Advisory Board

Biography

Professor Dorothy Driver holds a Professorship in the English discipline, and teaches half-time to allow for travel to South Africa for research purposes. From 1981-2001 she taught full-time at the University of Cape Town, where she is now an Emeritus Professor and an Honorary Research Associate. Her particular research interests have been in the constructions and representations of gender and race both under Apartheid and after Apartheid, and in the writings of women. She has published on Olive Schreiner, Pauline Smith, Nadine Gordimer, Njabulo Ndebele, Yvonne Vera, Zoë Wicomb and many others, as well as on a variety of general topics such as the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, African political memoirs, Drum magazine, and the African National Congress constitutional guidelines. She was also one of the editors of the historical anthology Women Writing Africa: the Southern Region, for several years co-edited the Southern African Review of Books, and for twenty years produced an annual Survey of the Year’s Work in South African literature in English for the Journal of Commonwealth Literature. She is on the editorial boards of English in Africa (Rhodes University) and the online journal Transnational Literature (Flinders University). As a visiting professor and associate professor she has taught courses in South African literature at University of Chicago and at Stanford University.

Staff Directory

Biography

Professor Emerita Anne Edwards AO is a sociologist who has spent her professional career in universities. Her last appointment was Vice-Chancellor of Flinders University, from 2001-2007. Her research interests included social policy, power and social inequality, women and gender issues, and ageing. She is a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia and a Fellow of the Australian Institute of Company Directors.

Since retiring from Flinders, she has taken on a variety of board positions, including the Council on the Ageing (COTA) SA, COTA Australia, the Australian Centre for Social Innovation, the Art Gallery of South Australia, and Co-Chair of the South Australian Premier’s Council for Women. She has recently been appointed as the inaugural Chair of the Board of ANROWS, the new national research centre with a focus on reducing violence against women and their children.

Biography

Andrew Hunter worked as General Manager (China Engagement) at Port Adelaide Football Club between 2015 and 2020. He holds a Master of Philosophy (Asian Studies) from The University of Adelaide. A professional athlete and national team representative in indoor volleyball, he has written over 100 opinion pieces for the Adelaide Review, InDaily, Adelaide Advertiser, Canberra Times and the Australian. Andrew and his wife Sally have two children, Theodore and Aurelien.

Biography

Emeritus Professor Nicholas Jose is a novelist, essayist and playwright, whose thirteen books include the novels Paper Nautilus, Avenue of Eternal Peace (shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award), The Custodians (shortlisted for the Commonwealth Prize) and Original Face; two short story collections; a volume of essays, Chinese Whispers; and the memoir Black Sheep. After gaining his doctorate at Oxford University, he taught in the Department of English at the ANU 1978-1985. His monograph Ideas of the Restoration in English Literature was published in 1984.

Professor Jose taught in China 1986-87, and served as Cultural Counsellor in the Australian Embassy Beijing 1987-1990. A full-time writer from 1991, he resumed his academic career as Chair of Creative Writing at Adelaide University in 2005. A past president of International PEN Sydney, he is general editor of the Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature (also published as The Literature of Australia). He was Visiting Chair of Australian Studies at Harvard University 2009-2010 and taught there again in 2011. He is Adjunct Professor with the Writing and Society Research Centre at the University of Western Sydney, Professor of Creative Writing at Bath Spa University, and Professor of English and Creative Writing in the School of Humanities at The University of Adelaide.

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Biography

Oliver Mayo was born in Adelaide in 1942. Mayo was educated at St Peter’s College and then enrolled in a BSc degree at the University of Adelaide. He completed this degree, with Honours, in 1964. Mayo then began his PhD, again at the University of Adelaide, which he completed in 1968.

In 1968 Mayo travelled to the University of Edinburgh as a CSIRO senior overseas student at the Institute of Animal Genetics (1968-9) and then a Leckie-Mactier fellow at the Department of Genetics (1969-71). Mayo came back to Australia in 1971 and joined the Biometry Section at the Waite Agricultural Research Institute as a senior lecturer (1971-8) and then reader (1979-89). In 1987 he also accepted the position of dean of the Faculty of Agricultural Science at the University of Adelaide.

Mayo made the move to Sydney in 1989 to become chief of the CSIRO Division of Animal Production, a position that he held until his retirement in 2000. Upon his retirement, Mayo was made an honorary research fellow of CSIRO Livestock Industries. More recently, Mayo completed a BA from the University of Adelaide majoring in German and Italian (2008).

Biography

Professor Anne Pender holds the Kidman Chair in Australian Studies. Anne is National Library of Australia Fellow, 2021, was Fulbright Senior Fellow at Harvard University in 2018, and is a former Australian Research Council Future Fellow 2012-2016. A Menzies Scholar to Harvard and graduate of the Australian National University, the University of New South Wales and Harvard University, Anne was Visiting Distinguished Professor in Australian Studies at the University of Copenhagen in 2011-2012 and taught Australian Literature at King’s College London in 2002-2003. Anne’s books include Seven Big Australians: Adventures with Comic Actors (2019), Players: Australian Actors on Stage, Television and Film (2016), From a Distant Shore: Australian Writers in Britain 1820-2012  (2013), One Man Show: The Stages of Barry Humphries (2010), Nick Enright: An Actor’s Playwright (2008) and Christina Stead: Satirist (2002).

Staff Directory

Biography

Professor Jennifer Rutherford was the Director of the J. M.Coetzee Centre for Creative Practice from 2015 to 2021.

Jennifer is an interdisciplinary scholar working broadly in the field of psycho-social poetics. Her works and research interests explore narrative, memory and place-making, the slowness of cultures and subjects in times of great change, the way individuals and communities dwell in and through the traumas that shape them, and the role that artists and writers play as conduits for change. Psychoanalysis informs much of what she does, as does the troubled history of colonial race-relations.

Jennifer holds undergraduate degrees in sociology and social anthropology from Newcastle and Macquarie Universities, a DEA in the Sciences of Language from the EHESS Paris, a PhD in Sociology from UNSW and she trained in psychoanalysis with the Ecole de la Cause Freudienne. She has held posts teaching literature, creative writing, cultural studies and social theory at universities including the Australian National University, the University of Melbourne and Macquarie University. Jennifer has held research fellowships at the Universities of Sydney and Macquarie and most recently served as the foundation Director of the Hawke European Union Centre for Mobilities, Migrations and Cultural Transformations at the University of South Australia.

Key critical works include The Gauche Intruder: Freud, Lacan and the White Australian Fantasy (MUP), Zombies (Routledge), Ordinary People (Documentary: Film Australia), The Poetics of Australian Space (with Barbara Holloway, UWA Press). Curated events/exhibitions include The Poetics of Australian Space (with Lisa Slater, Art Gallery of NSW), Traverses: J.M. Coetzee in the World (Kerry Packer Civic Gallery) and The Future of the Book (with Daniel Chafee, SASA Gallery). Forthcoming works include Melancholy Migrations: Journeying with the Negative (with Brian Castro, Giramondo) and Traverses: J.M. Coetzee in the World; a mobile app (with Lisa Harms). Jennifer is currently working on an Encyclopedia of Lost Things.

Staff Directory