Enlightenment Romanticism Contemporary Culture Research Unit

Professor Peter Otto

Executive Director, Enlightenment, Romanticism, and Contemporary Culture Research Unit (ERCC); Redmond Barry Distinguished Professor, English and Theatre Studies, the University of Melbourne

Peter Otto has published widely on William Blake, Gothic Fictions, dark Romanticism, popular entertainments, the prehistory of virtual reality, and Romanticism and contemporary culture. Recent publications include Multiplying Worlds: Romanticism, Modernity, and the Emergence of Virtual Reality (OUP 2011); ‘Innovations in Encompassing Large Scenes’, an online exhibition housed in the Romantic Circles Gallery of Visual Culture (2013); and William Blake: Selected Works in the ‘21st Century Oxford Authors Series’ (2018). He is consultant editor of The Victorian Popular Culture Portal: Spiritualism, Sensation, and Magic. His current research interests include the history of imagination and of imagination-machines; the pasts and futures of virtual reality; the post-secular; and the exchanges between architecture, fiction, imagination, and experience.

Email: peterjo@unimelb.edu.au
Phone: +61 3 8344 5482

Professor Deirdre Coleman

Co-Director and Lead Researcher, ERCC; Robert Wallace Chair of English, English and Theatre Studies, School of Culture and Communication, the University of Melbourne

Deirdre Coleman has published widely on the intersection of British Romantic literature with antislavery, natural history and colonialism. More recently she has been researching museum archives in Melbourne, Sydney and Queensland for an ARC-funded Linkage project with the Australian Museum on the economics of the 19th-century natural history trade. She is also exploring the social history of collecting in Australia, looking in particular at the diverse community which produced knowledge about the natural world from earliest settlement onwards. Starting with the correspondence networks and journal publications of members of the Victorian Field Naturalists Club (established in the early 1880s), she examines the motives and interests of bushmen, commercial specimen dealers, amateur collectors and (from 1900 onwards) an increasing number of salaried museum professionals. Cross-cultural exchange between indigenous people and fieldwork collectors on the colonial frontier, especially in far north Queensland and the Northern Territory, forms another part of this project, the aim of which is to achieve a wider understanding of Australia’s natural heritage and environmental history.

Email: colemand@unimelb.edu.au
Phone: +61 3 8344 5496

Professor Clara Tuite

Co-Director and Lead Researcher, ERCC; English and Theatre Studies, School of Culture and Communication, the University of Melbourne

Clara Tuite works in the literary and cultural history of Romanticism, with a particular interest in the work of Jane Austen and Lord Byron. Her research engages eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Romantic literature and culture from the perspectives of the history of the literary institution, sociability, fashion, history of emotions and sexuality studies, as well as the endurance of literary and popular Romanticisms in the contemporary moment.

Email: clarat@unimelb.edu.au
Phone: +61 3 8344 4216

Professor Mark Davis

Co-Director and Lead Researcher, ERCC; Publishing and Communications, School of Culture and Communication, the University of Melbourne

Mark Davis’ current research focuses on online ‘anti-publics’ and extreme online discourse, Australian digital literary cultures and taste making, changing media ecologies and the cultural politics of gatekeeping and disintermediation, Australian public culture, and media representations of young people. The first of my two current research projects focuses on post-digital literary cultures and the destabilisation of the literary-print cultural field by digital media. My second project focuses on online anti-publics, such as the alt-right, neo-reactionary (NRx) groups, anti-vaccination groups, anti-climate-science groups, and white nationalist groups, who use digital media to create communities that position themselves against basic democratic, scientific, and enlightenment principles.

Email: davismr@unimelb.edu.au
Phone: +61 3 8344 3349

Professor Vedi Hadiz

Co-Director and Lead Researcher, ERCC; Director and Professor of Asian Studies at the Asia Institute, the University of Melbourne

Vedi Hadiz's research interests revolve around political sociology and political economy issues, especially those related to the contradictions of development in Indonesia and Southeast Asia more broadly, and more recently, in the Middle East. Professor Hadiz’s latest book is entitled Islamic Populism in Indonesia and the Middle East (Cambridge University Press 2016). His other books include Localising Power in Post-Authoritarian Indonesia: A Southeast Asia Perspective (Stanford University Press 2010) as well as the co-edited Between Dissent and Power: The Transformation of Islamic Politics in the Middle East and Asia (Palgrave Macmillan 2014).

Email: vedi.hadiz@unimelb.edu.au

Dr Anita Archer

Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Enlightenment, Romanticism, and Contemporary Culture Research Unit, Faculty of Arts, the University of Melbourne

Anita Archer is an art historian whose research focus is contemporary art markets, with interest in the changing dynamics of primary and secondary markets, the evolving domination of multinational auction houses and the networked activities of art world intermediaries in the translocation of art globally. Anita’s PhD thesis examined the emerging market for Chinese Contemporary Art in the West and her recent focus is the role of Singapore as an art market hub for Southeast Asia. Anita’s research interest stems from her extensive work experience in the global art field as an international auctioneer and independent art consultant specialising in Asian contemporary art.

Email: anita.archer@unimelb.edu.au

Associate Professor Justin Clemens

Academic, School of Culture and Communication, the University of Melbourne

Justin Clemen’s work focuses primarily on the relationships between poetry, psychology and philosophy in Romantic and post-Romantic writing. He has written extensively on figures such as Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, and Alain Badiou, as well as on themes of slavery and technology. His recent books include What is Education? (Edinburgh UP 2017), edited with A.J. Bartlett and The Afterlives of Georges Perec (Edinburgh UP 2017), edited with Rowan Wilken.

