspects of her research. Chutney was used as a metaphor to describe the twice displaced Fiji Indians in their multicultural spaces.
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S.Chandrasekaran, born in Singapore, is well-known for his performance works since 1983. From 1990-98, he has been lecturing at various art colleges and attended various art conferences. He was the Head of the School of Fine Art at LASALLE-SIA, College of the Arts (Singapore) from 1999-2002. Presently, he is pursing his Doctor of Creative Arts at Curtin University. His research project is titled “Locating Immigrant Space”, and explores the tensions and conflicts between the national and cultural identities of an ethnic artist.
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Darrel Chia completed his studies at Murdoch University and the Australian National University, and was practicing as a solicitor in Perth and Canberra. Darrel is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Chicago in the Department of English Language and Literature. His research interests include contemporary poetry, transborder mobility and diasporic Asian identities.
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Tom Cho is writing a collection of short fiction that explores the themes of identity and popular culture. He is developing this collection as part of his PhD in Professional Writing at Deakin University. His short stories have been published in Australia, USA, Canada, Japan, France, Italy and Malaysia. He has also received various grants and awards for his fiction, and is regularly invited to perform his work at festivals and other events in Australia. Tom has worked in artistic roles for a range of organisations, including Melbourne Fringe and the National Young Writers’ Festival. He currently works at Footscray Community Arts Centre. Tom is also a freelance producer of arts events and projects. His projects include the award-winning show Hello Kitty, which has been staged in Melbourne, Sydney, Lismore and Canberra. Tom is also an editorial advisor for Peril, an Asian Australian arts and culture magazine.
Link: Tom Cho's Homepage
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Christine Choo, a historian, qualified social worker, social researcher and a migrant from Asia, has published widely in race and gender issues. She is currently an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Western Australia and is involved in a number of community based projects. Christine has published articles in refereed journals, book chapters and book reviews. Christine’s current research interests are Western Australian history, particularly of women and minority ethnic groups; Aboriginal-Asian connections in WA; Life Writing and personal family history. Christine co-edited History and Native Title, a volume of Studies in Western Australian History (2003). Her PhD in History entitled, Aboriginal Women on Catholic Missions in the Kimberley, Western Australia, 1900 - 1950 published as Mission Girls (2001). Aboriginal Child Poverty, written under the auspices of the Brotherhood of St Laurence and the Secretariat of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Child Care (SNAICC) was published in 1990.
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Simon Choo has completed his PhD, titled 'Rasa Rasa Malaysia: Taste, the Senses and the Production of Meaning through an Anthropology of "Malaysian" Food', at the Centre for Cross-Cultural Research, Australian National University. His research is an ethnographic examination of the interactions and dynamics of the intersection between Malaysian and Australian food experiences, which have arisen out of the migration processes to and from Malaysia. He holds a Bachelor of Arts with first class honours in anthropology and a Bachelor of Laws from the University of Western Australia. He has previously worked as a solicitor and as an anthropologist in the community and private sectors. Simon has left the academy and is working in international development aid.
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Christine Clark is a writer, curator and art administrator with many years experience in Asia-Pacific contemporary visual art projects. She was extensively involved in the first three Asia-Pacific Triennial exhibitions in 1993, 1996 and 1999, and has curated a number of exhibitions focusing on the Asian-Pacific region and conducted art management workshops throughout Indonesia. A recent research interest has been the examination of work by Asian Australian visual artists. She was curator of the Museum of Brisbane’s Echoes of Home: Memory and mobility in recent Austral-Asian art, 2005, an exhibition which explored the work of 14 Australian-based artists from various Asian backgrounds, and the editor of the associated 98pp catalogue. The exhibition is currently touring to seven major galleries in city and regional centres throughout Australia (2006-2008). She currently holds the position of Exhibition Officer at the National Portrait Gallery which involves the management and curation of exhibitions.
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Joost Coté is a Senior Lecturer in History at Deakin University, where he teaches South East Asian history. Joost’s research interests include postcolonial studies of the cultures of colonialism and nationalism and identity with a focus on twentieth century Indonesia, comparative studies of Dutch/British colonialism in South East Asia, Dutch East Indies/Australian relations, and the history of Asian communities in Australia and Australians in South East Asia.
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Sophie Couchman is currently researching a PhD in Asian Studies at La Trobe University that explores how the Chinese have been photographed in Australia from the 1850s through to the 1950s. As part of her thesis she has assisted with the development of the Chinese-Australian Historical Images in Australia website (www.chia.chinesemuseum.com.au). She also worked on the (www.chaf.lib.latrobe.edu.au) Chinese Heritage of Australian Federation. In 2000 she completed a Master of Arts in Public History at Monash University that uncovered some of the social history of Melbourne’s Chinatown.
