Michelle Smith is a Research Fellow in the School of Communication and Creative Arts at Deakin University and will take up an Alfred Deakin Postdoctoral Fellowship in mid-2015. In 2013, she completed a postdoctoral fellowship on the Australian Research Council Discovery project 'From Colonial to Modern: Transnational Girlhood in Australian, Canadian and New Zealand Print Cultures, 1840-1940'. Michelle's research focuses on gender in Victorian literature and culture, as well as children’s literature. Her current project examines female beauty in Victorian print culture. She completed her doctoral dissertation on British girls' literature and empire at the University of Melbourne in 2007. It was published as Empire in British Girls' Literature and Culture: Imperial Girls, 1880-1915 by Palgrave Macmillan (UK) in 2011. It won the 2012 European Society for the Study of English's Book Award for best book by a junior scholar. She is also the editor (with Kristine Moruzi) of Girls' School Stories, 1749-1929 (Routledge, 2013) and the collection Colonial Girlhood in Literature, Culture and History, 1840-1940 (Palgrave Macmillan). Her research has been published in journals including Women's Writing, Victorian Periodicals Review, English Literature in Transition, The Lion and the Unicorn, Continuum, Papers: Explorations into Children's Literature and in numerous edited collections. Michelle has published opinion pieces in the Age, the Washington Post, New Statesman, and The Drum and has been interviewed on numerous radio and television programmes.
John Nevile was Professor of Economics at UNSW 1965-1992, and is now Emeritus Professor and Visiting Professor. He was elected a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in 1972 and was President of the Economics Society of Australia from 1980 to 1984. John has been a member of government advisory bodies and has also been a consultant for major Australian Government enquiries and for the IMF. In recent years his research interests have been in the fields of macroeconomic policy, unemployment and history of economic thought, with also an interest in economics and ethics. In 2000 he received the Distinguished Fellow Medal of the Economic Society of Australia.
Gerard de Valence is a Senior Lecturer in the School of the Built Environment, in the Faculty of Design Architecture and Building at the University of Technology Sydney. He was Director of the Postgraduate Property Development course from 2006-13, and previously was Director of the Facilities Management course. Prior to becoming an academic in 1992 he had ten years experience as an analyst and economist in the private sector doing research on the property, building and construction industries for the Australian Stock Exchange, the Property Council of Australia and the NSW Royal Commission into Productivity in the Building Industry. He has a long-standing interest in industry performance and development, and worked on industry policy in the 1990s with both the Australian Construction Industry Development Agency and the NSW Department of Public Works and Services. For the Commonwealth Government he was a consultant for DIS, including the 1998 Building for Growth construction industry policy, and the 2002 Cole Royal Commission into the industry. His research has broadly focused on issues around the structure, conduct and technological trajectory of the building and construction industry, with over a hundred refereed papers and book chapters published. He was co-editor with Rick Best of the three volume Building in Value series of books published between 1999 and 2003: Pre-design Issues; Design and Construction; and Workplace Strategies and Facilities Management. As Coordinator between 2003 and 2011 of the International Council for Research and Innovation in Building and Construction (CIB) Working Commission on Building Economics (W55) he was a leader of the largest research group in the field. In 2012 Taylor and Francis published a new book he edited called Modern Construction Economics: Theory and Application. Gerard has a blog on Construction Industry Economics and Policy at http://gerard-de-valence.blogspot.com.au/
I'm a philosopher at Deakin University, and have previously held research fellowships in the UK (I'm an honorary Research Fellow at the University of Hertfordshire), Denmark and the US. My areas of research include personal identity, philosophy of death and remembrance, 19th and 20th century European philosophy (especially the work of Søren Kierkegaard) and moral psychology. As well as The Conversation, I'm a regular contributor to New Philosopher and pop up from time to time on The Drum, 774 Melbourne, 3RRR, Radio National, The Age, and other places.
Claire Molloy is Professor of Film, Television and Digital Media, Director of the Institute for Creative Enterprise (ICE) and Director of the Centre for Human Animal Studies (CfHAS). Her research interests focus on the critical junctures between media, film and Animal Studies; (un)sustainable consumption; eco-media; American cinema; activism; and, film and politics. Her recent publications include the books Memento (2010), Popular Media and Animals (2011), Beyond Human: From Animality to Transhumanism (2012) and American Independent Cinema: indie, indiewood and beyond (2013). She is currently co-editing The Routledge Companion to Film and Politics. In addition, her recent work on popular depictions of animal cruelty, industrial-economic analysis of commercial wildlife films, a history of independent nature films, news coverage of dangerous dogs, representations of nature in commercial feature films, farmed animals product advertising, and neoliberal aesthetics have been published in various edited collections and journals. Her research on news media discourses and the UK coastline forms one of four case studies on non-monetary valuations of nature (WP5) for the National Ecosystem Assessment (2013) and she is a contributing author to a guide on deliberative methods for non-monetary valuations of nature for policy-makers and key decision-makers (2014). She is a Fellow of the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics, serves on the Vegan Society Academic Advisory Committee and the Minding Animals International Programme Committee, and is an advisor to the Animal History Museum. In addition to reviewing for fourteen different publishers and journals and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, Claire is Consultant Editor for the Journal of Animal Ethics and on the Advisory Board for the Palgrave Macmillan Book Series on Animal Ethics. Her current research examines various aspects of sustainable ethical food production, particularly where these relate to media regulation, meat and dairy consumption, and the tensions between sustainable consumption and neoliberal constructions of consumer pleasure. She is involved in research on women and wildlife filmmaking, media discourses on animal sentience and she continues to write about Christopher Nolan’s films.
Mike Sandiford is Professor of Geology at the University of Melbourne. His research interests include tectonics, earthquake geology, geomorphology and geothermics. His work on the thermal structure of the Australian crust provides a framework for understanding the extraordinary abundance of Uranium in Australia, and helped promote interest in geothermal energy exploration in South Australia. He has published over 170 peer-reviewed scientific papers and supervised more than 80 young researchers at Honours, Masters, PhD and junior postdoc level. He was recipient of consecutive ARC professorial fellowships (2000-2009), the Mawson Medal from the Australian Academy of Sciences in 2004 (for outstanding contributions to Australian Earth Science), the Hobbs Medal, the Carey Medal and Stilwell Medal (three times) from the Geological Society of Australia. He is a fellow of the Australian Academy of Science and the Geological Society of Australia. He chaired the Science Advisory Framework for NCRIS geoscience capability AuScope. He directed the Melbourne Energy Institute at the University of Melbourne from 2009-2016.