Email: jclemens@unimelb.edu.au
Photo credit: Nicholas Walton-Healey

Dr Sara Crouch

Sara Crouch’s research interests include skin studies, medical history, and disability studies, with a focus on the way these disciplines intersect to generate new ways of thinking about the eighteenth-century novel in English. She has a particular interest in the writings of Frances Burney, John Cleland, Maria Edgeworth, and Tobias Smollett. Her doctoral thesis examined the ways in which medical discourse and scientific understanding and misunderstanding shaped attitudes towards human skin during the long eighteenth century in England, and how these in turn encoded the representation of character and the development of form and genre. She has published on the representation of sex work, maritime borders, and the stigmatised sexual touch in Medical History (2019) and on Burney’s representation of scarring and disability in Textual Practice (2020).

Email: sarafernandes.crouch@unimelb.edu.au

Dr Thomas H. Ford

Lecturer in English, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, La Trobe University

Thomas Ford’s work focuses on poems and other texts from Romanticism and the long eighteenth century. He reads this archive in the historicist traditions of philological materialism, and in light of the transdisciplinary imperatives of the environmental humanities. Ford calls this approach ‘ecophilology’ (a discipline that explores the role of textual environments in various settings, in all kinds of media, from the ancient cave drawings and graffiti to the contemporary electronic media). You can read about it in his book, Wordsworth and the Poetics of Air (Cambridge University Press, April 2018).

Email: T.Ford@latrobe.edu.au

Dr Sean Gaston

Visiting Scholar, Wolfson College Oxford (2017-2018), Emeritus Reader in English, Brunel University, London, and Honorary Research Fellow, the University of Melbourne

I am exploring ‘the eighteenth century origins of modernity’. I have focused on concepts of disinterest, sympathy and pity, as well as fictions of imprudence and the invention of the literary character. I am now working on concepts of world in British Romanticism, Revolutionary America and the ‘Atlantic World’.

Email: gastons@unimelb.edu.au

Dr Ben Gook

Lecturer in Cultural Studies, School of Culture and Communication, the University of Melbourne

Ben Gook’s current research focuses on alienation and disaffection in contemporary culture (post-1989). He has written on emotions and affects (melancholy, ecstasy and ambivalence), Germany (social, cultural, economic and psychic history) and Australia (postcolonial cinema). His book Divided Subjects, Invisible Borders: Re-unified Germany after 1989 (Rowman & Littlefield International, 2015) is a psychoanalytically informed study of the complicated process of re-unifying Germany after the Fall of the Berlin Wall. He has forthcoming publications on collectivity, transindividuality, libidinal economy and alienation.

Email: benjamin.gook@unimelb.edu.au

Professor Charles Green

Professor of Contemporary Art, School of Culture and Communication, the University of Melbourne

Charles Green is an authority in contemporary international and Australian art, on biennials and exhibition histories, and on artist collaborations. His books include Biennials, Triennials and Documenta: The Exhibitions that Created Contemporary Art (2016, co-authored with Anthony Gardner), The Third Hand: Artist Collaborations from Conceptualism to Postmodernism (2001), and Peripheral Vision: Contemporary Australian Art 1970-94 (1995). He has been awarded several ARC grants and was Adjunct Senior Curator of Contemporary Art at the National Gallery of Victoria (2001-2006), leading large curatorial teams who produced major exhibitions, including the inaugural, museum-wide installation of modern and contemporary Australian art at NGVA Federation Square (Fieldwork, 2001) as an outcome of an ARC Large Grant. He is also an artist, having worked in collaboration with Lyndell Brown as one artist since 1989; their works are in most Australian art museum collections and they were Australia’s Official War Artists in Iraq and Afghanistan in 2007.

Email: c.green@unimelb.edu.au

Dr Elias Greig

Elias Greig’s work considers the interaction between artistic and political representation, with a particular interest in the effects of democracy on literary form, from the eighteenth century to the present.

Email: elias.greig@unimelb.edu.au

Dr Steven Hampton

Monash University

Steven Hampton continues to inhabit two distinctly separate worlds: firstly, research into the multilingual and transnational nature of cultural and literary production during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Europe, in particular the interrelations between literatures in English, French and German, with a focus on the national epic as it was reconstructed, rediscovered or invented during the Age of Revolutions. Secondly, the hands-on design and construction of complex computer software systems for educational institutions in the present day, including the use of artificial intelligence. Both of these worlds require the application of critique, creativity and comparison but find their deepest synergies in the invention, discovery and construction of "actual, mixed and virtual realities".

Email: steven@stevenhampton.com

Dr Alexandra Hankinson

Alexandra Hankinson’s research focuses on the literary and cultural history of biological thought and phenomena from the Enlightenment to the present. Her doctoral thesis explored the cross-section between figurative and scientific thought in the botany and zoology of the long eighteenth century, with emphasis given to the way in which observation and analogy came together in this period to uncover and explain the affinities of living objects. She has published on the poetic and scientific history of insect pollination in Romanticism (2019) and is currently working on an online exhibition for the Romantic Circles Gallery of Visual Culture on hybrid and interspecific relationships. Her present research interests include the co-functioning of art and science in the discovery and description of camouflage and mimicry; histories of biodiversity and ecology in Australia; field notes; imaginative and scientific responses to avian migration; and seasonality and harvest in Romantic art and literature.

Email: alexandra.hankinson@unimelb.edu.au

Dr Jodi Heap

School of Culture and Communication, the University of Melbourne

Jodie’s research focuses on Western philosophical conceptions of the imagination and the imaginary from Aristotle to Castoriadis. Her PhD thesis, titled The Imagination. The Seed of Indeterminacy in the Writings of Kant, Fichte and Castoriadis, offered a scholarly elucidation of the notion of the imagination and the imaginary as well as provided a new way of thinking about the imagination as an embodied power of formation and of creation fundamental to both the ontology of being and of ways of being. Her area of research also explores the role of the imagination and the imaginary in relation to the concepts of creation and creativity, and in relation to creative forms of thinking and of practice, both at the level of the individual and society. Jodie has a particular interest in the ERCC project ‘Creativity, Critique, Innovation’ and has contributed to the ERCC seminar series in her seminar titled, Unleashing the Creative Imagination in the Domains of the Humanities, Science and Art.