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Rommel Curaming is a Postdoctoral research fellow (under the Endeavour Programme) at the School of Social Sciences, La Trobe University. His research project compares the transnational experience of Filipinos and Indonesian immigrants in the Melbourne-area. He completed a PhD at the Australian National University titled “When Clio Meets the Titans: Rething State-Historian Relations in Indonesia and the Philippines.”
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R. K. Dhawan is an Associate Professor in English (University of Delhi). He obtained M.Litt. in Comparative Literature and Ph.D. in the fiction of Joseph Conrad. In 1979, he visited Oxford University and other Universities in the U.K. as a British Council scholar. He has lectured at several Universities including those in Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Singapore, Malaysia, Tunisia, Italy, Canada and Australia. He is widely published, and has written several books, including Recent Commonwealth Literature and Indian Women Novelists. Currently, he is the general editor of The Commonwealth Review, a bi-annual journal devoted to the new literatures and women's studies.
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Ruth DeSouza is a Senior Research Fellow at Auckland University of Technology's Centre for Asian and Migrant Health Research; a Director of Wairua Consulting Limited and a committee member of the Refugee Council of New Zealand. Ruth has a background in mental health nursing, counseling and education. She is passionate about the ethnic sector and in how technology can advance the aspirations of communities. She set up the Aotearoa Ethnic Network (AEN) list, an online community of interest, to help people connect and share information and ideas and is co-editor of the AEN Journal. Ruth is a board member of the Walsh Trust and editorial board member of the journal, Diversity in Health and Social Care and the Journal of Transcultural Nursing.
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Peter Eckersall is a Senior Lecturer in Theatre Studies at the University of Melbourne and has had a long time association with theatre in Japan. He is author of Theorizing the Angura Space: Avant-Garde Performance and Politics in Japan 1960-2000 (Brill, 2006) and co-editor of Performance Paradigm journal. He is resident dramaturg for the Not Yet It's Difficult (NYID) performance group and has worked on a number of collaborations between Australian and Japanese artists including the NYID-Gekidan Kaitaisha 'Journey to Con-fusion' project (1999-2003).
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Danielle Evans holds a Bachelor of Arts Theatre Theatre and Practice degree from UWS Theatre Nepean where she studied Asian Theatre. She also had a Graduate Diploma of Education in Drama (UWS) and a Master of Education (Flinders) majoring in Asian Studies. Danielle had spent a number of years teaching in the NSW Public Education System, and developed successful programs of study for high school students in Japanese Performing Arts. She has also tutored at Gifted and Talented camps and days for school students of all ages as well as presenting at Professional Conferences in Contempory Japanese Theatre styles. In 2004 Danielle spent a year in Japan studying the classical Dance styles of Nihon Buyo and Kibimai, culminating in solo performance in Okayama.
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Sandy Fitts is the author of View from the Lucky Hotel, which was published in June 2008 by Five Islands Press. It includes the poem ‘Waiting for Goya’, which won the Gwen Harwood Poetry Prize 2007. Overall some twenty poems in View from the Lucky Hotel have won prizes and awards, and many poems are located in Vietnam. In 2006, Fitts served on the committee of the Poetry Australia Foundation working to establish the Australian Poetry Centre, and in 2007 she was Deputy Chair of the Board of the Australian Poetry Centre. Her university degrees have ranged from literature, history, psychology, to a Master of Business Administration. The latter included research in Vietnam on joint-venture businesses. Fitts has worked in many fields, including employment as policy analyst, management consultant, research director, and senior executive. Currently she is a full-time author, writing her second collection of poetry.
Link: Sandy Fitts’ homepage
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John Fitzgerald is Head of the School of Social Sciences at La Trobe University and has recently been appointed Chief Representative of the Ford Foundation in Beijing. His research interests include Chinese history, transnational history, and Chinese-Australian community history. His most recent book is Big White Lie: Chinese Australians in White Australia (UNSW Press, 2007).
