EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE (2021-)

Professor Russell McDougall

University of New England, NSW, Australia

Russell McDougall has longstanding research interests in Australian, Caribbean and African literatures in English – particularly those of West and Northeast Africa - on all of which he has published widely. He is particularly interested in post-colonial subjectivities and life writing; the storying of objects; literary geographies; comparative indigeneities (animal, vegetable and human-animal); and the new piracies, bio-piracy and geo-piracy. His books include Tracking the Literature of Tropical Weather: Typhoons, Cyclone and Hurricanes (Palgrave, 2016), coedited with Anne Collett and Sue Thomas, The Roth Family, Anthropology & Colonial Administration (Left Coast Press, 2008), co-edited with Iain Davidson; Writing, Travel, Empire (IB Tauris, 2007), co-edited with Peter Hulme; and The Muse of Australia: Henry Kendall (C.A.L.L.S., 1992).

Pauline Reynolds

University of New England, NSW, Australia

Pauline Reynolds is a Pacific historian completing a PhD by Creative Practice in the School of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences at UNE. This will result in a manuscript and an exegesis retelling a well-known Pacific story, but from the perspective of her Polynesian foremothers. Pauline is interested in reinterpreting how the past is told, through the use of objects, oral histories, language and culture to provide space for voices normally left out of the accepted historical narrative. Her research has led to both academic and creative projects. She has self-published two books, is published in a number journals and books around Pacific objects, and participated in exhibitions throughout the Pacific. She is a Churchill Fellow (2010), and her expertise in Pacific material culture is often sought after; as Pacific Collaborator with the Pacific Presences Project (2017) through Cambridge University; visiting researcher with Sydney University; and most recently at the British Museum and Musée de Tahiti et ses iles (2019) on the re-interpretation of a significant Tahitian treasure (Tahitian Mourner’s Costume).

Dr John Charles Ryan

University of New England, NSW, Australia

John C. Ryan has research interests in Australian, American and Southeast Asian literatures in English particularly Indonesia, Myanmar, Brunei and Papua New Guinea. John is Postdoctoral Research Fellow at UNE and Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Western Australia. His books include Australian Wetland Cultures: Swamps and the Environmental Crisis (Lexington, 2019), co-edited with Li Chen; Forest Family: Australian Culture, Art, and Trees (Brill, 2018), co-edited with Rod Giblett; Plants in Contemporary Poetry: Ecocriticism and the Botanical Imagination (Routledge, 2018); Southeast Asian Ecocriticism: Theories, Practices, Prospects (Lexington, 2017), as editor; and The Language of Plants: Science, Philosophy, Literature (University of Minnesota Press, 2017), co-edited with Monica Gagliano and Patrícia Vieira. His current projects include The Mind of Plants, Literary Ethnobotany and Southeast Asian Ecomedia.

Associate Professor Anne Collett

University of Wollongong, Australia

Anne Collett is an Associate Professor in English Literatures at the University of Wollongong, Australia. She edited Kunapipi: Journal of Postcolonial Writing and Culture from 1999-2012 (issues from 1979-2012 are available at https://ro.uow.edu.au/kunapipi/ ). Anne held the professorial chair in Australian Studies at the University of Tokyo (2011/12) and the University of Copenhagen (2014/15). Her current research focuses on the intimate relationship between the material and the ephemeral, the geomorphic and the poetic. She has written extensively on postcolonial poetics, including recent work on postcolonial environmental politics in the work of Caribbean poets Olive Senior, Kamau Brathwaite and Claude McKay, Australian poet Judith Wright, and Canadian artist Emily Carr. Publications include Tracking the Literature of Tropical Weather (edited with R. McDougall and S. Thomas, Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), Postcolonial Past and Present (edited with L. Dale, Rodopi/Brill, 2018), Romantic Climates (edited with O. Murphy, Palgrave Macmillan, 2019) and 100 Atmospheres (multi co-authored, Open Humanities Press, 2019). Email: acollett@uow.edu.au

Dr Michael R. Griffiths

University of Wollongong, Australia

2021 SPACLALS Chair

Michael R. Griffiths is Senior Lecturer in English Literatures at the University of Wollongong. He is the author of The Distribution of Settlement: Appropriation and Refusal in Australian Literature and Culture (UWAP 2018). The focus of his work is principally on the representation of Indigenous peoples and Indigenous self-representational responses. He has also publised on Caribbean and African writing within the fields of commonwealths, postcolonial and settler colonial studies. His essays have appeared in Textual Practice, Settler Colonial Studies, Discourse, Postcolonial Studies, Australian Humanities Review, The Journal of Commonwealth Literature and many other venues. Griffiths edited the book Biopolitics and Memory in Postcolonial Literature and Culture (Ashgate 2016). He also coedited a special issue with Bruno Cornellier of Settler Colonial Studies titled: “Globalising Unsettlement” and, with Tanja Dreher, a special issue of Continuum which offered an account of freedom of speech debates in the late liberal world; this special issue is to be reprinted as a book by Taylor and Francis. He likes poetry and spoodles.