Email: jodie.heap@unimelb.edu.au

Dr James Jiang

School of Culture and Communication, the University of Melbourne

James Jiang’s research traces the residues of Romantic thought in modern and contemporary British and American writing. His recent articles on William James and Marianne Moore draw out the implications for literary modernism and philosophical pragmatism of concepts such as style and character – concepts which assume their modern shape in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. James is currently at work on a project entitled Sage Modernism that explores the intersection between pragmatist poetics and therapeutic culture.

Email: james.jiang@unimelb.edu.au

Dr Claire Knowles

Senior Lecturer in English Literature, La Trobe University, Melbourne

Claire Knowles has published numerous articles on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century women writers. Her book, Sensibility and Female Poetic Tradition, 1780-1860: The Legacy of Charlotte Smith, was published by Ashgate in 2009 and she also recently edited, with Ingrid Horrocks, Charlotte Smith: Major Poetic Works (Broadview, 2017.) She is currently working on a project on newspaper poetry and popular literary culture in the Romantic period titled, "Romanticism, Newspapers, and the Democratization of Poetry, 1785-1810."

Email: c.knowles@latrobe.edu.au

Dr Scarlet Luk

Scarlet Luk’s work toggles between two somewhat distinct lines of inquiry: the intersection between narrative and queer/trans theory, and more recently, the relationship between financialisation and critical race and migration studies in the transpacific. She hopes to one day reconcile the two. Since completing her PhD at Yale, Scarlet has been daylighting as a high school English teacher.

Email: luk.scarlet@gmail.com

Dr Elizabeth McLean

School of Culture and Communication, the University of Melbourne

Elizabeth McLean’s research ranges from the Romantic period through to the contemporary, with a strong focus on processes of fictionality and genres of storytelling. She received her PhD in 2019 for her thesis, “The Topographical Parenthesis: Articulations of Space in the Novels of Henry James.” She is currently working on a trans-historical account of women’s literary journalism from the Enlightenment through to the present. This study is structured by four discrete episodes, that each present a composite of ideological and technological transformations vital to the professionalisation of literariness, journalism, and female authorship. These periods are: 1780s; 1890s; 1970s; Now. In a period of precarity for practitioners of both journalism and literary studies, this study looks to the late eighteenth century, and specifically to reportage of the French revolution, for a pre-history of the interdisciplinary form of literary journalism. In its veneration of both truth and form, literary journalism embodies the dualism of critique and creativity so essential to the relationship between Enlightenment and Romantic ideologies.

Email: elizabeth.mclean@unimelb.edu.au

Professor Ian McLean

Hugh Ramsay Chair of Australian Art History, the University of Melbourne

Ian McLean has published extensively on Australian art and particularly Indigenous art. Since the late eighteenth century the Australian colonies have been a privileged site of Enlightenment endeavours in science, art and literature – as Bernard Smith convincingly discussed in European Vision and the South Pacific (1960). As a student of Smith, Ian’s research has consistently explored the shadow of the Enlightenment in Australia and its histories.

Email: i.mclean@unimelb.edu.au

Dr Matthew Martin

Lecturer in Art History and Curatorship, School of Culture and Communication, the University of Melbourne

Matthew Martin is an art historian and curator whose current research interests focus on the cultural aesthetics of porcelain in eighteenth-century Europe. He is particularly interested in the intersections between art history and the history of the chemical and geological sciences reflected in artworks produced by eighteenth-century European court porcelain manufactories.

Email: mmartin1@unimelb.edu.au

Dr David Mence

Honorary Associate, School of Culture and Communication, the University of Melbourne

David Mence is passionate about the political thought of the Enlightenment. He has a particular interest in social contract theory (as variously formulated by Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau) and notions of Atlantic Republicanism. He is currently working on a book for Oxford University Press on the Federalist politics of Herman Melville (Enlightenment at Sea: Melville’s Maritime Politics). He completed his doctoral thesis at the University of Melbourne under the supervision of Professor Peter Otto.

Email: dmence@unimelb.edu.au

Professor Jennifer Milam

Research Associate, Enlightenment, Romanticism, and Contemporary Culture Research Unit, Faculty of Arts, the University of Melbourne; Pro Vice-Chancellor Academic Excellence, the University of Newcastle, Australia

Jennifer Milam’s research interests focus on understanding how the visual arts during the eighteenth century expressed philosophical ideas that rivalled the exposition of Enlightenment concepts in texts. Arguably what changed from the mid-eighteenth century onwards was broader exposure to ‘big ideas’ in visual form. Enlightenment ideas enjoyed wider circulation and cultural uptake through public exhibitions of art works that engaged audiences in interpretive response to aspects of the Enlightenment project. As a former Co-Director of the Enlightenment, Romanticism, and Contemporary Culture Research Unit (ERCC), Milam used her expertise in exactly this area to provide input into the research program of the ERCC by keeping this aspect of the Enlightenment in focus and elaborating upon its legacy in the contemporary culture sector.

Email: jennifer.milam@newcastle.edu.au

Dr Sonja Molnar

Lecturer in Media and Communications, the University of Melbourne

Sonja Molnar received her PhD in English Applied Linguistics from the University of Salzburg, where she taught courses on media discourse for six years. Thereafter she was a postdoctoral research assistant at the Vienna University of Economics and Business. Her main research areas include advertising discourse, sustainability communications, multimodality, and media linguistics. Her doctoral dissertation, which explores the verbal and visual changes in British, American and Australian print advertisements from the late seventeenth century to the present, will be published as part of the series Routledge Studies in Multimodality in 2021. Her current research project examines how environmental news is communicated in the mainstream media.