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After spending a number of years working in clerical and administrative jobs, Yvonne Foley re-trained as a youth worker in her thirties. Yvonne ran a youth club for about five years then moved with her husband to Hong Kong where she taught English at the Hong Kong Society for the Blind as a volunteer. Subsequently she acquired a Certificate in the Teaching of English as a Foreign Language and continued to teach on a voluntary basis when she and her husband moved to Australia. In the year 2000, Yvonne and her husband moved back to the UK and she began her research into the forced repatriation of Chinese seamen from the UK after WWII. Her interest in this arises from the fact that she is Eurasian and her father was one of the men made to leave the UK. Yvonne’s initial investigations indicate that there is a parallel story in Australia. She is currently working on researching her findings. For further information please visit the 'Liverpool and its Chinese Seamen' website at www.halfandhalf.org.uk
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Paul Giffard-Foret is currently in Australia starting his PhD on Australian women writers from Southeast Asia, having completed his MA in Perth on Simone Lazaroo's work this year. He is currently enrolled as a postgraduate student from the Research Centre on the Pacific (CEPAC) at the University of Le Havre in France. Paul’s research deals with racial and cultural hybridity; migration and multiculturalism related issues with a focus on Asian-Australian literature.
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Dominic Golding is a Vietnamese Australian actor, playwright and community artist. He graduated with Honours in Directing and Politics in 1999 from Flinders University, SA, and is currently a postgraduate student at Monash University, Melbourne. Dom's play Shrimp was recently published by Currency Press (2007), and his other work includes Walking without Feet (2003), The Viet Boys from Down Under (2002), and Aussie Bia Om (2001). He was part of the Asialink Leaders program in 2002.
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Catherine Gomes is a lecturer in Asian Media and Culture at RMIT University. She has published in the areas of gender and genre in Asian cinema. She is currently working on a book based on her recently completed thesis on the cross-cultural reception of Chinese cinema’s contemporary swordswomen. Catherine is interested in Asian cinemas, Asian transnationalism and Southeast Asian issues.
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Devika Goonewardene is completing a Ph.D in the School of Political Science, Criminology, and Sociology at the University of Melbourne. She is also a co-editor of the Institute of Postcolonial Studies' Occasional Papers series and Project Manager of the Postcolonial Literary Studies section of the Annotated Bibliography of English Studies (ABES) for the Centre for Postcolonial Writing, Monash University and Routledge. Her research interests include South Asian studies; diasporic literature; Indian historiography; Hindi cinema; cultural studies; the cultural practices of genre fandoms; cybercultures; disciplinary international relations; postcolonial international studies; the politics of non-western cultures; and postcolonial theory, criticism, practice, activism and pedagogy.
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Olivia Guntarik is a lecturer in the School of Applied Communications at RMIT University. She completed her PhD within the Australian Centre at the University of Melbourne in 2007. Her research explores the politics of cultural difference, drawing on narratives of resistance within two indigenous groups: Koori and Kadazan peoples. Her major research interests include media and social agency, issues of representation in indigenous cultures, and the politics of cultural memory and place.
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Bree Hadley currently teaches drama, writing and literature at Deakin and Victoria universities, and will from 2007 be Lecturer in Performance Studies at QUT. Her research focuses on the way theatre (particularly Asian-influenced physical theatre practices) can serve as a site for the physical, performative subversion of identity stereotypes. She also has a background working as a writer, dramaturg, director and arts administrator with independent theatre companies, and with the Glen Eira City Council, and is working on research into the way social capital contributes to the artistic and financial success of theatre companies and community festivals.
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Takeshi Hamano is currently completing his PhD in the Centre for Cultural Research, University of Western Sydney. His research focuses on the development of ethnic communities by Japanese settlers in Sydney. Takeshi’s research will examine the cross cultural interactions of Japanese communities and explore how ‘Japaneseness’ is redefined and reconstructed in the process of immigration and displacement.
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Alan Han is a PhD student at the Department of English, Media Studies and Art History, University of Queensland. Research interests include Critical Race and Whiteness Studies, Gender Studies and Cultural Studies. Alan has a Bachelor of Arts (Hons) majoring in Feminism and Gender Studies.
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Dennis Haskell is Professor of English & Cultural Studies at the University of Western Australia and co-editor of Westerly, which has published on Australian and Asian issues since 1956. Dennis is a poet who has written many poems about Australia and Asia (winner of the WA Premier's Prize for Poetry in 2007), and he has published articles and books on Australia and Singapore-Malaysian and Indian literature and culture. He has taught undergraduate courses and supervised doctoral theses on Australian-Asian writing, and participates in activities in this field through the Westerly Centre, a research centre at UWA. He won a Carrick Institute Award (a national teaching award) in 2007, partly for teaching a new Doctor of Arts degree ‘Australian Literature into China’ in China. He has been an invited scholar to conferences and universities in China, Indonesia, Japan, Singapore, Taiwan, Thailand, and the Philippines.
