2025 AGM Documents
Australian Academy of the Humanities 2025-10-29
The 2025 Annual General Meeting will take place on Wednesday 19 November from 12:30-2:00pm AEDT.
To attend and vote you must register at least 24 hours prior to the meeting for your name to be included in the voting list.
Please click on the links below to access the applicable document. Fellows are reminded that all documents are confidential and not to be shared outside the Fellowship.
Elections for Fellows
We have 27 Fellow candidates, 2 Honorary Fellow candidates, and 1 Corresponding Fellow candidates in 2025. To view citations, please click on the names below:
Fellows
Dr Mark Allon is one of the world’s leading authorities on early Buddhist languages and literatures. His pioneering work on Gandharan manuscripts and Pāli textual traditions has set the standard for the field internationally, and his groundbreaking work on style in Indian Buddhist literature is widely influential. His innovative use of dating techniques for ancient texts has been recognised by several scientific awards, and he has established Australia’s premier program in Buddhist Studies at the University of Sydney.
Tomoko Aoyama is internationally recognised as Australia’s leading authority on contemporary Japanese literature. Her award-winning scholarship has enriched global appreciation of Japanese literature and philosophy through extensive critical studies and major book-length translations. Aoyama’s critical research explores girlhood, childhood, gender, satire, humour and food cultures across diverse genres. Her translations from Japanese are marked by deep scholarly knowledge, rich linguistic skills and a cross-cultural literary sensibility. Her current research on women-centred humour in aging societies tackles the major demographic and social challenges facing East Asia. She is among the world’s top translators of Japanese literary and scholarly texts.
Associate Professor Debbie Bargallie is a Kamilaroi and Wonnarua scholar internationally recognised for her groundbreaking work on systemic racism, Indigenous identity, and workplace equity. Her award-winning monograph, Unmasking the Racial Contract (2020), is the first Indigenist critical race analysis of the Australian Public Service. With a background in executive leadership and public policy, she now leads research at Griffith University focused on racial literacy, Indigenous methodologies, and global solidarities through her innovative research on transnational family histories and intergenerational storywork. Her work is globally influential, with engagements including UNESCO and cultural diplomacy in Pakistan. Bargallie’s scholarship centres Indigenous voices and challenges the structures that uphold racial inequity.
Professor Biddle is a leading figure in visual culture studies, feminist cultural theory, and Indigenous art and cultural studies. She is the author of two major works exploring the contributions of Indigenous women artists to contemporary Indigenous visual culture, as well as numerous publications in the leading journals in her fields. Her accomplishments include her appointment to the 2020-21 Gough Whitlam and Malcom Fraser Chair in Australian Studies at Harvard University, and an ARC Future Fellowship. Her record of interdisciplinary innovation and engagement contribute substantially to the ongoing development of connections between the Communication and Cultural Studies disciplines and Indigenous Studies.
Professor Gawaian Bodkin-Andrews is a leading D’harawal scholar whose research spans Indigenous knowledges and storywork, data sovereignty, environmental justice, and racial equity. As Director of Indigenous Research at Western Sydney University, he leads nationally significant ARC projects and has published widely across the humanities and social sciences. A founding member of Maiam nayri Wingara, he has shaped national policy on Indigenous governance and education. His work centres D’harawal epistemologies, privileges Indigenous standpoints, and advances truth-telling and relational accountability. Recognised for his academic leadership and ethical scholarship, he is a transformative figure in the Australian humanities.
In the past decade Professor Matthew Crawford has produced an outstanding body of work that marks him as one of Australia’s leading emerging scholars in early Christian studies and the interaction of Christianity with other late ancient streams of thought. His research, focusing on writers such as Cyril of Alexandria, Eusebius and the Emperor Julian, offers new perspectives on intellectual, societal and material issues and conflicts during the crucial transitional period of the third to fifth centuries. His international research profile was recognised by the award of a Von Humboldt Fellowship for Experienced Researchers at the University of Tübingen in 2025.
Caillan Davenport received his DPhil in Ancient History from the University of Oxford in 2009. After holding continuing positions at the University of Queensland and Macquarie University (2012-2021), he took up a position as Associate Professor at the Australian National University, where he was promoted to full Professor from January 2025. He is author of two substantial monographs and co-editor of four volumes. His prize-winning monograph with Cambridge University Press represents the first comprehensive history of the Roman equestrian order from earliest times through to late Antiquity. His other publications significantly advanced scholarship on the history and representation of the Roman imperial world.
