IAFOR > CITY > Speakers

Speakers

The IAFOR International Conference on the City 2017 (CITY2017) is a multidisciplinary conference held concurrently with The IAFOR International Conference on Global Studies 2017 (Global2017). Keynote, Featured and Spotlight Speakers will provide a variety of perspectives from different academic and professional backgrounds. Registration for either conference will allow participants to attend sessions in both.

This page provides information about presenters. For details of presentations and other programming, please visit the Programme page.

  • Dr Simon Sleight
    Dr Simon Sleight
    King's College London, UK
  • Dean Adrien Katherine Wing
    Dean Adrien Katherine Wing
    University of Iowa College of Law, USA
  • Gloria Montero
    Gloria Montero
    Novelist, Playwright & Poet
  • Professor Mark Jonathan Harris
    Professor Mark Jonathan Harris
    Director, Producer & Writer | University of Southern California, USA
  • Professor Svetlana Ter-Minasova
    Professor Svetlana Ter-Minasova
    Lomonosov Moscow State University, Russia
  • Dr A. Robert Lee
    Dr A. Robert Lee
    Nihon University, Japan (retd.)
  • Peter Sotirakis
    Peter Sotirakis
    Writer, Translator & Independent Scholar
  • John Rochlin
    John Rochlin
    Australia Spain Business Association (ASBA), Spain
  • Dr Elena Urdaneta
    Dr Elena Urdaneta
    Basque Culinary Center, Spain
  • Iñigo Cojo
    Iñigo Cojo
    Basque Culinary Center, Spain
  • Dr Francesc Llauradó
    Dr Francesc Llauradó
    Nufarm Germany, Germany
  • Professor Georges Depeyrot
    Professor Georges Depeyrot
    French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), France
  • Dr Ljiljana Markovic
    Dr Ljiljana Markovic
    University of Belgrade, Serbia
  • Professor Emerita Sue Ballyn
    Professor Emerita Sue Ballyn
    Barcelona University, Spain
  • Dr Bill Phillips
    Dr Bill Phillips
    University of Barcelona, Spain
  • Professor Donald E. Hall
    Professor Donald E. Hall
    Lehigh University, USA
  • Dr Cornelis Martin Renes
    Dr Cornelis Martin Renes
    University of Barcelona, Spain
  • Professor Baden Offord
    Professor Baden Offord
    Centre for Human Rights Education, Curtin University, Australia & Cultural Studies Association of Australasia
  • Dr Richard Donovan
    Dr Richard Donovan
    Kansai University, Japan
Dr Simon Sleight
King's College London, UK

Biography

Dr Simon Sleight is Senior Lecturer in Australian History at King's College London, Co-founding Director of the Children's History Society and Deputy Director of the Menzies Centre for Australian Studies in London, UK. His work explores the history of urban place-making, the evolution of youth cultures and the Australian presence in Britain. He received his tertiary education at Warwick, University College London and Monash University in Melbourne, where his doctoral thesis won the Serle Award for the best PhD in Australian history. His latest books are Young People and the Shaping of Public Space in Melbourne, 1870-1914 (Routledge, 2013) and, co-edited with Shirleene Robinson, Children, Childhood and Youth in the British World (Palgrave, 2016). He has also published on street gangs, processions, the representation of working childhoods, expatriate experience and the morphology of cities. His most recent publications feature in the edited collection Spatial Cultures: Towards a New Social Morphology of Cities Past and Present (2016) and Walking Histories, 1800-1914. A current co-edited textbook project will be titled History, Memory and Public Life: The Past in the Present, scheduled for publication in 2017. At King's College London, Simon teaches a range of courses including “London Calling: Colonial and Postcolonial Encounters with the Metropole” and “Electric Cities: The Experience of Modernity in London, Melbourne, New York and Paris, 1870-1929”. His current research project explores the concept and experience of “geographies of belonging” in relation to “British world” migrant groups in Britain, 1793 to present.