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Khalid Hassan is currently a lecturer and working on a research thesis focused on "Aesthetics of Traditional and Baul (World Heritage) Music" at the University of Dhaka, Bangladesh. He is interested in Australian Culture, rituals, traditional music and Australian contemporary Indigenous culture, performance and cultural festivals like “Kicken’ up dust.”
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Dolores Herrero is Senior Lecturer of English Literature in the Department of English and German Philology at the University of Zaragoza, Spain. She currently teaches a course on Victorian literature and another one on postcolonial literatures in English. Dolores Herrero is a member of a competitive research team currently working on the ethical component in contemporary fiction in English headed by Professor Susana Onega. She has published articles and book chapters on Victorian and postcolonial literature (in particular Australian, Asian Australian and Indian authors such as Mudrooroo, David Malouf, Peter Carey, Roberta Sykes, J. Turner Hospital, Merlinda Bobis, and Satendra Nandan, to name but a few) and film and cultural studies. She has co-edited, together with Dr. Marita Nadal, the book Margins in British and American Literature, Film and Culture (1997). She was also the editor of Miscelánea: A Journal of English and American Studies from 1998 till 2006.
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Nathan Hollier is Publications Co-ordinator at the Australia Research Institute, Curtin University, Perth. He is currently fiction editor of Overland magazine. He has been a co-editor of Overland (2002-2004) and editor (2004-2007). During this time he initiated, with JV D'Cruz, an ongoing series of essays on Asian intellectuals. Nathan has published widely on various aspects of Australian society and culture, in a range of scholarly and popular forums.
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Chang-Yau Hoon is currently Assistant Professor of Asian Studies at Singapore Management University. He received a PhD in Asian Studies (with Distinction) from the University of Western Australia in 2007. He conducted fieldwork on Chinese-Indonesian identity in Jakarta in 2004 during which he was also a visiting scholar at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) Jakarta. His PhD thesis, ‘Reconceptualising Ethnic Chinese Identity in Post-Suharto Indonesia’ was awarded a "Distinction" by the Graduate School of Research at UWA. His book Chinese Identity in Post-Suharto Indonesia: Culture, Politics and Media is published by Sussex Academic Press (2008). He has previously taught Asian Studies and Indonesian at the University of Western Australia.
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Dorothy Hoy is a retired teacher and librarian who has taught in several universities and TAFEs in Australia, including UTS Sydney; Kuring-gai CAE; and Sydney CAE. She has also worked for the New South Wales Department of Education. Dorothy's research interests include twentieth century Chinese-Australian history, cross-cultural language adaptation and Chinese-Australian voluntary organisations.
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Zhong Huang is a PhD student researching Asian Australian Writing at the Faculty of Arts, University of Wollongong.
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Sabina Hussain completed her PhD at Macquarie University. Her thesis examined migrant experiences in Asian-Australian literature with a focus on writers from the Indian subcontinent. Sabina's research interests include migration, diaspora, transnationalism, colonialism/postcolonialism, hybridity, Asian-Australian migrant identities, Asian-Australian literary and cultural studies. She currently works for the United Nations Volunteers assisting in the recruitment of volunteers for peacekeeping missions.
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Peter A. Jackson is an Associate Professor and Senior Fellow in Thai History in the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies at the Australian National University in Canberra. He specialises in the cultural history of modern Thailand and his main research interests are the histories of Buddhism, gender, sexuality, and globalisation in Thailand. His books include “Buddhism, Legitimation and Conflict: The Political Functions of Urban Thai Buddhism” (Singapore, 1989); “Dear Uncle Go: Male Homosexuality in Thailand” (Bangkok, 1995); and “Buddhadasa: Theravada Buddhism and Modernist Reform in Thailand” (Chiang Mai, 2003). He is currently writing a history of Thailand’s same-sex and transgender cultures, conducting research on the impact of globalisation and capitalism on Thai religion in the 1990s, and exploring the history of Thai perceptions of the West since the reign of King Mongkut in the mid-19th century.
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Subhash Jaireth was born in a small town in Punjab, Northern India. He has published poems in Hindi, Russian and English. A collection of his Hindi poems Before the Bullet Hit Me came out in 1994. A verse-narrative Unfinished Poems for Your Violin was published by Penguin Australia in 1996. Subhash's latest collection of poems Yashodhara: Six Seasons without You was published by Wild Peony in 2003. His poems and stories have also been published in the Australian Short Stories, Conversations, Australian Book Review, Australian Review of Books, Meanjin, Imago, Southerly, Southern Reviews, UTS Review, Westerly, Redoubt, and Heat.