Professor Katie Ellis is a world-leading scholar of disability, media, and popular culture.
Her research has made foundational contributions to our understanding of disability representation, accessibility, inclusion and human rights in social and cultural life. In a signature move, Ellis’ work foregrounds the voices and experiences of people with disability via new concepts, methods, and innovative collaborations.
A noted leader in capacity building and mentoring for emerging researchers, her work has laid the foundations for disability media research to take its place as a field in its own right—and as an indispensable element in the wider domain of communication, and cultural studies.
Professor Rachel Fensham is a leading international scholar in dance and performance studies, paving the way for new and detailed understandings of the inter-relationship of theatre, dance and movement. Her scholarship considers how movement transforms the meaning of bodies and how these are received by audiences, probing questions of affect, corporeality and power in both the production and reception of creative works. A focus on the politics of performance and representation characterises her many books, articles and book chapters. Her substantial grant-record outcomes engage both academic and general audiences on topics ranging from community arts to public health.
Alice Gaby’s outstanding accomplishments in the comparative analysis of language, culture, and mind have focused on Australian First Nations languages, especially the Kuuk Thaayorre language of the western coast of Cape York. Her analysis of previously undescribed linguistic and cultural phenomena contribute crucial data to the permanent scientific record. She continues to advance theoretical understandings of the relations between language and fundamental categories of perception and experience, including space and time. Alice’s work is heavily focused on advancing ethical approaches to research on the languages and cultures of Indigenous groups, supporting and developing genuine community-engagement in language and culture research.
Professor Debjani Ganguly is a major scholar of modern and contemporary literature, as well as an expert in the field of world literature. Her monographs include This Thing Called the World: The Contemporary Novel as Global Form (Duke University Press, 2016) and Caste, Colonialism and Counter-Modernity (Routledge, 2005), and she has edited (in two volumes) The Cambridge History of World Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2021). She is author of numerous articles and chapters in prestigious journals and other publications, and a third monograph, Catastrophic Modes and Planetary Realism, is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press. She is one of two Series Editors of the monograph series, Cambridge Studies in World Literature. In 2025, Professor Ganguly was appointed Director of the Harvard Institute for World Literature.
Martin Gibbs is Professor of Australian Archaeology at UNE. He works principally in Australasian-Pacific historical and maritime archaeology but has also worked and published in Australasian-Pacific prehistory and ethnohistory. He is an expert in archaeological remote sensing and visualisation and has an expanding presence in the digital humanities. It is this breadth of interests that is original and distinctive in Martin’s work, as it allows him to bring theoretical concepts and technical approaches from one field of inquiry and expertise to cross-fertilise others. In particular, he has focussed on developing strong collaborations between historians and archaeologists via multi-disciplinary projects, blending methods from both discipline areas and the digital humanities.
Associate Professor Natalie Harkin is an award-winning Narungga poet and scholar from South Australia. She is internationally recognised for her poetry and performance. Her research on the history of Aboriginal domestic servants and her own family history informed the development of her innovative and influential archival-poetics approach. This methodology recognises the fraught nature of colonial archives as repositories of the ‘traumatic, contested and buried episodes of history that inevitably return to haunt’ (Harkin, ‘Weaving Blankets of Story and Hearts of Gold’, 2021), and uses creative practice to give new meanings to the colonial records in restorative acts of re-remembering.
Ian Hesketh is Associate Professor of History in the School of Historical and Philosophical Inquiry, University of Queensland. He is a leader internationally in the field of nineteenth–century historiography and history of ideas, working at the intersections of science, religion, book and periodical publishing, and popular culture, with particular reference to the history and historiography of evolutionary theory. Dr. Hesketh has published four books, six edited or co-edited collections, and numerous peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters. He is a Member of the National Committee for History and Philosophy of Science, Australian Academy of Science.
Anna Johnston is an outstanding literary historian with an international reputation for her innovative, cross disciplinary contributions to colonial and postcolonial studies. Her many first-rate publications combine the insights of critical theory with the rigour of archival research, resulting in radical re-readings of colonial texts and episodes in cultural history. Her studies of missionary writing and travel writing, with a primary focus on Australia, also include the Pacific islands and India, and contribute to both Victorian studies and the new imperial history. She has also won many grants, including two prestigious ARC research fellowships.
