Members

Cassandra Atherton is an is an international expert on the prose poetry form and an award-winning prose poet. She is co-author of the definitive book on the form—Prose Poetry: An Introduction (Princeton UP, 2020). Her specialization in prose poetry extends to the democratisation of poetry, focusing on poets as public intellectuals, specifically hibakusha poets. Cassandra was a Visiting Scholar in English at Harvard University sponsored by Professor Stephen Greenblatt and has been part of the Harvard University public intellectual symposia. Cassandra has authored and edited over thirty critical and creative books and has been invited to edit twelve special editions of leading refereed journals. Cassandra’s prose poetry has been widely anthologized both nationally and internationally and has been translated into Japanese, Korean and Chinese. She has been awarded the Sanlane prize, a Blanc literary award, the University of California Mary Schroeder award and has been a successful recipient of more than fifteen national and international research grants and teaching awards including, most recently, VicArts grants and Australian Council Grants for her work on atomic bomb poetry and book of poetic biographies of the elderly. She is a sought after interviewer after her widely publicized interviews with American intellectuals such as Harold Bloom, Noam Chomsky, Stephen Greenblatt, Camille Paglia, and Howard Zinn. Cassandra is commissioning editor for Westerly Magazine, Axon: Creative Explorations, and series editor for Spineless Wonders annual microliterature anthologies

N.A.J. Taylor is an Alfred Deakin Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Deakin University, and an Australian Defence Force Academy Visiting Fellow at The University of New South Wales. 

His current project approaches the Australian nuclear fuel cycle as future cultural and environmental heritage. In development are two sole-authored manuscripts that investigate the problem of nuclear harm at posthuman scales and through visual cultures, respectively. He has co-authored one book, Athens Dialogue on a Middle East WMD-free zone (European Public Law Organisation, 2013), and co-edited five major collections: “Re-imagining Hiroshima” (Critical Military Studies, 2015), “Internal Relations” (Borderlands: Culture, Politics, Law and Earth, 2017), Reimagining Hiroshima and Nagasaki (Routledge, 2017), “Reimagining Maralinga” (Unlikely: Journal for Creative Arts, 2018), and Jahnne Pasco-White: Kin (Art Ink and Unlikely, 2021).

Prior to joining Deakin, he taught for more than thirteen years across the broad interdisciplinary field of the Environmental Humanities and Social Sciences, in departments as diverse as business and earth sciences, law and ethics, and indigenous and international studies. His first major contribution to environmental theory and practice was recognised in 2007, when UniSuper—Australia’s university pension scheme—awarded him the inaugural prize for ethical and responsible investment research. He has since held research, honorary and visiting appointments at Bard College, Sciences Po, Linköping University, The University of British Columbia, La Trobe University, Roskilde University, Whitman College, The University of Queensland, and The New School, where he was an Australia Awards fellow.

For more information on his current and past projects: www.nuclearhumanities.org

Alessandro (Alex) Barilaro is a PhD student at Deakin studying the ingress of the Australian reputation as battle-hardened, expert soldiers which emanated from the First World War and defined the ANZAC myth, and by extension Australian identity.

He is a former Journalism graduate with distinction from RMIT, and his work in the media led him to be specifically interested in the construction and veracity of narratives which permeate through history. His Honours thesis dealt with the promulgation and active promotion of Australians as “super-soldiers” in the First World War, and how newspapers and histories gave Australia its first internationally promoted reputation. His PhD research examines the focal points of the early ANZAC myth and the means by which they constructed that story, from John Monash, to his often under-represented subordinate commanders, to the British commanders against whom the story of Australian supremacy was defined. Through investigation the correspondences between those commanders, Alex is seeking to illustrate the inner workings of the A.I.F. in its nation-defining crucible, and the means by which these people created an early and intrinsic part of the Australian story.

Alyson Miller is a prize-winning prose poet and academic who teaches Writing and Literature as a senior lecturer at Deakin University, Melbourne. Her critical and creative work, which focuses on a literature of extremities, has appeared in both national and international publications, including three books of prose poetry, Dream Animals (2014), Pika-Don with Cassandra Atherton (2018), and Strange Creatures (2018), as well as the critical monograph Haunted by Words: Scandalous Texts (2013), and The Unfinished Atomic Bomb: Shadows and Reflections, an edited collection with David Lowe and Cassandra Atherton (2017).

