Academic Freedom Symposium

Raewyn Connell is Professor Emerita at the University of Sydney and Life Member of the National Tertiary Education Union in Australia. Born in Australia, she was foundation professor of sociology at Macquarie University, Sydney 1976-91, professor of sociology at University of California Santa Cruz 1993-95, professor of education and University Professor at University of Sydney 1996-2013. She is a widely-cited researcher on gender relations, class structure, education, social justice, and the global economy of knowledge. Her books include The Good University; Southern Theory; Masculinities; Gender & Power; Making the Difference; and Ruling Class Ruling Culture. Her work has been translated into twenty-four languages; she has received the American Sociological Association’s Jessie Bernard Award and the International Sociological Association’s quadrennial Award for Excellence in Research and Practice. She has been involved in work for gender equality, in the labour movement, and in the unending struggle for peace.

Professor Peter Anderson is the Pro-Vice Chancellor (Indigenous) at the University of New England. His research spans the areas of Australian Indigenous education, educational systems, curriculum, and pedagogical interventions, as well as the intersecting relationships with Indigenous peoples both globally and domestically. A Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (UK), a Fellow of the Queensland Academy of Arts and Science and a member of the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies and a Lifelong Fellow of the Atlantic Institute at Oxford University. He also holds research advisory positions for the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, the Diversity Council of Australia, and the Australian Education Research Association.

Joseph Lo Bianco AM FAHA is Professor Emeritus at the University of Melbourne and International Secretary of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. Prior to this he was Chief Executive of Language Australia Ltd: the National Languages and Literacy Institute, of which he was the founder. He is a specialist in multilingual policy and social conflict/cohesion and has been commissioned to advise on language policy and literacy planning in South Africa, Hawai’i, Italy, New Zealand, Myanmar, Thailand, Malaysia, Samoa and other Pacific Island countries, Sri Lanka, Ireland, Scotland and Slovenia. He was a member of the Australian National Commission for UNESCO for 10 years and he previously served as Academy President from 2009–2011. He researches and advises on language and literacy policy, intercultural education and peacebuilding and language rights for minority populations in conflict affected settings in SE Asia. Recent major publications include, Helal and Lo Bianco (2025) Language politics in Tunisia: A study of language ideological debates; Lo Bianco, Loh and Shum (eds) (2024) Supporting Learners of Chinese as a Second Language: Implications for language education policy; Lo Bianco, Lundberg and Spolsky (eds) (in press) Language Policy and Planning; State of Research and Future Directions; Lo Bianco (2025) What Kind of Linguistics is Language Policy and Language Planning? Contemporary Linguistics, Bradley et al and; Wijesekera and Lo Bianco (in press) Sri Lankan Lessons: Language Policy and Education in Post-conflict Sri Lanka.

Yujie Zhu is Associate Professor at the Centre for Heritage and Museum Studies at the Australian National University, and an internationally recognised scholar of heritage, memory studies, and transnational cultural politics. Trained in anthropology (PhD, Heidelberg University), his research critically examines how heritage is governed, remembered, and mobilised across borders—particularly in relation to reconciliation, cultural diplomacy, and state–society relations. Dr Zhu has led major international collaborations funded by the Australian Research Council (ARC), UNESCO, the German Research Foundation (DFG), the European Union, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Australian Academy of the Humanities. His work addresses the intersections of cultural governance and public engagement, with a strong emphasis on how museums and memory institutions navigate contested histories. The author and editor of nine books, including Heritage, Conflict, and Peace-Building (2024), Dr Zhu’s research has shaped international debates on heritage, tourism, and the politics of knowledge production. He has held leadership roles including Vice-President of the Association of Critical Heritage Studies and expert member of the ICOMOS Intangible Cultural Heritage Committee, contributing to global heritage policy-making and advancing ethical, reflexive scholarship in politically sensitive contexts.

Michelle Arrow FASSA, FRHistS is professor of history at Macquarie University and. The current president of the Australian Historical Association. She is the author of several books, including The Seventies: The Personal, the Political and the Making of Modern Australia (2019), which was awarded the 2020 Ernest Scott Prize for history. Michelle is a regular media commentator on history and its place in contemporary life (including Great Australian Stuff, ABC 2022 and The Untold History of Australia, SBS 2025), and her writing has been published in the Sydney Morning Herald, The Saturday Paper, Crikey, and The Conversation, among others. Her most recent book is Personal Politics: Sexuality, Gender and the Remaking of Citizenship in Australia, co-authored with Leigh Boucher, Barbara Baird and Robert Reynolds (Monash University Publishing, 2024). Michelle is currently working on a biography of the Australian writer and broadcaster Anne Deveson.

Dr Yves Rees (they/them) is a writer and historian based on unceded Wurundjeri land. They are Senior Lecturer in History at La Trobe University, the co-host of Archive Fever podcast, and co-editor of the journal History Australia. Rees is the author of Travelling to Tomorrow: the modern women who sparked Australia’s romance with America (NewSouth, 2024) and All About Yves: Notes from a Transition (Allen & Unwin, 2021), and co-editor of Nothing to Hide: Voices of Trans and Gender Diverse Australia (Allen & Unwin, 2022) and Transnationalism, Nationalism and Australian History (Palgrave, 2017). Rees has been awarded the Serle Award, the Calibre Essay Prize, a Varuna Residential Fellowship, and they are the 2025 KSP Writers’ Centre Emerging Writer-in-Residence. They have published across Australian gender, transnational and economic history, and are currently working on a history of Australian drag. Their essays and criticism have been published in the Guardian, The Age, Sydney Review of Books, Australian Book Review, Meanjin, Griffith Review, Crikey and Overland.