Keynote Presentation | Memory and the Modern City
Dean Adrien Katherine Wing
University of Iowa College of Law, USA

Biography

Adrien Katherine Wing is the Associate Dean of International & Comparative Law Programs at the University of Iowa College of Law. The author of over 130 publications, she is also the Bessie Dutton Murray Distinguished Professor of Law and has taught at Iowa since 1987. Her subjects include: International Human Rights, Law in the Muslim World, Critical Race Theory and Sex Discrimination Law. Dean Wing is Director of the UI Center for Human Rights and the France study abroad program. Prior to joining the Iowa faculty, she practised international law in New York with two firms specialising in international law issues. Her professional affiliations include the American Society of International Law, where she is a Counsellor, Co-Chair of Blacks of ASIL (BASIL) Task Force, and a member of the Executive Council. She is also the former ASIL Vice President. She currently serves on the American Bar Association Section of Legal Education Accreditation Committee, the American Association of Law Schools Recruitment and Retention of Minority Law Professors Committee, and the American Journal of Comparative Law Board of Editors. She is a law school inspector for the American Bar Association and has previously served as the UI Law School Associate Dean for Faculty Development and the on-site Director for the London Law Consortium semester abroad program. She has advised the founding fathers and mothers of the constitutions of South Africa, Palestine and Rwanda. Dean Wing received her BA magna cum laude from Princeton, her MA in African Studies from UCLA, and her Doctorate of Jurisprudence from Stanford Law School.

Keynote Presentation | Intersectional Realities, Law and Belonging. Not?
Gloria Montero
Novelist, Playwright & Poet

Biography

Novelist, playwright and poet Gloria Montero grew up in a family of Spanish immigrants in Australia’s North Queensland. After studies in theatre and music, she began to work in radio and theatre, and then moved to Canada where she continued her career as an actress, singer, writer, broadcaster, scriptwriter and TV interviewer.

Co-founder of the Centre for Spanish-Speaking Peoples in Toronto (1972), she served as its Director until 1976. Following the success of her oral history The Immigrants (1973) she was invited to act as Consultant on Immigrant Women to the Multicultural Department of the Secretary of State, Government of Canada.

She organised the international conferences "Amnistia" (1970) and "Solidaridad" (1974) in Toronto to support and make known the democratic Spain that was developing in the last years of the Franco dictatorship, and in 1976 at Bethune College, York University, "Spain 1936-76: The Social and Cultural Aftermath of the Spanish Civil War".

With her husband, filmmaker David Fulton, she set up Montero-Fulton Productions to produce documentary films on social, cultural and ecological themes. Their film, Crisis in the Rain, on the effects of acid rain, won the Gold Camera Award American Film Festival 1982. Montero was consultant-interviewer on Dreams and Nightmares (A-O Productions, California) about Spain under Franco, a film that won international awards in Florence, Moscow, Leipzig and at the American Film Festival 1975.

Among her many radio documentaries for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation are: The Music of Spain – a series of 18 hours which presented Spanish music within a social and historical framework; Segovia: the man and his music — a 2-hour special (Signature); Women and the Law (Ideas); Foreign Aid: Hand-out or Rip-Off (Ideas).

Since 1978 Montero has been living in Barcelona, where she has continued to write and publish novels such as The Villa Marini, All Those Wars and Punto de Fuga. Her poem Les Cambres was printed with a portfolio of prints by artist Kouji Ochiai (Contratalla 1983). A cycle of prose poems, Letters to Janez Somewhere in Ex-Yugoslavia, provided the basis for collaboration with painter Pere Salinas in a highly successful exhibition at Barcelona's Galería Eude (1995).

She won the 2003 NH Premio de Relato for Ménage à Trois, the first time the Prize was awarded for a short story in English.

Well known among her theatre work is the award-winning Frida K., which has toured Canada, played New York and Mexico and has been mounted in productions in Spain, Cuba, the Czech Republic, Poland, Sweden and Latvia.