Dr Amit Sarwal is a Senior Lecturer at the University of the South Pacific and the Founding Convenor of Australia-India Interdisciplinary Research Network (AIIRN). His areas of interest include South Asian diaspora, postcolonial literature, translation, cultural diplomacy, Australia-India relations, Bollywood, and globalization of Indian dance. He has many books to his credit, prominent being: Wanderings in India (2012); Bollywood and Its Other(s) (2014); Labels and Locations (2015); Salaam Bollywood (2016); South Asian Diaspora Narratives (2016/2017); Louise Lightfoot in Search of India (2017); and Vyakul Rashtra(2017). His latest book The Dancing God: Staging Hindu Dance in Australia (Routledge, 2020) charts the sensational and historic journey of de-provincialising and popularising Hindu dance in Australia. For more information, visit Amit’s personal website.

Amy  is a senior lecturer in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Deakin University. Amy researches  the development  and  impact  of  asylum  policies  in  Australia  and  Asia,  with  a  focus  on transnational  cooperation  on  border  control. An important theme of her work is the analysis of asylum policy according to democratic norms of policymaking. She  has  a  particular  interest  in  immigration  detention:  its  history,  evolution,  diffusion, legal  status,  consistency with democratic norms, and  human  impact.

My PhD research explores public health initiatives in the Philippines between 1939 and 1954, across the turbulent period of change from the late Commonwealth (after decades of American rule), the Japanese occupation, and the years following Philippine Independence. I am interested in the role that health played in the relationship between Filipinos and the American colonial state, how the Japanese regime used health to promote Pan-Asianism, and how health informed or was utilised by various Filipino resistance and nationalist groups throughout the period, including by the Hukbalahap Rebellion in the immediate post-Independence years.

Much prior research on health and medicine in the Philippines has examined the effect of the Filipino-American War on health or the creation of the public health service in the early American period. My work, however, is interested in the branches of continuity between the end of the colonial era (after the ‘Filipinization’ of public health was well under way) and the successive waves of control and change which followed. My research is less concerned with the overall effectiveness of public health measures than it is with the role they played in the shifting debate on Filipino nationalism and the creation of a civic society, especially as allegiances to America and interests in Asia clashed. Through the use of photographic sources I hope to better understand how Filipinos – both collectively, as practitioners/bureaucrats/public, and in their many different ethnic/regional/class groups – experienced public health and medicine throughout these changes of government and foreign occupations.

My supervisors are Associate Professor Susie Protschky and Professor David Lowe, and I am working with the Decolonisation and Photography in Southeast Asia project. 

I have an MA in Colonial & Global History from Leiden University, and a BA (hons) in English & History from Goldsmiths, University of London. In my spare time I co-host The Mayday Podcast: Tales of Mystery & Misadventure, a history podcast focused on stories of exploration and disaster in global history.

A PhD student at Deakin University, Anabelle is researching Sicilian history in Australia, charting Sicilian migration and considering how Sicilian migrants and second and third generation migrants remember Australian history. This research will engage with oral histories of Sicilian migrants and their children and grandchildren living in Australia, also considering the impacts of Sicilian migration on Australia today.

Guided by Principal Supervisor, Dr Jonathan Ritchie, and Associate Supervisor, Dr Sarah Pinto, Anabelle’s research will consider how historians can reapproach Australian history by including ‘other’ voices in our national archive.

Anabelle’s Honours thesis, completed in 2023, charted the Australian perceptions of Papua New Guinea in newspaper articles before, during and after colonisation, reflecting on the relationship between colonialism and Australia’s national identity.

Andrea graduated with a PhD in Media and Communication Studies from Central Queensland University in 1997 (her dissertation looked at the Australian National Maritime Museum and situated it within emerging practices in the new museology). She has a Graduate Diploma in Museum Studies and an Honours Degree in History from the University of Sydney. She worked as a social history curator in the lead up to the opening of the Australian National Maritime Museum in Sydney and then at the National Museum of Australia.

After completing her PhD she took up a lectureship in cultural heritage at the Research Institute for Cultural Heritage at Curtin University in Perth in 1996. She was promoted to a Senior Lecturer in 2000. In 2006 she took up an appointment as an Associate Professor (Research) at Deakin University. She was promoted to Professor at the end of 2013. She is the author of Re-Imagining the Museum: Beyond the Mausoleum (Routledge, 2003) and the co-author of From the Barracks to the Burrup: The National Trust in Western Australia (University of NSW Press, 2010) with Kate Gregory.  Her edited books include South Pacific Museums: An Experiment in Culture (Monash e-press, 2006) with Chris Healy and, with Kylie Message, Museum Theory, which is volume 1 of the International Handbooks of Museum Studies co-edited by Sharon Macdonald and Helen Rees Leahy (Wiley and Sons 2015). 

Andrew Dean is Lecturer in Writing and Literature at Deakin University. His research has focused on (1) post-Second World War global metafiction, (2) colonialism and postcolonialism, and (3) comedy. Andrew’s first academic book, “Metafiction and the Postwar Novel: Foes, Ghosts, and Faces in the Water”, was published by Oxford University Press in April 2021. The book examines the origins, poetics, and capacities of self-reflexive prose fiction after World War II. It focuses on three authors: J. M. Coetzee, Janet Frame, and Philip Roth.