Email: sonja.molnar@unimelb.edu.au

Dr Philip Pond

Lecturer in Digital Media Research Methods, the University of Melbourne

Philip Pond specialises in the study of software systems and their influence on the production of meaning, especially in politics. He is lead investigator on a Special Research Initiative investigating the relationship between between digital media and tendency for conversations to become extreme quickly and, more broadly, he investigates the relationship between digital speed and destabilising communication. He is author of two books. Digital Media and Making of Network Temporality (2021) explains how time can be reconfigured in digital systems with disruptive consequences. Complexity, Digital Media and Post-Truth Politics (2020) proposes a framework for studying destabilising interactions between the digital and political systems.

Email: ppond@unimelb.edu.au

Associate Professor John Rundell

Principal Fellow, School of Culture and Communication, the University of Melbourne and Adjunct Professor in Philosophy, La Trobe University, Melbourne

John Rundell’s research focuses on the problems of the imagination, creativity and modernity. As ERCC Research Fellow he is especially interested in the themes of ‘Critique, Creativity, Comparison’ and ‘Worldiness, Cosmopolitanism, Globalisation’. His publications include Origins of Modernity; Imaginaries of Modernity; Aesthetics and Modernity Essays by Agnes Heller; Rethinking Imagination (with Gillian Robinson); Blurred Boundaries(with Rainer Bauboeck), and ‘Creating Social Theory: Enlightenment, Romanticism, Revolution’ in The Handbook for Social Theory edited by George Ritzer and Barry Smart. He is currently completing a book on the work of Immanuel Kant entitled Kant and Critical Theories before turning to another entitled The Creative Imagination: From Kant to Castoriadis and Beyond.

Email: johnfr@unimelb.edu.au

Dr Sarah Tiffin

Sarah Tiffin’s research focusses on depictions and descriptions of Southeast Asia in British art and creative literature of the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries. Formerly a Curator of Asian Art at the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art, Sarah is the author of Southeast Asia in Ruins: Art and Empire in the Early 19th Century (2016) which explores how British picturesque imagery of ruined candi, pagodas and wats contributed to the networks of knowledge critical to imperial enterprise. She continues to publish on British ideas about ruins and ruination, and is also currently working on a study of the upas or poison tree of Java and its appearance in British art and literature over the long 19th century.

Email: sarahtiffin@bigpond.com

Dr Thomas Vranken

School of Pacific Arts, Communication and Education, University of the South Pacific

Thomas Vranken is Lecturer in Literary Studies at the University of the South Pacific (Laucala Campus, Suva, Fiji). With Suzy Anger, he is currently editing Victorian Automata: Mechanism and Agency in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge University Press, 2023). He is the author of Simulating Antiquity in Boys’ Adventure Fiction: Maps and Ink Stains (Cambridge University Press, 2022), and Literary Experiments in Magazine Publishing: Beyond Serialisation (Routledge, 2020). Between 2019 and 2021, he was a Killam Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of British Columbia. He completed his PhD at the University of Melbourne in 2017.

Email: thomas.vranken@usp.ac.fj

Dr Phil Habil Jennifer Wawrzinek

Freie Universität Berlin

Jennifer Wawrzinek’s research focuses on the intersections between the political and the ethical in literature and culture of the Romantic and post-Romantic eras. She recently completed a monograph entitled Beyond Identity: Romanticism and Decreation, which investigates modes of decreation in British Romanticism as a response to the political and ethical crises of the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. Jennifer recently edited, together with Lisa O’Connell (UQ), a special issue of the journal Postcolonial Studies which investigated the ways in which global movements and colonial contact in the long eighteenth century can be seen to have transformed or reinvented European literature and culture of the period. She is currently developing a new research project which aims to investigate Romantic models of relationality in which (human) being is conceived as embedded within a world that is not only biological, but techno-ecological as well. This project is particularly interested in the human-animal-machine formations of William Blake.

Email: j.wawrzinek@fu-berlin.de

Dr Callum Reid

Associate of the School of Culture and Communication, The University of Melbourne

Callum Reid is an art historian whose research fields include museology, printmaking, early modern art and decorative arts, with a particular focus on the formation of collections and their reception. Callum is further interested in the history and provenance of objects, having also spent several years working in the art market and collecting institutions. Adapted from his PhD, his upcoming monograph Collecting and display in the Uffizi Gallery: Art in the age of the grand dukes (Routledge, 2021) is a museological study into Florence’s state gallery, and its early incarnations under the control of Medici and Lorraine grand duchies (1580-1859). Callum's research into 18th and 19th century museums aligns with the ERCC theme of Critique, Creativity, Comparison, as collectors and administrators toyed between the new trend of didactic arrangements and the self-representation of aesthetic displays.

Email: callum.reid@unimelb.edu.au

Dr Louise Box

School of Culture and Communication, the University of Melbourne

Louise is an art historian, curator, and educator with research interests in eighteenth-century visual and decorative arts; the collection and display of prints; the material culture of the English country house; and business and the arts. Her doctoral research focused on the print collection of Lady Elizabeth Seymour Percy, 1st Duchess of Northumberland (1716-1776). In 2018, Louise was the Harold Wright and Sarah and William Holmes Scholar in the Department of Prints and Drawings at the British Museum. She has also been awarded a Paul Mellon Research Support Grant and a Francis Haskell Memorial Fund Scholarship for research in collections and archives in the UK, Europe, and the USA. She is a Trustee of the Colin Holden Charitable Trust, which supports print scholarship. Louise’s publications include: 'Enlightened “Museums of Images” or Decorative Displays? Elizabeth Seymour Percy and the Eighteenth-Century Print Room' in Eighteenth-Century Life, Sept, 2021; a chapter in Kerrianne Stone (ed.) Horizon Lines, Marking 50 Years of Print Scholarship, Melbourne, 2019; and 'Marks and Meanings: Revealing the Hand of the Collector and “the Moment of Making” in two 18th-Century Print Albums', Journal18, Fall, 2018.