Photo by Pilar Aymerich.

Featured Presentation | My Barcelona – The City as Answer to a Personal Question
Professor Mark Jonathan Harris
Director, Producer & Writer | University of Southern California, USA

Biography

Mark Jonathan Harris is an Academy Award-winning documentary filmmaker and Distinguished Professor in the School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California, USA.

Among the many documentaries he has written, produced and/or directed are Huelga!, the landmark film about Cesar Chavez and the Delano grape strike (1968); and The Redwoods, which won an Oscar for Best Short Documentary and helped establish a redwood national park (1968). The Long Way Home, a film he wrote and directed about the period immediately following the Holocaust, won the Academy Award for Best Feature Documentary in 1997; and Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport, which he also wrote and directed, won the Academy Award for Best Feature Documentary in 2000 and was selected by the US Library of Congress for inclusion in its National Film Registry. Unchained Memories: Readings from the Slave Narratives (2003), a documentary that he wrote on slavery in America, was nominated for an Emmy for a Nonfiction Special and Harris was nominated for Outstanding Writing for Nonfiction Programming. He also wrote The Cutting Edge: The Magic of Movie Editing, a documentary about editing produced by BBC-TV, NHK, and STARZ, which is shown in film schools around the world (2004). In 2007, he produced Darfur Now, a film about the humanitarian crisis in Africa, which was nominated as best documentary of the year by the National Board of Review and the Broadcast Film Critics Association and won an NAACP Image Award. Living in Emergency: Stories of Doctors Without Borders, a film he executive produced, premiered at the Venice film festival and was shortlisted for the 2011 Oscar for best feature documentary. Code Black, another documentary he executive produced about ER doctors, won the Grand Jury Prize for Best Documentary at the 2013 Los Angeles Film Festival and became the basis for the CBS series of the same name. 

In 2010 the International Documentary Association honoured him with its Scholarship and Preservation Award. He holds the Mona and Bernard Kantor Chair of Production at the School of Cinematic Arts, where he heads the documentary program.

Featured Film Screening | Breaking Point: The War for Democracy in Ukraine
Featured Presentation | Breaking Point: Ukraine in the Era of Trump
Professor Svetlana Ter-Minasova
Lomonosov Moscow State University, Russia

Biography

Professor Svetlana Ter-Minasova is President of the Faculty of Foreign Languages and Area Studies at Lomonosov Moscow State University, Russia, and Professor Emeritus in the University. She holds a Doctorate of Philology from the University, and has published more than 200 books and papers on Foreign Language Teaching, Linguistics and Cultural Studies, and has lectured widely throughout the world.

She is Chair of the Russian Ministry of Education’s Foreign Language Research and Methodology Council, President and founder of both the National Association of Teachers of English in Russia, and the National Association of Applied Linguistics. She holds the Lomonosov Award, Fulbright’s 50th Anniversary Award, and was named Doctor Honoris Causa by the University of Birmingham in the UK, the State University of New York in the USA, and the Russian-Armenian University in Armenia. She is a member of the IAFOR International Advisory Board.

Featured Presentation | My Moscow
Featured Panel Presentation | The Challenges of Doing Cultural Studies Today
Dr A. Robert Lee
Nihon University, Japan (retd.)

Biography

A. Robert Lee, a Britisher who helped establish American Studies in the UK, was Professor in the English department at Nihon University, Tokyo from 1997 to 2011, having previously taught for almost three decades at the University of Kent at Canterbury, UK. He now lives in Murcia, Spain. He has held visiting professorial positions in the US at the University of Virginia, Bryn Mawr College, Northwestern University, the University of Colorado, the University of California Berkeley, and the University of New Mexico.