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Emeritus Professor Laksiri Jayasuriya is currently Hon. Senior Research Fellow, Discipline of Social Work and Social Policy, in the School of Social and Cultural Studies, University of Western Australia. He graduated from the University of Sydney in 1954 and obtained his PhD from the London School of Economics and Political Science, University of London. He has written widely and published in scholarly journals in the fields of social policy, multiculturalism, and ethnic affairs. Until his retirement in 1992, he held the Foundation Chair of Social Work and Social Administration at the University of Western Australia. In addition to his academic appointments and responsibilities, he has been involved in a range of community activities, especially in the field of social policy, welfare, ethnic affairs, and development assistance. He has an extensive record of involvement in public affairs since 1972, and has played a major role in policy developments relating to multiculturalism and ethnic affairs in Australia both state and national levels. He has served on numerous government bodies and committees of inquiry and been a policy advisor to many governments.
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Mayu Kanamori was raised in Roppongi, Tokyo where her family still lives. She was educated at the American School in Japan and grew up bilingual in English and Japanese. She migrated to Australia in 1981. Starting in a journalism career in 1992, Mayu has since made a reputation as a freelance photojournalist, writer, radio broadcaster and much-nominated and awarded photo media artist based in Sydney. As an artist, she employs her experience as a journalist to create multi media art documentaries, working in collaboration with artists from other disciplines, including theatre and installation works. She is the creator and director of The Heart of the Journey. Her radio feature Chika was a finalist for the 2004 Walkley Awards for Excellence in Journalism. In 2005, Mayu's digital and photographic works have been chosen as finalist for 2005 Harries National Digital Awards, 2005 Olive Cotton National Photographic Portrait Awards, and 2005 Conrad Jupiter's National Art Prize. She is a member of Sydney based photographic group Broken Bench and is a board member of The Koto Music Institute of Australia.
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Kit Kelen is an Australian scholar and poet whose literary works have been widely published and broadcast since the mid 1970s. Kelen holds degrees in literature and linguistics from the University of Sydney and a doctorate on the teaching of the writing process from UWS Nepean. Kelen’s first volume of poetry The Naming of the Harbour and the Trees won an Anne Elder Award in 1992. In 1996 Kelen was Writer-in-Residence for the Australia Council at the B.R.Whiting Library in Rome. He has won a number of awards, including the Blundstone National Essay Contest conducted by Island journal (1999) and Westerly's Patricia Hackett Prize (2007) . The most recent of Kelen’s eight volumes of poetry are Dredging the Delta (2007, Cinnamon Press) and After Meng Jiao: Responses to the Tang Poet (2008 by VAC (Chicago, IL)). Apart from poetry, Kelen publishes in a range of theoretical areas including writing pedagogy, ethics, rhetoric, cultural and literary studies and various intersections of these. Kelen is an Associate Professor in the English Department at the University of Macau, where he has taught Literature and Creative Writing since 2000. Kelen is also the editor of the on-line journal Poetry Macao and poetry editor for the monthly lifestyle/current affairs journal Macao Closer.
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Alistair Kennedy is a former Defence Force member, who has recently transferred from King’s College, London to ANU, Canberra where he is hosted by Dr James Jupp at CIMS. He is gathering material for his PhD thesis on the differing experiences of second (and later) generations of Australian- & British-born Chinese. Alastair's particular research interests are the proliferation of role models in Australia and the lack of them in UK, and the effect this has had on attitudes to feelings of ‘belonging’ or ‘exclusion’ and interest (or shunning) of Chinese cultural heritage. He is also researching a paper on the experiences of those Australian- and British-Chinese who served in the Defence Forces in and before WW1. He holds an Honours degree in Modern History, a Masters Degree in UK Social History and a Diploma in Classical Chinese (HKU).
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Olivia Khoo is a research fellow at Curtin University, Western Australia. She was previously a lecturer in Film and Media at the University of New South Wales. Her research areas includes the cinemas of Hong Kong, China, Taiwan and Singapore, and Asian-Australian film and cultural production. Her book, The Chinese Exotic: Modern Diasporic Femininity was published by Hong Kong University Press in 2007, and she is currently co-editing a volume entitled Time Signatures: Technologies and Temporalities in Chinese Screen Cultures. She is also collaborating on a project on Asian-Australian Cinema with Audrey Yue and Belinda Smaill. Olivia has previously taught film and cultural studies at the University of Technology, Sydney, and Melbourne University, and has also worked on a number of film and arts festivals within Australia.
