Professor Dan Woodman: President

Dan is TR Ashworth Professor of Sociology in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Melbourne and Assistant Dean (Advancement and Engagement) in the Faculty of Arts. He was previously a Research Fellow in the Research School of Social Science at the Aus tralian National University (2009-2011) and a Research Fellow at the University of Melbourne’s Youth Research Centre (2005-2009).

Prior to his academic career Dan spent a number of years as an intellectual disability support worker and did a short stint in the Victorian Public Service. Dan is the current immediate past President of the The Australian Sociological Association (TASA) and was the founding convener of the Sociology of Youth Thematic Group within the Association. He is also Vice President for Australia, New Zealand and Oceania of the Research Committee on the Sociology of Youth (RC34) within the International Sociological Association (ISA). He is co-Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Youth Studies and on the Boards of the Journal of Sociology, Journal of Applied Youth Studies and Youth and Globalization. He is the Founding Chair of Social Sciences Week, Australia and Chair of the Local Organising Committee for the upcoming 20th World Congress of Sociology, Melbourne 2022.

Dan gives regular presentations to teacher and student groups, business, government and community sector organizations and often appears in the print media and on radio, in Australia and around the world. His work has been used in submissions by various community organizations to numerous government bodies and inquiries, including Productivity Commission and Fair Work Commission reviews.

Dr Helen Sykes AM: Vice President & Treasurer

Helen is the Director of Future Leaders, President of the Trust for Young Australians, Chair of The Australian Collaboration, Associate of Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute, Member of the Future Justice Executive and Summit Governor of the Hillary Institute. She has published and edited many books.

Alec Coles OBE

Alec has been CEO of the Western Australian Museum since 2010: the State’s museum with branches in Perth, Fremantle, Geraldton, Kalgoorlie and Albany. He was previously Director of Tyne & Wear Archives & Museums in North East England for eight years. Prior to that, he was CEO of the Northumberland Wildlife Trust, a wildlife conservation charity in North East England. He is an Adjunct Associate Professor in the School of Social Sciences at The University of Western Australia, an Executive Member of the Council for Australasian Museum Directors, a Board member of The University of Western Australia’s Institute of Advanced Studies, and Chair of International Council of Museums (ICOM) Australia. He is committed to developing and demonstrating the public value of museums. He is currently driving Western Australia’s initiative of a new State Museum and aspires to create a museum that is owned and valued by all West Australians and admired by the world. In 2010, he was awarded an OBE for Services to Museums. In March 2017, he was awarded Honorary Doctor of Letters from The University of Western Australia in recognition of his contribution to the Arts.

Professor Ilana Mushin is a linguist whose research interests include: interactions between discourse, cognition and grammar, pragmatics, perspective-taking in discourse, Conversation Analysis, typology, narrative structure, language shift and language maintenance, Australian First Nations Languages. Ilana is currently a Chief Investigator on the ARC Discovery Project 'Conversational interaction in Aboriginal and Remote Australia' (CIARA - https://www.ciaraproject.com). She is also currently President of the Australian Linguistic Society and Conference Chair of the International Society for Conversation Analysis conference (ICCA23).


Ilana is a UQ Expert for media in the following fields:

Australian Aboriginal languages, Aboriginal languages, Languages - Aboriginal, Sociolinguistics, Discourse analysis, Pragmatics, Linguistic typology

They are happy to lend their expertise to your articles or broadcasts and share their research discoveries and insights with the community via media channels.

For additional assistance with story ideas, general advice and information or help with seeking further experts, please email the UQ Media Team or telephone (07) 3365 1120.

Dr Matthew Champion is a Senior Lecturer in History in the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies at the University of Melbourne. Prior to his return to Australia in 2020, he was a tenured Lecturer in Medieval History at Birkbeck, University of London, and a Junior Research Fellow at St Catharine’s College, Cambridge. He has held visiting fellowships at the Warburg Institute, London, the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions, and at the Newberry Library in Chicago.

Matthew’s research spans the history of temporality, emotions, gender, sound and music, visual and material culture, and religious reform and heresy. His 2017 monograph The Fullness of Time: Temporalities of the Fifteenth-Century Low Countries (Chicago UP) was the winner of the 2018 Gladstone Prize from the Royal Historical Society. He is currently working towards a global and material history of time and sound, supported by an ARC Discovery Early Career Researcher Award ‘The Sounds of Time’ and a collaborative Discovery Project with colleagues at the Universities of Melbourne, Manchester and Heidelberg on Albrecht Dürer’s material worlds.

Matthew is an editor of the series Genders and Sexualities in History for Palgrave, a member of the international advisory board of the Journal of Ecclesiastical History, and a current elected committee member of the Australian and New Zealand Association for Medieval and Early Medieval Studies.

Professor Sandra Gattenhof is Director of Research Training in Creative Industries, Education and Social Justice Faculty at QUT situated on Turrbul and Yugara lands in Meanjin (Brisbane). Sandra is internationally recognised as expert in the field of arts and cultural evaluation and worked as a researcher with major arts organisations and arts funding bodies in Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, United Kingdom and Norway. Sandra has an outstanding publications record. Sandra is chief investigator for ARC Linkage Project The Role of the Creative Arts in Regional Australia (2019-2022), Social Impact Strategy for the Puuya Foundation (2021-2023), and led Valuing the Arts Australia and New Zealand (2020). Sandra has been a lead consultant for Australian Curriculum: The Arts, Education Queensland’s Arts curriculum and syllabuses, Queensland Ballet, Out of the Box children’s festival and Brisbane Festival. Sandra’s outstanding service record includes past president of Drama Australia and Drama Queensland, chair of the Dead Puppet Society, and board member of National Advocates for Arts Education. Sandra has received QUT Vice- Chancellor’s Performance Award (2014; 2007), QUT Award for Excellence in Leadership (2014), and Creative Industries Faculty Dean’s Award for Excellence in Research and Innovation (2011). Sandra received Drama Australia President’s Award in 2021.