His academic books include Designs of Blackness: Mappings in the Literature and Culture of Afro-America (1998); Postindian Conversations (1999), with Gerald Vizenor; Multicultural American Literature: Comparative Black, Native, Latino/a and Asian American Fictions (2003), which won the American Book Award in 2004; Gothic to Multicultural: Idioms of Imagining in American Literary Fiction (2009) and Modern American Counter Writing: Beats, Outriders, Ethnics (2010). Has also been responsible for collections like Other Britain, Other British (1995); Beat Generation Writers (1996); China Fictions/English Language: Literary Essays in Diaspora, Memory, Story (2008); The Salt Companion to Jim Barnes (2010); with Deborah L. Madsen, Gerald Vizenor: Texts and Contexts (2010); Native American Writing, 4 Vols (2011), African American Writing, 5 Vols (2013), US Latino/a Writing (2014); and, with Alan R. Velie, The Native American Renaissance: Literary Imagination and Achievement (2013).

His creative work is reflected in Japan Textures: Sight and Word (2007), with Mark Gresham; Tokyo Commute: Japanese Customs and Way of Life Viewed from the Odakyu Line (2011); and the poetry collections Ars Geographica: Maps and Compasses (2012); Portrait and Landscape: Further Geographies (2013); Imaginarium: Sightings, Galleries, Sightlines (2013); Americas: Selected Verse and Vignette (2015); Password: A Book of Locks and Keys (2016); and Aurora: A Spanish Gallery of Image and Text (IAFOR Publications on-line, 2016).

Featured Panel Presentation | History, Story, Narrative – Constructing History
Peter Sotirakis
Writer, Translator & Independent Scholar

Biography

Peter Sotirakis is a freelance Australian writer, translator and media professional with experience in the press, TV, film and radio industries in both Australia and Spain. Based in Barcelona since 1993, he currently works for a wide variety of clients, including film and TV producers, art centres, publishers, legal firms, local government departments, and so on, while continuing to produce his own independent video projects whenever possible. An RMIT graduate in Graphic Art and Media Studies, he is an active participant in the Barcelona branch of the Australia Spain Business Association (ASBA) and occasionally lectures on Australia in various educational centres and institutes in Catalonia. He was a speaker at the University of Barcelona Australian Studies Centre (UB ASC) “Landscapes of Exile” conference in 2004, and he screened his feature-length documentary Broken Circles: The Return from Exile and chaired a panel session at the UB ASC “Looking Back to Look Forward” conference in 2012. He was also a speaker at the UB ASC “Watershed” conference in 2014.

Plenary Panel Presentation | Plenary Panel Presentation I: Daily Life: What a Precarious State We Live In
John Rochlin
Australia Spain Business Association (ASBA), Spain

Biography

John Rochlin is an Australian lawyer and mediator. He practised as a barrister at the New South Wales Bar in Australia before moving to Barcelona to live in 1998. In 1991 he was admitted to practise as a barrister in Ireland. From 1999 to 2001 he was an occasional lecturer for the European Law Students’ Association at the University of Barcelona, on the subject of “Introduction to the English Legal System”. In 2001 he founded the Barcelona branch of the Australia Spain Business Association and is its current head. He works as an international lawyer with the law firm Riba Vidal in Barcelona. In 2013 he was appointed as the Honorary Consul of Australia in Barcelona for the regions of Catalonia and Aragon.

Plenary Panel Presentation | Plenary Panel Presentation I: Daily Life: What a Precarious State We Live In
Dr Elena Urdaneta
Basque Culinary Center, Spain

Biography

Dr Elena Urdaneta is Director of Research and Innovation at the Basque Culinary Center. She received her PhD in Pharmacy from the Universidad de Navarra in 1995. Dr Urdaneta has made a number of postdoctoral visits to centres abroad, including the UCLA Faculty of Medicine (Los Angeles, USA) and the Physiology Department of the University of California in Irvine. She currently leads research projects in the field of promotion of active and healthy ageing and e-health. She is the principal researcher of numerous funded research projects on physiology, gerontology and nutrition and is the author or co-author of more than twenty scientific research articles in international periodicals. In 2004 she received the “Beca Ortiz de Landázuri”, granted by the Department of Health of the Government of Navarre. Dr Urdaneta is the scientific coordinator of SIforAGE.