Dr. Sarah-Jane Burton

Australian National University

2021 SPACLALS Secretary

Sarah-Jane's research is focused on twentieth-century American poetry with a particular interest in the literary history of New England and the study and preservation of archival materials related to this period. She is the Official Historian for the New England Poetry Club in Boston, MA and her research has been funded internationally by several universities. In 2019 she was a Research Fellow at the Houghton Library, Harvard. She has also been the recipient of an Everett Helm Visiting Fellowship at the Lilly Library, Indiana University and a Dissertation Grant from the Schlesinger Library for the History of Women in America, Harvard. She has worked in both academic and professional roles in the tertiary sector including the English department at Macquarie University, Sydney and the Library division of Western Sydney University. She is a proud Wiradjuri woman from the Central West of NSW and is passionate about regional outreach for universities and education for First Nations peoples.

Dr Gillian Dooley

Flinders University, Australia

Gillian Dooley is an Honorary Senior Research Fellow in the Department of English, having retired from Flinders University Library in May 2017. She graduated from Flinders with a PhD in English in 2001. She was the founding general editor of the Flinders Humanities Research Centre's electronic journal Transnational Literature from 2008-2018, and is founding co-editor of Writers in Conversation. She has published two monographs and several scholarly editions. Her research interests include the writers J.M. Coetzee, Iris Murdoch, V.S. Naipaul, Jane Austen, and maritime explorer Matthew Flinders. She has a particular interest in music and literature, and as a singer often organises and performs in programs of music with literary themes. She is a regular book reviewer for various journals and magazines, including Australian Book Review. She was a co-convenor of the 2018 SPACLALS conference in Parramatta. Email: gillian.dooley@flinders.edu.au

Emeritus Professor Gareth Griffiths, FAHA

University of Western Australia

Email: gareth.griffiths@uwa.edu.au

Gareth Griffiths is Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Western Australia. He has also taught at Macquarie University in Sydney and in the United Kingdom, France, and the United States, chairing the English Department at SUNY Albany from 2002-2006. He has previously held positions as Head of the Theater Studies Council of Australia and Western Australian theatre Rreviewer for the Australian Newspaper. Griffiths was born in Wales, educated at Cyfarthfa Grammar School and, apart from the period as Chair at SUNY Albany, has been based in Australia since 1973. Griffiths's work has primarily focused on postcolonial literature and theory, a topic on which he has been an influential contributor. He has published on the literatures of diverse third world and postcolonial spaces but his work has most significantly dealt with East and West Africa. He has also published significant works on the intersection of land and identity. His current research is on ideas of the secular and the sacred in the postcolonial world and on US/African relations in the 19th Century.

Dr Felicity Hand

Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain

Felicity Hand is senior lecturer in the English Department of the Autonomous University of Barcelona. She teaches post-colonial literature and history and culture of Britain and the U.S. She has published articles on various Indian Ocean writers including M.G.Vassanji, Abdulrazak Gurnah, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown and Lindsey Collen. She is the head of the research group Ratnakara which explores the literatures and cultures of the South West Indian Ocean. At present the group is working on life writing and the aesthetics of remembering. Felicity is also the editor of the electronic journal Indi@logs. Spanish Journal of India Studies. Email: felicity.hand@uab.cat

Associate Professor Chris Prentice

University of Otago, New Zealand

Chris Prentice teaches and researches in postcolonial literatures at the University of Otago. Her research has focused on mobilisations of culture in Indigenous decolonization struggles in settler (post)colonial societies. More recently she has been working on ecopolitics and disaster, as well as postcolonial memory. She is a co-editor of Cultural Transformations: Perspectives on Translocation in a Global Age (Rodopi, 2010), and has published in many postcolonial literary journals. She has co-edited special journal issues and is on the editorial advisory boards of Sites: Journal of Social Anthropology and Culture Studies, Antipodes and the Journal of New Zealand Literature as well as publisher advisory boards of Brill and Otago University Press. She has been a judge for the Commonwealth Writers Prize, and was Chair of ACLALS 2016–2019. Email: chris.prentice@otago.ac.nz

Priyanka Shivadas

University of New South Wales

Ms. Priyanka Shivadas is a PhD candidate at the University of New South Wales Canberra, located at the Australian Defence Force Academy. Her current research focuses on Global Indigenous Literary Studies. She has published “The Bone People of New Zealand: Identity Politics in the South Pacific” in Homogeneity in Heterogeneity: Memory, Culture, and Resistance in Aboriginal Literatures from Around the World, edited by KBS Krishna and Hem Raj Bansal (Authorspress, 2018) and “The Practice of Public Apology: Australia Says Sorry to the Stolen Generations” in The Culture of Dissenting Memory: Truth Commissions in the Global South, edited by Veronique Tadjo (Routledge, 2019). For her LinkedIn profile, please click this URL. Email: p.shivadas@student.adfa.edu.au