Email: box.l@unimelb.edu.au

Dr Nat Cutter

Teaching Associate (Periodic) and ARC Research Coordinator, School of Historical and Philosophical Studies and School of Culture and Communication, The University of Melbourne

Nat’s current research focuses on the experiences and influence of British expatriates living in the Maghreb (Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Libya) in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, highlighting their broad networks of material, cultural, and informational exchange throughout the Mediterranean world and eastern Atlantic, and how their reports and attitudes were presented to a wide audience through British newspapers. He is interested broadly in interactions between Protestant Europe and the Islamic world, media history, diplomacy, networking, material culture, religious and cultural dialogue, privateering, and piracy. Nat has published articles on English news representations of the Maghreb, information flows between Britain and the Maghreb, and on social connection and isolation in British communities in the Maghreb. His research has been funded by the Huntington Library, the Folger Shakespeare Library, the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, ANZAMEMS and the University of Melbourne. He is currently working on projects relating to the reception of the Maghreb in English, Scottish and Irish print, on the diffusion of Morocco leather in the British luxury bookbinding and upholstery trades, and on the importance of exilic theology as a framework for processing Protestant life in the Islamic Mediterranean.

Email: nat.cutter@unimelb.edu.au

Dr Todd Dearing

Flinders University

Todd Dearing’s work focuses on Romantic ideas of the human and conceptions of imagination, creativity, and genius. He explores how these ideas impact upon contemporary literary criticism and contemporary ideas of the human. His doctoral thesis was on the trope of the daimon in William Blake’s magnum opus, Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion, read as an allegory for literary practice. His broader research interests include English and German Romantic literature, art, and philosophy, (post)humanism, contemporary literary criticism, poetry, mythopoeia, and the links between psychology and literature. Todd is interested in the ERCC themes ‘Creativity, Critique, Comparison’ and ‘Actual, Mixed, and Virtual Realities’, and the ERCC research projects ‘Critique, Creativity, Innovation’, ‘William Blake and the History of Imagination’, and ‘Gothic Fictions’.

Email: todd.dearing@flinders.edu.au

Sophie Dungan

Tutor, Monash University

Sophie Dungan is an educator whose research fields include vampire fiction, ecocriticism, Anthropocene studies and Gothic Fiction. Adapted from her MA, her first monograph, Reading the Vegetarian Vampire (Palgrave, forthcoming), traces the rise of the so-called ‘vegetarian’ vampire in popular culture, while also exploring how the shift in the diet of (some) vampires, from human to animal or synthetic blood, responds to a growing ecological awareness that is rapidly reshaping our understanding of relations with other species. Her broader research interests include critical race theory, ecofeminism and food studies. Sophie is interested in the ERCC themes of ‘The Human, the Nonhuman and the Inhuman’, ‘Liberty, Colonisation, Slavery’, and ‘The Anthropocene’.

Email: sophie.dungan@unimelb.edu.au

Dr Ryan Johnson

Research assistant and Tutor, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, University of Sydney

Ryan’s research interests include English, French and Japanese poetics, comparative views on modernity, literary theory, and the reception of classical Chinese texts in modern East Asia. Much of my work addresses the problems of theorizing the “world” in World Literature. His first book examined how, faced with increasing globalization, modern writers across the West and East Asia have navigated the difficulties of reconciling competing universalities, aesthetic, philosophical, and religious systems. His current projects consider how the concept of modernity has encouraged a transnational enthusiasm for comparative antiquities across America, Europe, and Asia, and how the dissemination and translation of radical Russian literature in Chinese, English, French, and Japanese have affected the very notion of an East-West divide in literature, philosophy, and spirituality.

Joshua Barnes

PhD candidate in English and Theatre Studies, School of Culture and Communication, The University of Melbourne.

Joshua Barnes’ research investigates the relationship between generic forms and social forms in the literature of the long eighteenth century. Studying the mutually enabling relationship between epic, romance, the early English novel and other prose forms in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, his PhD project aims to describe the conditions of possibility of this heterogeneous literary field.

Email: jbarnes2@student.unimelb.edu.au

Alice Capstick

PhD Candidate and Teaching Associate, School of Languages, Literatures, Cultures and Linguistics, Monash University

Alice Capstick’s work focusses on the development of alternative heroic archetypes in the Romantic period. In particular, her work traces how the figure of the Satanic hero developed into a fully established archetype in the Romantic period. She examines how Romantic perception of Satan from John Milton’s Paradise Lost and other archetypal heroic figures informed their own experimentation with “dark heroes.” Alice is also interested in theories from the field of Literary Darwinism and how they can be used to understand and account for the enduring prevalence of certain types of dark heroes and people’s fascination with them. Her broader research interests include early modern poetry, aesthetic theory, gothic studies, and book history.

Alice was on the organising committee for 'Resilience, Renewal, Recovery', an international postgraduate conference co-hosted by the University of York's Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies (CECS) and the ERCC in 2021.