Featured Presentation | Gastronomy for a Healthy Ageing World
Iñigo Cojo
Basque Culinary Center, Spain

Biography

Iñigo Cojo is a researcher and chef at Basque Culinary Center. He has worked in several avant-garde cuisine restaurants and is an expert in modern cooking techniques. For the last three years he has been the Coordinator at the Basque Culinary Center of Innovations for new gastronomic developments, and heads a team of five researchers, working for many enterprises and at an international level. He also is engaged in producing new gastronomic developments for older people in the Center.

Featured Presentation | Gastronomy for a Healthy Ageing World
Dr Francesc Llauradó
Nufarm Germany, Germany

Biography

Francesc Llauradó was born in Barcelona in 1956. He graduated from the University of Strasbourg in 1983 with a PhD in soil science, then he specialized (MBA) in marketing of agricultural and food products in 1987 in France and England. He has worked mainly for Ciba-Geigy and Novartis in South America, France, Switzerland, Italy, Spain and Germany in the areas of seeds and plant protection. He was Director for Southern Europe of Nufarm, the company for which he has worked for more than 16 years. Currently he is General Manager for Nufarm Germany and Regional Manager of Northern Europe. He has also been President of AEPLA (Spanish Agrochemical Industry).

Plenary Panel Presentation | Plenary Panel Presentation I: Daily Life: What a Precarious State We Live In
Professor Georges Depeyrot
French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), France

Biography

Professor Georges Depeyrot is a monetary historian at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) in Paris. He began his scientific career in the 1970s studying coin finds and joined the CNRS in 1982. After some years he joined the Center for Historical Research in the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (EHESS) and is now a professor at the École Normale Supérieure. After his habilitation (1992), he specialised in international cooperative programs that aim to reconsider monetary history in a global approach. He has directed many cooperative programs linking several European countries, including those situated at the continent’s outer borders (Georgia, Armenia, Russia, and Morocco). Professor Depeyrot is the author or co-author of more than one hundred volumes, and is the founding director of the Moneta publishing house, the most important collection of books on the topic of money. Professor Depeyrot is a member of the board of trustees of the Centre National de Recherche Scientifique.

IAFOR Silk Road Initiative Information Session
Dr Ljiljana Markovic
University of Belgrade, Serbia

Biography

Dr Ljiljana Markovic is Dean, Chairperson of the Doctoral Studies Program and Full Professor in Japanese Studies at the University of Belgrade, Serbia. She has previously served as Vice Dean for Financial Affairs, Faculty of Philology, University of Belgrade (2008-2016). She holds the positions of Chairperson of the Association of Japanologists of Serbia, Member of the University of Belgrade Council, Chairperson of the University of Belgrade SYLFF Committee, Member of the Republic of Serbia, Ministry of Education, Science and Technological Development, Bilingual Education Board, and Member of the Republic of Serbia, Ministry of Culture, Committee on Books Procurement for Public Libraries. In 2010 she received the Gaimu Daijin Sho Award from the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Japan, and in 2011 she received the Dositej Obradovic Award for Pedagogical Achievement. She is the author of a large number of publications in the fields of Japanese studies and economics.

IAFOR Silk Road Initiative Information Session
Professor Emerita Sue Ballyn
Barcelona University, Spain

Biography

Sue Ballyn is Professor Emerita at Barcelona University from where she graduated with a BA in 1982. Her MA thesis on the writings of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes won the Faculty prize in 1983. In 1986 she won the Faculty prize again, this time for her PhD thesis on Australian Poetry, the first PhD on Australian Literature in Spain.

She joined the English and German Philology Department on graduation 1982 and has remained at the university ever since. In 1990 she founded the Australian Studies Program which was recognised as an official Barcelona University Observatory - Studies Centre in 2000, known as CEA, Observatorio Centre d’Estudis Australians. It is the only Australian Studies Centre in Spain and one of the most active in Europe.

