Associate Professor in French and Australian Research Council DECRA Fellow, University of New England I am originally from Collio di Vobarno, a small town of the province of Brescia, in the north of Italy, not far away from Lake Garda. After attending the Liceo “Enrico Fermi” in Salò (BS, Italy), I completed a Diploma di Laurea in French and English languages, literatures, and cultures at the University of Bologna (Italy); and then an MSt and a DPhil in French at the University of Oxford (Balliol College). I have been a pensionnaire étrangère at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, rue d’Ulm, and an intern at UNESCO (Headquarters, Paris). Before joining the University of New England (Australia), I held the Kathleen Bourne Junior Research Fellowship in French and Comparative Literature at St Anne’s College (Oxford, UK). Currently, I am the recipient of an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Award (DE200101206: Provincial Poets and the Making of a Nation) funded by the Australian Government.
Postdoctoral researcher and lecturer in history, University of Bonn Viola Franziska Müller is a historian at the Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies at University of Bonn. She is the author of Escape to the City: Fugitive Slaves in the Antebellum Urban South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2022) and co-editor of Coercion and Wage Labour: Exploring Work Relations through History and Art (London: UCL Press, 2023). Her research interests include global history, slavery, labor coercion, inequality, illegality, im/mobility, race, resistance, and urban history.
Professor of Hydrosystems Engineering, University of Michigan My research interests aim to uncover interactions, mechanisms and feedbacks among various components of natural and human-impacted systems. My group strives to promote both the development of process-oriented models of water, energy and element cycles at various scales and the integration of data and models. The specific foci are land surface hydrology, ecohydrology, floods and climate impact assessments, with a growing emphasis on uncertainty quantification in all these research domains. In the years to come, we will apply both rigorous computational models and field data collection to better understand: water, energy and carbon dynamics in tropical and polar ecosystems; coupled processes of surface-subsurface hydrology and flooding hydrodynamics in natural and managed environments; and impacts and feedbacks associated with the propagation of climate and weather dynamics through hydrologic systems.
Professor of Mechanical Engineering, University of Nigeria Professor Val Ekechukwu was the former Director, Research & Innovation at the National Universities Commission (NUC). He was a member of the Governing Council at both the Air-force Institute of Technology, Kaduna and the National Mathematical Centre, Abuja. He has held numerous international fellowships and is currently undertaking research at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, where he has taught for over four decades.
Assistant professor of strategy and entrepreneurship, UCL Vaughn Tan is a strategy consultant and assistant professor of strategy and entrepreneurship at University College London (on leave). His first book, The Uncertainty Mindset (Columbia Univ. Press, 2020), is a multi-year ethnography of globally renowned high-end cutting-edge culinary innovation teams including those at the Fat Duck, The Cooking Lab, and ThinkFoodGroup. It explains the history, dynamics, and organization of innovation in high-end cuisine, and why that industry is in a state of continual change. He is currently working on a project about not-knowing.