Professor Ariadne Vromen

Ariadne Vromen joined ANU in mid-2020 as the new Sir John Bunting Chair of Public Administration in the Crawford School, a position that is co-funded by ANU and the Australia and New Zealand (ANZSOG) School of Government. As Deputy Dean (Research) for ANZSOG, and a member of Crawford’s Policy and Governance Department, Ariadne focusses on research leadership and strategy to foster excellence in impactful and applied research; while continuing my existing research projects in governance, political sociology, and public administration.

Ariadne's research interests are diverse, and include: citizen engagement, digital politics and governance, women and the future of work, policy advocacy, and young people and politics.

In mid-2020 Ariadne started an ARC Linkage project ‘Designing Gender Equality into the Future of Work’ with colleagues at the University of Sydney that contrasts change and technological disruption in the retail and legal industries. Ariadne is also currently working with long-term collaborators on two books: one on online petitions, citizen engagement and politics; the other on storytelling and policy advocacy. All Ariadne's research interests are underpinned by an interest in political equality and social justice – and these core questions of redistribution and recognition will be even more important to address via post-Covid19 policymaking and civil society organising.

Ariadne is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences Australia; and a visiting Senior Fellow at the Weizenbaum Institute for the Networked Society in Berlin, Germany.

Ariadne co-founded and co-lead the Australian Political Studies Association’s research group on Political Organisations and Participation.

Professor Frank Bongiorno

Frank Bongiorno AM (born Nhill, Victoria, 1969) is Professor of History and a historian of Australia. He was formerly Head of the School of History (2018-21), and Deputy Director (Education) of the Research School of Social Sciences (2012-14). He is currently President of the Australian Historical Association.

Twitter: @fbongiornoanu

He is most recently the author of Dreamers and Schemers: A Political History of Australia (La Trobe University in conjunction with Black Inc.): https://www.blackincbooks.com.au/books/dreamers-and-schemers

Frank welcomes student enquiries about Higher Degree Research supervision of projects in Australian history.

Frank is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia and the Australian Academy of the Humanities and a Whitlam Institute Distinguished Fellow at Western Sydney University. He is a Member of the Order of Australia.

Prior to joining the Australian National University, he held lecturing positions at King’s College London (2007-11), the University of New England (2000-07) and Griffith University (1996), and taught previously at the ANU (1994). He has been an Australian Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow at the ANU (1997-2000), and in 1997-8 was Smuts Visiting Fellow in Commonwealth Studies at the University of Cambridge and Mellon Visiting Fellow at the University of Texas at Austin. He has also worked as a Research Officer in the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.

Frank is the author or co-author of five books and many scholarly articles and book chapters on Australian history. The Sex Lives of Australians: A History (2012), won the ACT (Australian Capital Territory) Book of the Year and was shortlisted in the Australian History category of the Australian Prime Minister’s Literary Award and the New South Wales Premier’s History Award. The Eighties: The Decade That Transformed Australia (2015) also won ACT Book of the Year and was shortlisted for the Ernest Scott Prize, the New South Wales Premier’s History Award and the Council for the Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences (CHASS) Book Prize, and long listed for the Colin Roderick Award. Read on... 

Professor Deborah Gare

Deborah Gare is a Professor in the School of Arts and Sciences and leads the History program in Fremantle. She is an author and editor of several leading works, including Fremantle: Empire, faith and conflict since 1829 (2016), Tom Stannage: History from the other side (2015) and Making Australian History: The politics of the past since 1788 (2008). Her research interests are, broadly, Australian, Western Australian and Empire history.

Notre Dame’s location in Fremantle has informed Deborah’s own research. In 2014 she published When War Came to Fremantle: 1899 – 1945 (Fremantle Press, 2014) with Madison Lloyd-Jones. It has been described by reviewers as ‘a gorgeous photographic and social history of the town of Fremantle and its interaction with different world conflicts’.

Of the nineteenth century, Deborah is writing a biography of Mary Ann Friend (1800-39), an artist and writer who visited the Swan River Colony in 1830. The Friend journal was recently acquired by the State Library of Western Australia.

Deborah has a strong interest in teaching and learning within the Humanities. She was the inaugural co-Chair of the Deans Council (DASSH) Associate Deans’ Network of Learning and Teaching in Australia and New Zealand; she represented DASSH in the ALTC project which developed graduate standards for the discipline of History; and she is a long-serving Associate Dean of Teaching and Learning at Notre Dame.

Deborah has received several teaching awards, including Notre Dame’s prestigious Vice-Chancellor’s Award for Leadership of Teaching and Learning (2013), and has been nominated for several Commonwealth OLT awards in teaching excellence. Read on... 

Professor Dimitris Vardoulakis

Dimitris Vardoulakis works on political, social and cultural philosophy.

His is primarily interested in how materialist philosophy conceives democracy and sovereignty, with a particular focus on conceptions of technology.

What binds these diverse fields is the attempt to reassess epicureanism, an undervalued and under-researched school of thought from antiquity whose modern proponents, such as Spinoza, faced persecution.

Dimitris is currently serving as the Chair of the Australasian Society for Continental Philosophy, and is a member of Western Sydney University’s Human Research Ethics Committee. Read on...