Over the last twenty-five years, Sue Ballyn’s research has been focused on foreign convicts transported to Australia, in particular Spanish, Portuguese, Hispanics and Sephardim, and she works closely with the Female Convicts Research Centre, Tasmania. She has published and lectured widely in the area, very often in collaboration with Prof. Lucy Frost. 2016 will see the publication of a book on Adelaide de la Thoreza, a Spanish convict, written by herself and Lucy Frost.

More recently she has become involved in a project on ageing in literature DEDAL-LIT at Lleida University which in turn is part of a European project on ageing: SIforAge. As part of this project she is working on Human Rights and the Elderly, an area she started to research in 1992. In 2016 a book of interviews with elderly women, with the working title Stories of Experience, will be published as part of this project. These oral stories are the result of field work she has carried out in Barcelona.

She is also involved in a ministry funded Project, run out of the Australian Studies Centre and headed by Dr Bill Phillips, on Postcolonial Crime Fiction (POCRIF) This last project has inevitably intertwined itself with her work on convicts and Australia. She currently holds the position of Profesor Emerita and Founder/Co-Director of the Australian Studies Centre, at Barcelona University.

Featured Panel Presentation | The Challenges of Doing Cultural Studies Today
Dr Bill Phillips
University of Barcelona, Spain

Biography

Bill Phillips is a Senior Lecturer in English literature and culture at the University of Barcelona and head of the English and German Studies Department. He lectures on British poetry, crime fiction and other contemporary fiction. He has published widely on poetry, focusing particularly on the Romantic period, ecocriticism, ecofeminism, postcolonial studies, gender studies and popular fiction, including detective fiction, science fiction and zombies.

He is head of POCRIF (Postcolonial Crime Fiction: a global window into social realities), a research project on postcolonial crime fiction financed by the Ministerio de Economía y Competividad. The project’s team are members of the Australian Studies Centre, based at the University of Barcelona, and the group’s research forms part of the wider academic and investigative work carried out by the Centre.

Spotlight Presentation | TBA
Professor Donald E. Hall
Lehigh University, USA

Biography

Donald E. Hall has published widely in the fields of British Studies, Gender Theory, Cultural Studies, and Professional Studies. Prior to arriving at Lehigh in 2011, he served as Jackson Distinguished Professor of English and Chair of the Department of English (and previously Chair of the Department of Foreign Languages) at West Virginia University (WVU). Before his tenure at WVU, he was Professor of English and Chair of the Department of English at California State University, Northridge (CSUN), where he taught for 13 years. He is a recipient of the University Distinguished Teaching Award at CSUN, was a visiting professor at the National University of Rwanda, was 2001 Lansdowne Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the University of Victoria (Canada), was Fulbright Distinguished Chair in Cultural Studies at Karl Franzens University in Graz, Austria, for 2004-05, and was Fulbright Specialist at the University of Helsinki for 2006. He has also taught in Sweden, Romania, Hungary, and China. He has served on numerous panels and committees for the Modern Language Association (MLA), including the Task Force on Evaluating Scholarship for Tenure and Promotion and the Convention Program Committee. In 2012, he served as national President of the Association of Departments of English. In 2013, he was elected to and began serving on the Executive Council of the MLA.

His current and forthcoming work examines issues such as professional responsibility and academic community-building, the dialogics of social change and ethical intellectualism, and the Victorian (and our continuing) interest in the deployment of instrumental agency over our social, vocational, and sexual selves. His book, The Academic Community: A Manual For Change, was published by Ohio State University Press in the fall of 2007. His tenth book, Reading Sexualities: Hermeneutic Theory and the Future of Queer Studies, was published in the spring of 2009. In 2012, he and Annamarie Jagose, of the University of Auckland, collaborated on a volume titled The Routledge Queer Studies Reader, which was published in July of that year. He continues to lecture worldwide on the value of a liberal arts education and the need for nurturing global competencies in students and interdisciplinary dialogue in and beyond the classroom.