Email: Alice.Capstick@monash.edu

Corey Cribb

PhD candidate in Screen and Cultural Studies, School of Culture and Communication, The University of Melbourne

Corey Cribb specialises in film theory and the continental philosophy of film. Focusing on the film-philosophies of Gilles Deleuze and Jean-Luc Nancy, his research considers the potential of modern cinema to perpetuate the non-mediated transformation of the world and occasion the ontological renewal of thought, bodies and ways of being-in-the-world. In part, this involves a consideration of the palpable influence of Maurice Blanchot’s literary ontology upon these thinkers, and the subsequent question of why Deleuze and Nancy maintain that the marked passivity (or worklessness) of modern cinema harbours unprecedented potential for ontological change and the restoration of belief in a world from which we are said to be absent. Beyond the notion of worklessness as “the most essential – the most romantic and the most modern – gesture in romanticism” (Watt, 2017, pp. 18), Corey’s research connects with the concerns of the ERCC by seeking to show how some of the most ground breaking developments in film theory today bear the influence of debates which can be traced back to German Idealism.

Email: ccribb@student.unimelb.edu.au

Marguerite Gibson

PhD Candidate in Art Theory and History, School of Media, Arts and Social Inquiry, Curtin University

Marguerite Gibson focuses on nineteenth century Australian colonial art, particularly in relation to the themes of aesthetics, landscape and the emotional traditions of the sublime. Currently, her research project is investigating the utilization of the sublime through motifs, nuances and Australian landscape depiction within art, representing the emotional experiences of the historical period of the Gold Rush era, 1850-1900. Through the primary texts of Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant, along with the contemporary concept of the colonial sublime, she explores the relationship between these ideas, termed the Australian colonial sublime within the research. She currently has a book chapter forthcoming within Song of Death in Paradise: Death and Garden Narratives in Literature, Art and Film, edited by Feryal Cubukcu and Sabine Planka (Lexington Books), entitled “Wilderness Garden: Death, Landscape and the Australian Colonial Sublime”. Her research and interests relate to several ERCC themes, particularly Critique, Creativity, Comparison and Worldliness, Cosmopolitanism, Globalisation. Marguerite was on the organising committee for 'Resilience, Renewal, Recovery', an international postgraduate conference co-hosted by the University of York's Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies (CECS) and the ERCC in 2021.

Email: m.gibson@postgrad.curtin.edu.au

Samantha Happé

PhD Candidate and Graduate Research Teaching Fellow in Art History, School of Culture and Communication, University of Melbourne.

Samantha Happé specialises in the role of the gift in negotiating diplomatic relationships during the long eighteenth century. Her doctoral thesis examines the visual and material culture surrounding the Persian embassy to Versailles during the reign of Louis XIV in 1715, with a particular focus on the gifts as they travelled between cultural spheres that lacked a common symbolic vocabulary. Her research privileges the objects of exchange as being crucial and active tools of cross-cultural mediation, creating a new diplomatic history that considers the gifts as well as allowing for the performative aspects of the diplomatic encounter. Samantha is also working as a Research Officer at the Centre of Art History and Theory at ANU on a project mapping patterns of cultural exchange between France and non-European countries during the ancien régime, with an emphasis on Louis XIV prints and medals. Samantha’s research connects with several ERCC themes including Worldliness, Cosmopolitanism, Globalisation, and non-European Enlightenments and Romanticisms.

Email: s.happe@unimelb.edu.au

Rohan Harrison

PhD candidate in English and Theatre Studies, School of Culture and Communication, the University of Melbourne

Rohan specialises in literary genre theory and the gothic fictions of late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth-century Britain, considered as material practices involving a number of stakeholders in the changing print economy following the consumer revolution. His current research explores the role of the Minerva Press in the emergence of the gothic as a genre, considering its publishing output and marketing practices as attempts to cultivate a reliable readership by supplying readers with a particular sort of imaginary world. This use of genre serves as an important precursor to the marriage of marketing and textual immersion that would come to characterise the genre fictions of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Rohan’s focus on the romantic nostalgia of gothic worlds, put to work in the consumer economy through its ability to generate immersive virtual environments, connects his work to several ERCC themes, including Critique, Creativity, Comparison and Actual, Mixed and Virtual Realities.

Email: r.harrison@student.unimelb.edu.au

Francesca Kavanagh

PhD candidate in English and Theatre Studies, School of Culture and Communication, The University of Melbourne

Francesca Kavanagh specialises in eighteenth and nineteenth-century women’s reading and writing practices with a focus on material culture. She is also interested in the gothic and cultures of celebrity and fandom from Romanticism to the present. Her current project examines practices of letter-writing, annotation, and commonplacing from a range of women writers throughout the long eighteenth century and pairs this archival material with fictional accounts of these practices by Samuel Richardson and Jane Austen to elucidate the ways in which women in the long eighteenth-century used these textual practices in the production of textual and virtual spaces of intimacy. She currently has a journal article forthcoming in The Australasian Journal of Victorian Studies entitled “‘Marianne Knight | Godmersham Park’: Inscription as Community Interface in the Books of Jane Austen’s Niece”.

Francesca was on the organising committee for 'Distance 2020', an international postgraduate conference co-hosted by the University of York's Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies (CECS) and the ERCC. She is interested in a number of the ERCC’s current themes, including Actual Mixed and Virtual Realities and Worldliness, Cosmopolitanism, Globalisation, as well as opportunities for future collaborations.

Email: f.kavanagh@student.unimelb.edu.au

Tarek Makhlouf

PhD candidate in Arabic, Asia Institute, The University of Melbourne

Tarek researches the content and context of traditions of philology with a particular emphasis on the Arabic tradition. Philology here is used in the traditional sense of studying texts and thus encompasses a broad array of activities including grammar, codicology, hermeneutics (in its broad meaning), literary criticism, and history. Tarek reads these philological works embedded in their socio-intellectual context, often revealing counter-intuitive results. His current project investigates the flow of Arabic philological learning from Islamic Spain to Egypt and the Levant in the 13th and 14th centuries. While maintaining his interest in the breadth of the ERCC’s themes and activities, Tarek is focused on two themes: ‘Non-European Enlightenments and Romanticisms’ and ‘Worldliness, Cosmopolitanism, Globalisation’. He is also currently working with ERCC researchers to put together a seminar series on Islamic Enlightenments.