Andrew Singleton is Professor of Sociology and Social Research in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Deakin. His work explores the interconnections between social and religious change, with a specific focus on Australia and the Global South. Recent research has explored teen religion and spirituality, and the history and current expressions of Spiritualism in Australia (the religion that contacts the dead). A social research practitioner, Andrew incorporates survey research, ethnography, in-depth interviews, focus groups, and archival research into his work. He is particularly interested in the application of mixed methods and deals in the dark arts of statistics. Before joining Deakin in 2015, Andrew taught in the School of Social Sciences at Monash University.

Ann Vickery is Head of Writing, Literature and Culture at Deakin University. She works across the areas of feminist literary history, poetry and poetics, and modernism. She co-founded the Australasian Modernist Studies Network and was a founding member and editor-in-chief of HOW2, a pioneering online journal of innovative women’s writing and scholarship. Ann recently co-convened the “Queer Legacies, New Solidarities” conference that brought together the Australian Lesbian and Gay Archives and the Australian Women’s and Gender Studies Association for the first time. Ann has written two monographs on feminist histories, the first on the American movement of Language poetry and the second on early twentieth-century Australian poetry. She also co-authored The Intimate Archive: Journeys through Private Papers (National Library of Australia, 2009) and co-edited Poetry and the Trace (Puncher and Wattmann, 2013). She has published two poetry collections. She came to Deakin in 2009 after various postdoctoral fellowships, including a Fulbright at Temple and Yale University.

Anna is the Executive Coordinator and Project Coordinator for the Centre for Contemporary Histories.

I research international education, international development and foreign policy – with a special focus on where these three elements intersect. International development scholarships are one of those intersections and they were the subject of my PhD.

My PhD traced all the different international tertiary scholarships the Australian government has offered to Pacific Island countries (and before that colonial territories) between 1948 and 2018. It is a history of scholarships, but also a history of international education policy in Australia. Because of the timeframe and the geographic region, the thesis also shows a different side of the process of decolonisation in the Pacific, and especially in PNG.

During the course of my PhD I also looked at how international education has impacted on Australia and Australians, and the organisations and individuals who have been involved in supporting international students in Australia over the decades.

There is very little research focused on the history of Australian government scholarships, and even less focused on the Pacific. I’m excited to contribute to the development of a growing field of research.

My PhD research examines the history of marriages between Australian servicemen and Asian war brides in military occupations between 1945 and 1975. My thesis consists of three case studies: the Allied Occupation of Japan, the Malayan Emergency, and the Vietnam War.

My research is primarily concerned with how war bride marriages during occupation were controlled by military directives, defined by the public, and experienced by the couples themselves. I am also interested in the impact that these marriages, which resulted the migration of Asian women to Australia, had on immigration policy within the White Australia era. In order to answer these questions, I am engaging with a wide range of historical sources, such as archival documentation, personal photographs, and oral history accounts. In doing so, I hope to bring attention to the role intercultural marriages had in military occupations in Asia as well as on the Australian home front.

I am working in the Decolonisation and Photography in Southeast Asia Project under the supervision of Associate Professor Susie Protschky and Dr Carolyn Holbrook.

Prior to commencing my candidature at the start of 2022, I completed a Bachelor of Arts (Advanced) and a Bachelor of International Relations at the University of Adelaide. In 2020, I completed my Bachelor of Arts (Honours) at Flinders University.

Bart Ziino is Senior Lecturer in History at Deakin University, where he commenced as an Australian Research Council postdoctoral fellow in 2008, before taking on his current role in 2011.

Bart is a leading scholar of Australia and the First World War.  He has published widely on Australian experiences of 1914-18, including private sentiment surrounding the war, and various modes of remembrance and commemoration over the past century.

His doctoral thesis, the basis of his first book, A Distant Grief: Australians, War Graves and the Great War (UWA Press, 2007), received the Australian Historical Association’s Serle Award for best thesis in Australian history.  He has since published the edited collections The Heritage of War (with Martin Gegner, 2011), Remembering the First World War (2015), and Museums, History and the Intimate Experience of the Great War (with Deborah Tout-Smith and Joy Damousi, 2021).

Bart has extensive experience teaching first-year world history at Deakin, as well as units on Australia and the two World Wars, historiography and honours-level research training.  He has supervised numerous Honours, Masters and Doctoral theses.

When not engaged in the above activities, Bart is in his natural environment scouring flea markets and op shops for the detritus of past lives.  For one of his more curious and intriguing finds, click here.