Abstract: In recent years, I have had the opportunity to lead and participate in cross-disciplinary projects that bring together researchers from the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences to address global challenges in food, health, and sustainability. In this talk, I will reflect on my own experience of working with colleagues across fields such as environmental science, linguistics, aquaculture, nutrition, computer science, and political ecology in a project on aquatic food perceptions in Vietnam. Leading such a diverse team taught me the importance of building trust, negotiating different disciplinary languages, and creating a shared framework where cultural perspectives are valued alongside quantitative evidence. Through this process, I came to appreciate how humanities-led approaches can illuminate aspects of food, identity, and […]

Abstract: Fire is a major determinant for life in Australia. The seasonal and spasmodic quality of Australian rain and the hot dry air masses that form in the central arid regions provide the conditions for bushfires in the dry months. Australian literature reflects the recurrence of fire in various ways, most obviously in providing narratives with their moment of extremity and climax.   As a limit moment within the Australian settler imaginary, fire has always signified a certain terrifying terminus in its literary representations. But this quality has varied with time and Australian literature captures these qualitative changes. In the early settler literature, fire represented the terrible return of Australian strangeness, which had been violently pushed away by the settler […]

Abstract: Over the past forty years literary studies have not been very kind to the idea of aesthetic autonomy. As our field moved away from its formalist roots in order to focus on literature’s social and ideological entanglements, it has also grown deeply suspicious of claims to aesthetic detachment in their many guises, from Kantian disinterestedness to Oscar Wilde’s celebration of the aesthetic as a sphere outside the reach of moral judgment, and further to the New Critical understanding of the literary text as a self-contained object. More often than not, such claims are seen as distracting or disingenuous, an expression of a certain kind of Western bourgeois habitus that aim to obfuscate the relationship between the aesthetic and the […]