Email: tarekm@student.unimelb.edu.au

Pierre Palayan

PhD Candidate in Art History, School of Culture and Communication, University of Melbourne.

Pierre Palayan’s research explores the role of porcelain in assessing the questions of what the Ottoman Empire meant to Western Europeans and how European powers represented Ottoman culture and politics during the eighteenth century. The research examines the political engagement between Europe and the Ottoman empire by focusing on the image of the Ottomans as portrayed by small-scale sculptures and other objects, and by considering the relationship between porcelain and the cultures associated with the aristocratic courts, turquerie and cosmopolitanism, and its significance within discourses having to do with geopolitics and nationalism.

Email: jeanpierre.palayan@student.unimelb.edu.au

Mona Rahimpour

PhD candidate in English and Theatre Studies, School of Culture and Communication, The University of Melbourne

Mona Rahimpour’s research focuses on a trend in the contemporary global novel which engages with the accelerative precarity of human futures. What she identifies under the new conceptual cluster of Doom Lit projects imminent planetary threats into unsettlingly near futures, where human subjects struggle to adapt to acute ontological and existential disruption. She proposes to read these works in line with the relationality between their distinct aesthetic properties—what they are—and their affective qualities—what they do to the reader. Her methodology responds to Doom Lit as a site of attachment and material possibility as she considers doom in contemporary fiction to examine the relationship between the fictional depictions of the human ‘ends’ and the lived, material experiences of the present. Significantly, the plurality of ‘ends’ acknowledges diverse temporalities that prefigure human finality. This includes Indigenous knowledge (e.g. in Wright’s The Swan Book), refugee imaginaries (e.g. in Lanchester’s The Wall) and pandemic narratives (e.g. in McKay’s Animals in That Country). In so doing, she attends to nuances of heterogeneous imaginaries of the Global South with fundamental, and often subversive, ontological differences to what the end of the world may look like.  Mona’s research connects with the concerns of ERCC in its focus on worldliness, cosmopolitanism and globalization and its involvement with the genealogy of aesthetic preoccupation with doom which she traces to the “Romantic climate”, exemplified in Byron’s Darkness and Mary Shelley’s figure of The Last Man. 

Mona is an Erasmus Mundus alum and has a journal article forthcoming entitled “Intertextuality and Oneiric Futurity in Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea”.

Email: mrahimpour@student.unimelb.edu.au

Belinda Scerri

PhD Candidate in Art History, School of Culture and Communication, The University of Melbourne

Belinda Scerri’s research explores French Rococo interior ornament, patronage and the ascendancy of ornémaniste artists in early eighteenth-century Paris. Her broader research interests include: the South Sea Bubble, Système Law and economic collapse of 1720 through an art historical lens; early modern collecting and commissioning cultures; mercantilism and the establishment of Royal manufactories; exoticism and cosmopolitanism in French Régence art and architecture. She is a founding member of the Centre of Visual Art (CoVA) doctoral academy and a 2019/2020 research fellow at the UCLA Center for Seventeenth and Eighteenth-Century Studies. She is currently writing a book chapter entitled ‘“Instructing herself by fad or fancy”: Depictions and Fictions of Female Connoisseurs in Eighteenth-century Paris’ which will appear in Portraits & Poses: Representations of Female Intellectual Authority, Agency and Authorship in Early Modern and Enlightenment Europe (Leuven and Cornell UP, 2020).

Email: bscerri@pgrad.unimelb.edu.au

Dr Adrian Schober

MA candidate in the School of Culture and Communication, University of Melbourne

Adrian Schober’s research examines the role of Romanticism in the films of American director Steven Spielberg. He addresses this influence across a range of films, from the early to later part of Spielberg’s career, giving special attention to his studies of children and childhood. He positions the director as a late-Romantic to acknowledge how motifs and ideas within Romanticism continue to reassert themselves within contemporary culture. Adrian, who has a PhD in English from Monash University, is the author of Possessed Child Narratives in Literature and Film (Palgrave, 2004), and co-editor (with Debbie Olson) of Children in the Films of Steven Spielberg (Lexington, 2016) and Children, Youth, and American Television (Routledge, 2018). He is having a monograph published on The Omen for the Devil’s Advocates series by Auteur / Liverpool University Press. He is Senior Editor on the board of Red Feather: An International Journal of Children in Popular Culture.

Email: aschober@student.unimelb.edu.au

Hugh Sinclair

PhD Candidate in English and Theatre Studies, School of Culture and Communication, the University of Melbourne

Hugh Sinclair’s work focuses on Romantic poetry and the history of the scholarly edition. He is currently working on a comparative study of the editions of poets William Blake and Friedrich Hölderlin. This project looks at the changes brought about as digital media replace books as the repository of cultural memory, and the ways in which the advent of digital scholarly editions is recasting the role of the scholarly editor. By closely examining the inner workings of these editions, and by paying attention to the various technologies and editorial methodologies that underwrite them, this study reconstructs an editorial politics in relation to each poet that is ultimately a politics of cultural memory. An interest in the legacies of Romanticism in the present connects Hugh’s work to the concerns of the ERCC, particularly to themes of Critique, Creativity, Comparison and Actual, Mixed and Virtual Realities.