Professor James Arvanitakis is the Director of the Forrest Research Foundation based at the University of Western Australia and brings together the five Western Australian universities to attract world class research to the state and confront the world’s grand challenges. He is an award-winning educator, cultural researcher, and media commentator with 20-years of experience in the higher education sector having also had successful careers in finance and the not-for profit sector. As an educator and researcher, James was the driving force behind several innovative programs at Western Sydney University (WSU) including The Academy which received the Australian Financial Review’s Excellence in Education Award.

James is a Fulbright alumnus, having spent 12 months at the University of Wyoming as the Milward L Simpson Fellow. In 2021, he was appointed the inaugural Patron of Diversity Arts Australia in recognition of his commitment to promoting a cultural sector that reflects the rich diversity of Australia. In 2022 he founded Respectful Disagreements, a brave spaces project that promotes the lost art of civility in political disagreement as well as the educational power of discomfort. He sits on several boards including the Perth Festival and the Western Australian Government’s Science and Technology Advisory Council.

Sean Turnell has been a senior analyst at the Reserve Bank of Australia, a Professor of Economics at Macquarie University, a consultant to a range of international institutions, and is currently a Senior Fellow at the Lowy Institute in Sydney. From 2016 to 2021 he served as economic adviser to Myanmar’s democratic government. Following the military coup that took place in Myanmar in February 2021, Sean was imprisoned alongside Myanmar’s democratic leadership. After 650 days of incarceration and severe ill-treatment, he was finally released in November 2022. Sean has written extensively on macroeconomic policymaking, economic reform, and the role of financial institutions in economic development, with a special focus on Australia, Myanmar, and the Indo-Pacific. His book on Myanmar’s monetary and financial history, Fiery Dragons, was published in 2009. In 2023 Penguin published Sean’s book on his experience of being a captive in Myanmar, An Unlikely Prisoner. His new book on economic reform in Myanmar, The Best Laid Plans, has also just been published by Penguin and the Lowy Institute.

Professor Peter Greste is an Australian-born journalist, author, media freedom activist and academic at Macquarie University. Before joining academia in 2018, he spent 25 years as a foreign correspondent, starting with the civil war in Yugoslavia and elections in South Africa. He joined the BBC as its Afghanistan correspondent in 1995 and went on to cover Latin America, the Middle East and Africa where he moved to Al Jazeera.

He hit the headlines himself in December 2013, when he and two colleagues were arrested in Cairo on terrorism charges. They were convicted and sentenced to seven years in a case widely condemned as an attack on press freedom.  Under enormous pressure, Egypt released Peter and he went on to become a champion of press freedom around the world. His stance has earned him numerous awards, including the Australian Human Rights Commission Medal, the RSL’s 2016 ANZAC Peace Prize, and Australian Press Council’s 2018 Press Freedom award.

His book, The Correspondent, is an updated version of The First Casualty, originally published in 2017 exploring his time in prison and the wider ‘war on journalism’. It has been re-released to coincide with a major movie about his Egypt experience, starring Richard Roxburgh.

Adrienne Stone FASSA FAAL is Melbourne Laureate Professor and Director of the Centre for Comparative Constitutional Studies at Melbourne Law School.  Her academic expertise lies in constitutional law and theory, freedom of speech and academic freedom. She has recently published, ‘More than Rulebook: Identity and the Australian Constitution’, originally delivered as the High Court Lecture in 2022. Among her other works are the Oxford Handbook on the Australian Constitution (2018)(co-edited with Cheryl Saunders), the Oxford Handbook on Freedom of Speech (2021)(co-edited with Frederick Schauer) and Open Minds: Academic Freedom and Freedom of Speech (2021)(co-authored with Carolyn Evans).

Stephen Garton became a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities in 2000 and was elected the Academy’s 20th President in November 2023. 

An eminent historian, Stephen’s research expertise is in Australian history. He has also published in the fields of American and British History. His major books provide thought provoking insights into areas including the history of medicine, particularly psychiatry, social welfare, war veterans and the aftermath of war, sexuality and the history of higher education.

Stephen has also had a long career in university administration, serving as Dean of Arts, Provost and Senior Deputy Vice-Chancellor, and as interim Vice-Chancellor, at the University of Sydney. He was appointed a Member of the Order of Australia for significant service to tertiary education administration and to history.

Mark Edele is the inaugural Hansen Professor in History at the University of Melbourne. He is a historian of the Soviet Union and its successor states, in particular Russia and one of the editors of Elements in Soviet and Post-Soviet History (Cambridge University Press). He was trained as a historian at the Universities of Erlangen, Tübingen, Moscow and Chicago. His publications include Soviet Veterans of the Second World War (2008), Stalinist Society (2011), Stalin’s Defectors (2017), The Soviet Union. A Short History (2019), Debates on Stalinism (2020); The Politics of Veteran Benefits in the Twentieth Century. A Comparative History, with Martin Crotty and Neil Diamant (2020); Stalinism at War. The Soviet Union in World War II (2021); and Russia’s War against Ukraine. The Whole Story (2023, revised edition forthcoming 2026). A former ARC Future Fellow, he has served in a variety of leadership positions at the University of Melbourne, including Deputy Dean and Deputy Head of the School. He teaches the histories of the Soviet Union, of the Second World War, and of dictatorship and democracy in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He is currently working on a history of KGB prosecutions, 1954-1985.

Biography pending