Professor Cheryl Kickett-Tucker AM is a proud Aboriginal Western Australian and Wadjuk traditional owner and custodian of Balladong and Yued country. She is the First Nations Education Chair in the Faculty of Humanities, Curtin University. She is a prolific Aboriginal researcher and children’s book author whose publications have significantly influenced understanding of Australia’s Aboriginal schooling, community development and children’s wellbeing. Kickett-Tucker grew up in Perth and her writing offers nuanced perspectives of Aboriginal identity, self-esteem, and the well-being of Aboriginal children and young people people’s experience, and how social constructions of power and identity influence community and family dynamics. In 2020, Dr. Kickett-Tucker was appointed a Member of the Order of Australia (AM) for her significant service to tertiary education and the Indigenous community.
Professor Mark Ledbury is internationally recognised for scholarship in art and theatre histories. He has published extensively on the significant late 18th-early 19th century French artists François Boucher, Jean-Baptiste Greuze and Jacques-Louis David, on inter-arts networks, and on the methods of art history. In his 15 years as Power Professor of Art History and Visual Culture and Director of the Power Institute, University of Sydney, he has built the Power Institute into a vibrant, purposeful, public-facing foundation for cross-disciplinary research, scholarly publication and public event-programming. He combines inspiring leadership, innovative teaching and community outreach with assiduous commitment to archivally informed scholarship.
Ramon Lobato is a prominent figure in a wave of scholarship taking communication and media studies into new terrain, exploring emergent platforms, markets and infrastructures across national and regional geographies. Lobato has a global reputation for the originality of his research, his collaborative and generous scholarship, and his lucid and engaging books. Beyond academe, his work has informed and influenced industry, consumer organisations and policy makers. He exemplifies the best of contemporary scholarship in cultural and communication studies: global in reach and purview, locally engaged and influential, and fluent in integrating cultural, social, historical, technological, policy and regulatory perspectives.
Susan Luckman is an internationally influential ethnographer of creativity and cultural work. Her ground-breaking scholarship has provided a distinctive account of the widespread surge of interest in craft and handmade culture as it both responds to and makes use of digital technologies. Her richly textured, forward-looking studies into the rise of female-dominated creative enterprise and platform economies have powerfully illuminated the gendered experience of creative precarity. Widely published and sought-after as a keynote speaker, Professor Luckman is an inspiring contributor to scholarly communities and institutions, and an energetic contributor to public culture.
Christopher Marshall is a prolific researcher of Italian Baroque Art and contemporary museology. He specialises in socio-economic questions of art, as well as contemporary viewing strategies. He studies the nature and conditions of seventeenth-century art markets, notably Neapolitan art, and recently has published a leading work on the now famed artist Artemisia Gentileschi. His focus is the artist: as intermediary, as dealer, their workshop practices, notions of artistic ‘worth’, and ‘technical art history’. Work on inter- and post-war British and Australian art connects museums, sculpture, and public art to wider understandings of shared but contested artistic cultures.
Tamson Pietsch is an internationally renowned scholar of the global history and politics of knowledge and its production. Her contributions to the history of higher education have established the importance of universities to imperial and international history and moved the field beyond its traditional emphasis on individual institutions and the nation-building project. She has also created new resources for understanding the social and material production of knowledge, including new archival databases and new tools for more equitable contributions to Wikipedia, and played a leading role in pushing Universities to play a role as homes of public meaning-making.
Philip Piper is a Professor in Archaeology at ANU. He has over 35 years of experience working on numerous archaeological excavations in Europe, Southeast Asia and Australia. He is a specialist in Southeast Asian vertebrate zooarchaeology, focusing on human-animal interactions. He has applied original and distinctive methodological frameworks to investigate economic, technological, and ideological change in the hunter-gatherer archaeological record of Southeast Asia from the Late Pleistocene to mid-Holocene. His recent research has concentrated on building chronologies for the emergence of sedentary lifeways, the arrival of cereal agriculture and animal management, social and cultural divergence, and the development of early trading networks in Mainland Southeast Asia.
Professor Gillian Russell works on foundational questions in philosophical logic. In particular, she has worked on questions about logical consequence–arguably, the most fundamental concept in the field of logic–and about the distinction between analytic and synthetic truths (roughly, truth in virtue of meaning alone, and truth at least in part in virtue of how the world is). In the middle of the twentieth century, the American philosopher W. V. O. Quine argued that there is no defensible way to make out the distinction between analytic and synthetic truths, and, for decades afterwards, many philosophers were persuaded that this is so. But Professor Russell’s work makes a very strong case for the claim that Quine was simply mistaken about the analytic/synthetic distinction. In the eighteenth century, Hume argued that there is no way to derive ‘ought’ from ‘is’; this view has been controversial ever since. However, Professor Russell’s work makes the most comprehensive and powerful extant case that Hume was right.
