Management Committee

Biography

A novelist and literary critic as well as a translator, Professor J. M. Coetzee has won many awards throughout his career. His novel Waiting for the Barbarians was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, and he is three-times winner of the CNA Prize. Age of Iron was awarded the Sunday Express Book of the Year award, and The Master of Petersburg was awarded the Irish Times International Fiction Prize in 1995. He has also won the French Prix Femina Étranger, the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, and the 1987 Jerusalem Prize for the Freedom of the Individual in Society. He was the first author to be awarded the Booker Prize twice: for Life & Times of Michael K (1983) and for Disgrace (1999).

In 2003 Coetzee received the Nobel Prize in Literature, and in 2005 was awarded the Order of Mapungubwe (gold class) by the South African government for his 'exceptional contribution in the field of literature and for putting South Africa on the world stage.' J.M. Coetzee is a Professor of Literature at the University of Adelaide.

Publications Staff Directory

Biography

Luke Harrald is a composer, performer and media artist. He holds a PhD in Composition from Elder Conservatorium of Music, and he completed his undergraduate studies at Flinders Street School of Music.

Technology is central to Luke's research, which often explores and critiques the ways we interact with digital media and how we might both develop, and engage with technology that is able to exhibit aspects of free will. Through his PhD research, Luke developed an interactive Artificial Intelligence system called ENSEMBLE, which mimics some of the conscious and unconscious strategies of musical improvisers using Game Theory.

A specialist in interdisciplinary collaboration, Luke has most recently been in demand as an installation artist. He has a reputation for creating immersive site-specific works that combine activism, community engagement, heritage interpretation and sound-art. In recognition of this work, in 2013 he was part of a team that won two national APRA Art Music Awards for Excellence in Experimental Music and Excellence in a Regional Area.

Publications & compositions Staff Directory

Biography

Dr Aaron Humphrey is a researcher at the University of Adelaide and teaches in the department of media. His research combines critical analysis with creative practice to investigate the relationships between images and texts, and between media and society. He was recently awarded the Dean’s Commendation for Thesis Excellence for his doctoral dissertation about comics and pedagogy.

His academic writing has been published in Media International Australia, Composition Studies, Digital Humanities Quarterly, The Comics Grid and The Conversation. As a cartoonist, his comics are currently used in digital rhetoric courses and for postgraduate medical education. As a filmmaker, his short films have screened in festivals in Australasia and North America.

His current research projects include the use of comics and “graphic medicine” for medical education, visual discourse about asylum seekers within Australia and the historical development of emoji.

He is a co-founder and co-organiser of ‘Inkers and Thinkers,’ Australasia’s annual academic conference devoted to comics and graphic narratives.

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

Meg Samuelson has recently joined the Department of English and Creative Writing at the University of Adelaide as an associate professor, and was previously associate professor at the University of Cape Town and, before that, Stellenbosch University, where she is now a research associate. She has published widely on southern and eastern African and Indian Ocean literatures, film and photography, including the book Remembering the Nation, Dismembering Women? Stories of the South African Transition. Her current book projects in progress include the provisionally titled South African Literatures: Land, Sea, City; Amphibian Aesthetics: Writing from the African Indian Ocean Littoral; and, with Pamila Gupta, Photographic Culture in Zanzibar, 1868-2018. Her other and related research interests include the beach, the “blue southern hemisphere”, debates on the praxis of literary scholarship and Anthropocene thought.

Staff Directory

Patrick Flanery is Chair of Creative Writing at the University of Adelaide and Professor Extraordinary at the University of Stellenbosch. Prior to joining Adelaide, he was Professor at the University of Reading, and subsequently Professor and Director of the Creative Writing Pathway at Queen Mary University of London. He holds a BFA in Film and Television Production from New York University's Tisch School of the Arts and a DPhil in Twentieth-Century English Literature from the University of Oxford. Patrick is the author of the novels Night for Day (Atlantic, 2019), I Am No One (Atlantic, 2016), Fallen Land (Atlantic, 2013) and Absolution (Atlantic, 2012), which was shortlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and the Royal Society of Literature’s Ondaatje Prize, amongst others. In 2019 he published a volume of creative nonfiction, The Ginger Child: On Family, Loss and Adoption (Atlantic). He has also published scholarly work in the fields of Film Studies and Book History. His creative work has been supported by fellowships at MacDowell, the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center, the Santa Maddalena Foundation, and the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study. 

Publications Staff Directory

Andrew van der Vlies is Professor in the Department of English, Creative Writing and Film at the University of Adelaide. Born and raised in South Africa, he is a graduate of Rhodes University in Makhanda (Grahamstown) and the University of Oxford, where he was a Commonwealth Scholar. Andrew has published widely on South African literatures, visual cultures, gender studies, and print cultures. He is the author of the monographs South African Textual Cultures (Manchester, 2007) and Present Imperfect: Contemporary South African Writing (Oxford, 2017), and editor of Print, Text, and Book Cultures in South Africa (Wits, 2012), Zoë Wicomb’s Race, Nation, and Translation: South African Essays (Yale, 2018), and South African Writing in Transition (Bloomsbury, 2019, with Rita Barnard). He is currently co-editing the Bloomsbury Handbook to J. M. Coetzee and a collection on Olive Schreiner’s literary influences and afterlives and preparing a scholarly edition of Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm. As a translator, he has published versions in English of work by the Afrikaans-language poet Sheila Cussons in Asymptote, The Denver Quarterly, and Modern Poetry in Translation. Andrew taught previously at the University of Sheffield and Queen Mary University of London. He has a research affiliation with the University of the Western Cape, where he is an Extraordinary Professor. He has held fellowships and grants from the British Academy and Leverhulme Trust in the UK, the Harry Ransom Research Center in the US, and the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study in South Africa. Andrew is currently co-investigator on a British Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) funded project on literary modernisms in South Africa. 

Publications Staff Directory