Featured Panel Presentation | The Challenges of Doing Cultural Studies Today
Dr Cornelis Martin Renes
University of Barcelona, Spain

Biography

Dr Cornelis Martin Renes graduated from the University of Barcelona with a BA in 2001, an MA in 2006 and PhD in 2010. He joined the English and German Philology staff in 2001. His main teaching areas have been English poetry from the Renaissance to contemporary times, and postcolonial studies with a special emphasis on the Asia-Pacific area and Australia in particular. He wrote his thesis on indigenous Australian literature and identity formation. He co-directs the Australian Studies Centre at the university, which was recognised as an official University of Barcelona Centre in 2000. Since the 2000s his main area of research has been indigenous Australian literature, and more recently he has become a member of a research project, POCRIF, which looks at postcolonial crime fiction and is funded by the Spanish Ministry of Education. He currently holds the positions of Adjunct Lecturer, Co-Director of the Australian Studies Centre at the University of Barcelona, and Member of the EASA (European Association for Studies of Australia) Board. He maintains steady contact with Australian academia through visiting fellowships.

Featured Presentation | TBA
Professor Baden Offord
Centre for Human Rights Education, Curtin University, Australia & Cultural Studies Association of Australasia

Biography

Baden Offord is an internationally recognized specialist in human rights, sexuality, education and culture. In 2012 he was a sponsored speaker to the 14th EU-NGO Human Rights Forum in Brussels where he spoke on ASEAN and sexual justice issues. In the same year he conducted a three-week lecture tour of Japan sponsored by the Australian Prime Minister’s Educational Assistance Funds post the Great Eastern Tohoku Earthquake in 2011.

Among his publications are the books Homosexual Rights as Human Rights: Activism in Indonesia, Singapore and Australia (2003), Activating Human Rights (co-edited with Elizabeth Porter, 2006), Activating Human Rights Education (co-edited with Christopher Newell, 2008), and Activating Human Rights and Peace: Theories, Practices, Contexts (co-edited with Bee Chen Goh and Rob Garbutt, 2012). His most recent co-authored publication in the field of Australian Cultural Studies is titled Inside Australian Culture: Legacies of Enlightenment Values (with Kerruish, Garbutt, Wessell and Pavlovic, 2014), which is a collaborative work with the Indian cultural theorist Ashis Nandy. His latest chapter, ‘Queer activist intersections in Southeast Asia: human rights and cultural studies,’ appears in Ways of Knowing About Human Rights in Asia (ed. Vera Mackie, London, Routledge, 2015).

He has held visiting positions at The University of Barcelona, La Trobe University, the Kinsey Institute at Indiana University and Rajghat Education Centre, Varanasi. In 2010-2011 he held the Chair (Visiting Professor) in Australian Studies, Centre for Pacific Studies and American Studies, The University of Tokyo. In Japan he has given lectures and research seminars at Chuo, Otemon Gakuin, Sophia, Tohoku and Keio Universities.

Prior to his appointment at Curtin University, he was Professor of Cultural Studies and Human Rights at Southern Cross University, where he was a faculty member from 1999-2014.

Featured Presentation | Refuge: Refugee: Moonlight and Precarious Love
Featured Panel Presentation | The Challenges of Doing Cultural Studies Today
Dr Richard Donovan
Kansai University, Japan

Biography

Dr Richard Donovan lectures in comparative literature and translation studies in the Faculty of Letters at Kansai University, Japan. He has also worked as a translator at the Kyoto City International Relations Office. He obtained a PhD in literary translation studies at Victoria University of Wellington in 2012. The title of his thesis was "Dances with Words: Issues in the Translation of Japanese Literature into English". His other areas of interest include Japanese media subculture and environmental technology.

Dr Donovan is the editor of the IAFOR Journal of Literature & Librarianship .

Spotlight Presentation | Urban Monsters: The Edgy Japanese Folkloric Fiction of Yukimi Ogawa