Professor Gaye Sculthorpe is a Palawa woman from Tasmania and a Research Professor in Cultural Heritage and Museum Studies in the Alfred Deakin Institute of Citizenship and Globalisation, Deakin University. She has previously worked at a number of local, regional and national museums, including her tenure as curator and head of section, Oceania, at the British Museum (2013-2022). Professor Sculthorpe is internationally renowned for her ground-breaking research on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultural materials held in British and European museums and the ongoing legacies of colonial collecting practices.
Katerina Teaiwa is Professor of Pacific Studies at the Australian National University and author of the landmark book on phosphate mining in the Pacific, Consuming Ocean Island (2015). An interdisciplinary scholar and artist of Banaban, I-Kiribati and African American heritage, Teaiwa has also presented her research via visual and performance media in her globally acclaimed exhibition, Project Banaba (2017—). She has been a powerful advocate for not only Pacific history, but also the Pacific arts and the Pacific environment, consulting for UNESCO, the EU, DFAT, and the NZ government. Teaiwa is Editor of the leading journal for Pacific humanities, The Contemporary Pacific.
Paul Turnbull is the pre-eminent historian of European scientific curiosity, collecting, and repatriation of Indigenous Australian Ancestral bodily remains. His regionally focused research has made major contributions to the global history of the human sciences, intellectual history, and the history of anthropology in colonial contexts. For over thirty years, he has pursued applied research assisting Indigenous Australians to repatriate their Ancestors held in museum collections. As Australia’s first professor of e-history he has achieved an international reputation as an innovator in creating freely accessible, research-based online resources.
Andrekos Varnava, Professor of Imperial and Colonial History at Flinders University and the new editor of the British-based Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History,, is an internationally recognized scholar of the history of the modern British empire and the pre-eminent specialist of the history of Cyprus under British rule. He has analysed British imperialism on the island, the role of Cyprus during the First World War, Cyprus’ key geopolitical position in the Mediterranean and the Middle East in the mid-1900s and the fraught decolonization of the country. Prof. Varnava’s research has encompassed studies of the theme of utopia in colonialism, cartoons as a form of colonial and wartime propaganda, the significance of the years immediately following the First World War in shaping the twentieth century, and the topic of migration and diaspora, including the migration of Cypriots to Australia. He has also published important work on the Armenian genocide and the Armenian legion.
Honorary Fellows
Dr Terri Janke is a trailblazer in Indigenous Intellectual Property Rights and leader in First Nations recognition, engagement and advancement in Australia’s national institutions, including in the museums sector and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
Dr. Meredith Lake is a celebrated public historian, scholar, and broadcaster specializing in Australian religious history.
Lake’s scholarship examines the intersection of religion, colonialism, and the Australian envionment. Her acclaimed book “The Bible in Australia: A Cultural History” (2020) won multiple prestigious awards including the 2019 Prime Minister’s Literary Awards Australian History Prize and NSW Premier’s History Award. Lake has hosted ABC’s ‘Soul Search’ podcast since 2019.
Corresponding Fellows
Elleke Boehmer, BA (Hons), MPhil (Oxon), DPhil (Oxon), FRSL FRHistS FEA, is Professor of World Literature in English in the English Faculty, University of Oxford. She is the Director of the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing (OCLW) and Professorial Governing Body Fellow at Wolfson College. Elleke Boehmer is a founding figure in the field of colonial and postcolonial literary studies, and internationally known for her research in the anglophone literatures of empire and anti-empire. Her writing straddles a range of forms and genres, including cultural history, fiction, criticism, and life-writing. She is a Fellow of the Royal Literary Society and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. She holds an Honorary Doctorate from Linnaeus University, Sweden.
In 2020-21, Elleke Boehmer is a British Academy Senior Research Fellow working on Southern Imagining, a major literary and cultural history about perceptions of the southern hemisphere. The study interweaves Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Herman Melville alongside J.M. Coetzee, Benito Lynch, Zakes Mda, and Alexis Wright, among many other southern writers.
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