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Tseen Khoo is a Monash
University Research Fellow (2004-2009), based in Sociology, School of Political and Social Inquiry. She has published on
Asian Australian cultural production and politics, multicultural/race issues in
Australia, and Asian diasporic studies. Tseen's monograph Banana Bending:
Asian Australian and Asian Canadian Literatures was published by
McGill-Queens and Hong Kong University Presses in 2003, and she has
also co-edited Culture, Identity, Commodity:
Diasporic Chinese Literatures in English (2005; with Kam Louie) and Diaspora: Negotiating Asian Australia (2000; with Helen Gilbert and Jacqueline Lo). She has also edited Locating Asian Australian
Cultures (Routledge 2008). Tseen's current fellowship project
is titled "Siting Differences: The Politics of Representing Asian
Australian Public Narratives," and she also researches minority
representations in multicultural societies, diasporic Asian
cultures, and the politics of ethnic festivals. She is currently a Chief Investigator on an ARC Discovery project ("Being Asian in Australia and the United States") with Dean Chan and Jacqueline Lo. Tseen is also an editorial advisor for Peril, an Asian Australian arts and culture magazine. |
Jen Tsen Kwok is completing a PhD in Sociology at the University of Queensland. His thesis looks at the political cultures and subcultures of diasporic Chinese communities in multicultural Australia. Jen's thesis focuses upon the domestic political engagements of Chinese Australian communities through the lens of critical and situated multiculturalisms, the affects of the global economy upon local citizenship, and the significance of diaspora for Chinese Australian political subcultures. Jen's research interests include critical and situated multiculturalisms, migrant citizenship, transnational political engagements and networks, Chinese Australian histories, and broadly, studies upon the Chinese diaspora.
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Elaine Laforteza is a PhD candidate in Critical and Cultural Studies at Macquarie University. This year, she taught two subjects in the Critical and Cultural Studies Department - Ways of Reading Asian Cultures and Introduction to Visual Culture. For the past five years, she wrote feature, news and opinion articles for the community language newspaper, Philippine Community Herald. Her current research interests include: post-colonial, migration and diaspora studies; critical whiteness studies; race, ethnicity, gender and sexuality; and development discourses of First and Third World spaces particularly in the context of the Philippines-Australia nexus.
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Benjamin Law is a PhD candidate at the Queensland University of Technology. His project involves writing an eight part television series entitled The New Lows, a black comedy-drama that centers on a dysfunctional Chinese Australian family. The two short stories, on which the characters are based on, have been shortlisted and runner-up in the Queensland State Library Awards for young writers. Benjamin's thesis is focused on the representation of Asian Australian characters in television. He also works as a freelance writer and senior contributor to the national magazine Frankie.
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Simone Lazaroo's three award winning novels The Travel Writer, The World Waiting to be Made and The Australian Fiance have been broadcast on radio. All three novels won the WA Premier’s Prize for Fiction. Simone was selected from an international field for the David TK Wong Writing Fellowship at the University of East Anglia in England in 2001, where she wrote some of her third novel, The Travel Writer. The Australian Fiance was shortlisted with novels by Michael Ondaatje and Carlos Fuentes for America’s Kirriyama Rim Pacific Prize in 2000, and is currently optioned for film. Simone’s short stories have been anthologised by Bloomsbury in England, and in Australia. Simone co-judged the 2005 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, and lectures in Creative Writing at Murdoch University in Perth.
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Mabel Lee is Honorary Associate Professor of Chinese at the University of Sydney and Honorary Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. She is the English-language translator of several books by 2000 Nobel Laureate Gao Xingjian and 1999 Flaiano Prize for Poetry winner Yang Lian.
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Owen Leong is a visual artist currently based in Melbourne. He has exhibited widely in Australia and internationally. His work has been shown in London, Manchester, Liverpool, Poznan, Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Hong Kong and Singapore. In 2005, Owen was awarded an Australia Council New Work Grant. He has held residencies at Artspace (Sydney) and the Chinese Arts Centre (Manchester, UK). From August 2008, he will be artist-in-residence for three months at the Moya Dyring Studio, Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris.
Link: Owen Leong's Homepage
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Julie Lim is a PhD candidate in the Institute for International Studies at the University of Technology Sydney. Julie’s research interests include cosmopolitanism, China studies, and the Chinese diaspora. Julie also tutors in Business English in the University of Central Lancashire's business degree program delivered at the Shanghai Institute of Foreign Trade in Shanghai, China.