Email: h.sinclair@student.unimelb.edu.au

Samuel Watts

PhD candidate and Teaching Associate, School of Historical and Philosophical Studies, The University of Melbourne

Samuel Watts researches and writes about the experiences of African Americans in the Deep South during Reconstruction. His focus is on how formerly enslaved people interpreted ideas of freedom and citizenship in violently contested urban spaces, while working to construct and maintain lasting communities and networks. Additionally, Samuel is broadly interested in the historical legacies of racial discourse in the US, Australia and beyond. He currently has a book chapter in peer-review, entitled: “Reconstruction Justice: African American Police Officers in Charleston and New Orleans,” in Freedom’s Gained and Lost: Reinterpreting Reconstruction in the Atlantic World, eds. Simon Lewis and Adam Domby (New York: Fordham University Press, 2019 – forthcoming). He is interested in a number of ERCC projects, most notably those focused on slavery, and has an ongoing interest in the legacies of Enlightenment thought in debates about race, citizenship and revolution.

Email: sjwatts@student.unimelb.edu.au

Distinguished Professor Genevieve Bell AO FTSE FAHA

Genevieve Bell is a renowned anthropologist, technologist, and futurist. Genevieve completed her PhD in cultural anthropology at Stanford University in 1998 and is best known for her work at the intersection of cultural practice and technology development.  She is currently the Director of the School of Cybernetics and Florence Violet McKenzie Chair at the Australian National University and a Vice President and Senior Fellow at Intel Corporation.

Genevieve joined the ANU in 2017 after spending 18 years in Silicon Valley guiding Intel's product development and social science and user experience research capabilities. In 2017, Genevieve was appointed the inaugural Director of the 3A Institute, co-founded by the ANU and CSIRO's Data61. The Institute's mission is to establish a new branch of engineering to responsibly and sustainably scale AI-enabled cyber-physical systems. In 2021, she was appointed Director of the new School of Cybernetics at the ANU, which in addition to housing the 3A Institute, is focused on building capacity in Systems and Design.

Emeritus Professor Will Christie  

After teaching English literature at the University of Sydney for many years, Will Christie became Head of the ANU’s Humanities Research Centre (2015-2021) and Director of the Australasian Consortium of Humanities Researchers and Centres (2017-2022). He is currently co-ordinator of the Romanticism Section of the International Association of University Professors of English (IAUPE), on the International Advisory Board of the journal European Romantic Review, and general editor of the series China and the West in the Modern World for Sydney University Press. Will was founding President of the Romantic Studies Association of Australasia (RSAA) from 2010 to 2015 and has published widely in Romantic studies, including  Samuel Taylor Coleridge: A Literary Life (2006), awarded the NSW Premier’s Biennial Prize for Literary Scholarship in 2008, The Letters of Francis Jeffrey to Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle (2008), The Edinburgh Review in the Literary Culture of Romantic Britain (2009), Dylan Thomas: A Literary Life (2014), and The Two Romanticisms, and Other Essays (2016). More recently, he was co-editor (with Jock Macleod and Peter Denney) of Politics and Emotions in Romantic Periodicals (2019) and (with Q.S. Tong and Angela Dunstan) of Tribute and Trade: China and Global Modernity, 1784-1935 (2020). Will was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities in 2011.

Konfir Kabo

Konfir Kabo is the founding partner of Kabo Lawyers, a law firm based in Melbourne, Australia. He is also the CEO of Aksara Group, a service station investment trust.

Konfir has been an avid art collector for the past decade and is a passionate patron of the arts through Project 11, a philanthropic initiative he established with his wife. Project 11 works with key institutions such as the University of Melbourne, Monash University and RMIT University as well as arts organisations such as the National Gallery of Australia, Arts Centre Melbourne, Multicultural Arts Victoria, Melbourne Recital Centre and Musica Viva. Aside from the arts, Konfir also supports health initiatives such as autism research with OTARC, Australian Prostate Cancer Research and the Skin Cancer Foundation. He is currently on the board of Centre of Asian Business and Economics (The University of Melbourne), Australia Indonesia Art Forum and VCA Foundation.

Konfir has launched a few projects in Indonesia, including the establishment of an education centre in Bandung with Melbourne Polytechnic to deliver audio engineering courses as well as movie productions.

Konfir was born in Makassar, Indonesia in 1973. He studied Law and Commerce at Monash University. He was admitted as a solicitor and barrister of the Supreme Court of Victoria and the High Court of Australia in 1998. He is also a Fellow of the Australia and New Zealand College of Notaries. He currently resides in Melbourne with his wife and two children.

Seri Renkin OAM

An innovator and advocate for social and economic justice, Seri has over 25 
years' experience working in the corporate, non-profit, philanthropic and 
government sectors, including holding leadership, advisory and non-executive 
board roles.  Currently, Seri's work focuses on shifting the power in 
philanthropy and impact investing, helping leaders in the social sector make 
the critical shifts so their efforts can be more democratic, equitable and 
effective.   

Seri has led or contributed to the establishment of many social change 
organisations in Australia and served on a wide range of Boards.  She was 
founding CEO and Managing Director of the ten20 Foundation, a 10 year impact 
fund and founding Director of the Melbourne Office of Social Ventures 
Australia (SVA), an organisation offering innovative solutions to society's 
most pressing social problems. She was Chair of The Stella Prize, and a 
Board Director of the International Women's Development Agency (IWDA) and 
Australian's Investing in Women (AIIW).  Seri is an Activator for the global 
participatory fund SheEO.    Prior to her roles in the social sector, Seri 
was a Management Consultant working for Accenture in Australia and New 
Zealand and Hay Management Consultants in London. She earned her BA (Hons) 
from the University of Melbourne.   

Seri is passionate about providing opportunities for young people, gender 
lens approaches to social investment as well as walking alongside First 
Nations people to reimagine an economic system that supports community 
agency and sustainability.   

in 2020 she was awarded an Order of Australia (OAM) in recognition of her 
services to communities and non-profit organisations.