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Jacqueline Lo is Head of the School of Humanities at the Australian National University. Her research and teaching is strongly interdisciplinary, drawing from postcolonial studies, performance studies, cultural studies and literary analysis. Recent publications include Performance and Cosmopolitics: Cross-cultural Transactions in Australasia (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007, co-written with Helen Gilbert), Staging Nation: English Language Theatre in Malaysia and Singapore (HKUP, 2004) and a guest-edited special issue on mixed-race for Journal of Intercultural Studies (28.1-2, 2007). Jacquie has published extensively in leading journals and has coedited a number of books including Diaspora: Negotiating Asian-Australia (2001), and Resistance and Reconciliation: Writing in the Commonwealth (2003). She is completing an ARC project focused on Asian Australian cultural production, and Jacquie is also currently a Chief Investigator on an ARC Discovery project ("Being Asian in Australia and the United States") with Dean Chan and Tseen Khoo.
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Victoria Loblay is a PhD candidate in Anthropology at Macquarie University. Her research interests include feminist cultural history and reproductive rights in South Asia. Victoria’s PhD research is focused on South India and concerns the practice of sex-determination and the social movement to end this practice.
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Kam Louie is Dean of Arts Faculty, Hong Kong University. He has written on various aspects of Chinese culture, especially in the areas of philosophy, literature and gender. He is currently researching depictions of masculinity in Chinese diasporic writing. Recently he has edited Cambridge Companion to Modern Chinese Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2008) and (with Tseen Khoo) Culture, Identity, Commodity: Diasporic Chinese Literatures in English (Hong Kong University Press, 2005).
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Daniel McKay is currently a doctoral student in the School of Culture, Literature, and Society at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand. His research project focuses upon representations of Chinese and Japanese in the cultural productions of New Zealand and the United States. His other research interests include gold rush history, fictionalised travelogues, film, and minority literatures.
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Deborah Madsen is Professor of American Literature and Culture at the University of Geneva in Switzerland. Deborah was born in Melbourne; she completed her BA and MA degrees at the University of Adelaide, and her PhD at the University of Sussex in England. Deborah taught at the University of Leicester and then at London South Bank University before moving to Geneva. Her research focuses upon gendered discourses of nationhood, multiculturalism, diaspora, and immigration. She is the author of a series of books addressing the rhetoric of American national belonging and is currently extending that work into the field of Transnationalism with a monograph about gender performativity and national embodiment as constituent discourses of Chinese diaspora. She wrote the Asian Australian Literatures chapter for A Companion to Australian Literature Since 1900, (eds) Nicholas Birns and Rebecca McNeer (2007); other publications include ‘“No Place Like Home”: The Ambivalent Rhetoric of Hospitality in the Work of Simone Lazaroo, Arlene Chai, and Hsu-Ming Teo’, in the 2006 special issue of the Journal of Intercultural Studies, ‘Locating Asian Australian Cultures’, edited by Tseen Khoo; as well as essays on Chinese Canadian and Chinese American issues.
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Anita Mannur is Assistant Professor of English at Denison University. She is editor of a special issue of Massachusetts Review (Fall, 2004) on "Food Matters" and the co-editor of Theorizing Diaspora: A Reader (Blackwell, 2003). Along with Valerie Matsumoto she co-edited a volume of Amerasia Journal on "Meat vs Rice: New Research on Asian American Foodways" (2006). Her work on food in Asian American literature appears in several antholgies including Asian American Studies After Critical Mass (2004), East Main Street: Asian American Popular Culture (2005), Culture, Identity, Commodity: Diasporic Chinese Literatures in English (2005) as well as well as the The Journal Of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies.
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Francis Maravillas completed his PhD thesis entitled ‘Shifting Cartographies of the South in Austral/Asian Art Exchanges’ at the University of Technology, Sydney where he teaches in the Cultural Studies program. His research interests are in the areas of contemporary art and visual culture in Asia and Australia, curatorial practice and international art exhibitions. He is currently guest editing a special issue on contemporary art and globalisation in Austral/Asia for the e-journal borderlands. |
Julie Matthews is an Associate Professor and Director of Research in the Faculty of Art and Social Sciences at the University of the Sunshine Coast, Queensland. She has written and published on mixed-race, Asian femininity, diaspora, hybridity, racism, sexism, and the education of Asian students. Julie's research is interdisciplinary and spans education, sociology, anthropology, cultural studies and gender studies. Theoretically her work is informed by feminist, postcolonial and Foucauldian theory and she is interested in ethnography and visual research methods. As the member of two cross institutional research teams she holds ARC Discovery grants; one looking at refugee education and the other at reconciliation pedagogy. She is currently developing projects in international education and sustainability education.
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Judy Maxwell is a PhD Candidate (History) at the Australian National University in Canberra. Her research focuses on Chinese transnational histories. examining entry strategies used by the Chinese to gain access to Australia and Canada during Exclusions years. Judy is the former Recording Secretary for the Vancouver Historical Society and past Secretary for the Chinese Canadian Military Museum. She has been the Chief Researcher for the Military Museum since 2002 and is involved in an Oral History Project interviewing the surviving veterans.
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Joanne Miller is a PhD Candidate (Social Sciences) at the University of Queensland. Her research interests include Buddhism in the West and the internet as a medium for Buddhist meditation. Joanne holds an MA in Applied Linguistics, Bachelor of Education and a Diploma in Buddhist Studies (Than Hsiang Buddhist Research Centre). She is a member of the Australasian Association of Buddhist Studies.
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RoseAnne Misajon is currently a Lecturer in Behavioural Studies, School of Social and Political Inquiry, Monash University. She is also registered with the Psychologist Registration Board of Victoria. Her research interests include wellbeing of people with a disability or chronic illness; quality of life and quality of life measures, including in different cultural settings; and migration, coping and social support. In addition to academic life, RoseAnne is an associate producer of a Filipino-Australian weekly television program, shown nationally for community television. |
Robyn Morris teaches in the School of English Literatures, Philosophy & Languages at the University of Wollongong where she is currently completing her PhD. Her area of interest is contemporary Asian Canadian and Asian Australian women’s writing with a particular focus on issues of race and gender. She has published articles, chapters and interviews on the work of Larissa Lai, Joy Kogawa, Hiromi Goto and Simone Lazaroo and Hsu Ming Teo. She is currently co-editor of the ACSANZ newsletter.
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Yuriko Nagata teaches Japanese language and culture at the School of Languages and Comparative Cultural Studies at the University of Queensland. Her research deals with various aspects of the Japanese diasporic communities in Australia and Pacific, with a focus on their war-time experiences. She is an oral historian and is active in the local Japanese migrant community in Brisbane where she lives.
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Don Nakanishi is Director and Professor of the UCLA Asian American Studies Center, which is the largest research, teaching, publications, library and archival collecting, and public educational program focusing on Asian Americans in the United States. Don holds a PhD (Harvard), BA (Yale), and has undertaken research on the domestic and international dimensions of the political experiences of Asian Pacific Americans and other minority groups in the United States. He has also been conducting research on the politics of Asian Australians for about ten years.
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Nicholas Ng is completing a PhD with Larry Sitsky and Stephen Wild at the Australian National University School of Music. His thesis combines composition and ethnomusicology in the exploration of intercultural issues as a Chinese Australian artist. Part of his research focuses on the music of the Sydney Chinese community (1954-2004). A composer, Nicholas has been commissioned by ensembles/organisations such as the Foundation for Universal Sacred Music, Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, Australian Choreographic Centre, The Australian Voices, The Song Company, Art Gallery of NSW, United Nations of Australia, Tugpindulayaw Theatre, Sydney-Asia Pacific Film Festival, MetroScreen and Music for Everyone. His music has been broadcast on ABC Classic-FM and awarded the Ignaz Friedman Memorial Prize amongst other awards.
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Lucille Ngan was recently awarded her doctorate in Sociology from UNSW. Her thesis was titled "Identity and Life Course: A Long-term Perspective on the Lives of Australian-born Chinese." Her research focused on the construction of ‘Chineseness’ in Australian born Chinese, and multi-dimensional nature of identity formation in diasporic lives. Lucille is a contributor to the recent publication, Home in the Chinese Diaspora: Memories, Identities and Belongings and is in the upcoming edition of the Graduate Journal of Asia-Pacific Studies (6.1). She is currently teaching in the School of Sociology at the University of Hong Kong.
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Barbara Nichol is a retired professional librarian who has worked at both RMIT and Swinburne Universities. Barbara's research interests include the immigration and settlement of Victoria, with a particular emphasis on cross-cultural community engagements. She is a member of the Chinese Australian Family Historians of Victoria (CAFHOV).
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Deborah Nixon is currently a full time permanent lecturer in academic literacy at the University of Technology, Sydney. She is undertaking PhD studies in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, School of Enquiry. The focus for her research is the experience of domiciled Europeans up to and during the Partition of India in 1947, and examines the way Partition narratives have been inflected by this event. She is using her family history and her father’s experience serving with a Gurkha regiment transporting refugees during Partition.
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Rodney Noonan is an independent researcher who works in the archives/records profession. He was educated at the University of NSW and Cha |