ASLEC-ANZ Executive Committee 2015

	Associate Professor Linda Williams – President. Linda Williams is Associate Professor of Art, Environment and Cultural Studies at RMIT University in Melbourne http://www.rmit.edu.au/staff/lindawilliams where she leads the AEGIS research network.She is a key researcher at the HfE Mellon Observatory in Environmental Humanities at the University of Sydney, and in 2015 has been invited to be an associate investigator with the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions. http://www.historyofemotions.org.au/research/researchers/linda-williams.aspxLinda’s research is focused on the interdisciplinary fields of the environmental humanities and studies in human-animal relations – particularly histories of the longue durée, and the contemporary issues of climate change and mass species extinction. Her work on social theory, historical sociology and European philosophy is focused on issues arising from materiality—such as the ontological status of the animal and the nonhuman world in human history, and the connections between cultural history, science and technology. She also has a particular interest in 17th century studies. Her publications can be accessed at: https://rmit.academia.edu/LindaWilliams
	Dr Grace Moore,  Vice President (Australia) Grace Moore (VP Australia) is a senior research fellow at the ARC’s Centre for Excellence in the History of Emotions at the University of Melbourne, where she also holds a lectureship in the English & Theatre programme. Grace is at present working on a book-length study of settlers and bushfires, Arcady in Flames, while developing a research interest in emotions and the environment. Her other projects include work on nineteenth-century dingo-hunting and an edited collection on the Victorian environment. Before arriving at Melbourne in 2004, Grace taught at the University of Idaho, USA and the University of Bristol, UK. Details of her work are available here: http://www.historyofemotions.org.au/research/researchers/grace-moore.aspx and here: https://unimelb.academia.edu/GraceMoore She is also—along with her colleagues—an occasional blogger at www.historiesofemotion.com. Email: gmoo@unimelb.edu.au Twitter: @gmoo_melbourne
	Dr Charles Dawson, Vice President (New Zealand) Charles Dawson is from Wellington, New Zealand and has been amongst other things  a student of literature, history, cultural geography and te reo Māori. His interest in ASLE was sparked by a letter from Glen Love in the early 1990s; at the close of that decade Professor Love was external examiner for Charles’ doctoral dissertation “Writing the Memory of Rivers.” Charles continues to be fascinated by human responses to water. His recent work is at the interface between cultures, nature and indigenous rights in NZ policy and Treaty of Waitangi contexts. His articles, reviews and poetry have appeared in Australasian and North American journals and he has arranged ASLEC poetry readings in Wellington. Charles welcomes further New Zealand members and wants to build up a NZ network so more can share in the very rich and positive trans-Tasman/Pacific dialogue he experiences within ASLEC-ANZ. Email: chas.dawson@gmail.com
	Dr Tom Bristow,  Immediate Past President Tom is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Melbourne. His current projects include a children’s book on empathy and the more-than-human world, and a literary history of pastoral (literary mode and land use) in four regions of Australia. Tom’s research combines literary scholarship with philosophical and geographical concepts, as exemplified in his latest publication, The Anthropocene Lyric: An Affective Geography of Poetry, Person, Place (Palgrave Macmillan 2015). Tom is currently engaged in a number of initiatives as a key researcher in the Australasian Humanities for the Environment (HfE) Observatory at the Sydney Environment Institute, a board member of the Australasian Consortium of Humanities Research Centres (ACHRC), an editorial staff member of Philosophy Activism Nature (PAN), and as the immediate outgoing president of ASLEC-ANZ. Tom looks forward to working with you to develop ideas and networks within and beyond the academy. Email: thomas.bristow@unimelb.edu.au
	Dr Debbie Symons, Secretary Debbie Symons is a multi-disciplinary artist who is based in Melbourne. She completed her PhD Anthropocentrism, Endangered Species and the Environmental Dilemma at Monash University in 2013. Symons collaborates with scientific organisations, such as the IUCN Red List to facilitate the statistical data pertaining to her works. Email: debbie@debbiesymons.com.au Website http://debbiesymons.com.au/
	Dr CA Cranston, Australasian Journal of Ecocriticism  and Cultural Ecology Representative (AJE) Dr CA.Cranston is the Journal Manager and general editor of ASLEC-ANZ’s peer-reviewed, online journal, AJE: Australasian Journal of Ecocriticism and Cultural Ecology. She was President of ASLEC-ANZ in 2009-2011 and in 2010 convened ASLEC-ANZ’s biennial conference ‘Sounding the Earth: Music, Language and Acoustic Ecology’. She published the first Australian collection of ecocritical essays The Littoral Zone: Australian Contexts and their Writers CA.Cranston and Robert Zeller (eds). Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi Press, 2007; and a place-based anthology of Tasmania, Along These Lines: From Trowenna to Tasmania (2000). Cranston taught from 1991-2008 in what was the School of English, U. of Tasmania. In 2008 and 2009, she received Australia-India Council Fellowships as Adjunct Professor, U. of Madras, Tamil Nadu; in 2006 she was Visiting Professor at Appalachian State U., North Carolina, USA; and during 2004, Visiting Professor at Alps-Adriatic U., Austria. In 2012 she was Adjunct Professor at the U. of Prince Edward Island at the Institute of Island Studies where she taught ‘Island Political Ecology’. Email: CA.Cranston@utas.edu.au Website: http://www.ca-cranston.com
	Dr. John Ryan, Communications and  Newsletter Editor John Ryan is Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Edith Cowan University (ECU) in Perth, WA. He has written extensively on the flora of Western Australia in the books Green Sense (2012), Unbraided Lines (2013) and Being With (2014); on digital art and new media in Digital Arts (2014, with Cat Hope); and creative environmental practice in Two with Nature (2012, with Ellen Hickman). His research areas include the environmental humanities, digital humanities, ecopoetics and Buddhist studies. Email: john.ryan@ecu.edu.au
	Dr Jennifer Hamilton, Conference Organiser Jennifer Hamilton completed her PhD in English in 2013, and since then has been working as Adjunct Professor of Ecocriticism at New York University (Sydney) and Visiting Fellow with the Environmental Humanities at UNSW. She is a practicing curator/artist working with Sydney University’s Verge Gallery in 2015 on a series of events exploring the links between art, the environment and politics under the banner “Earlwood Farm Presents…”. She blogs at http://www.earlwoodfarm.com Email jennifermaehamilton@nyu.edu
	Dr Victoria Team, Treasurer Victoria Team, MD, MPH, DPH, is a teaching associate at the School of Political and Social Inquiry, Monash University, and a research fellow at Mother and Child Health Research Centre, LaTrobe University. Her research interests are in the area of women’s health and she is the author of the advanced review, Social and public health effects of climate change in the ‘40 South’, recently published in WIREs Climate Change.
	Dr Iris Ralph, Bibliographer Iris Ralph is an Assistant Professor in the English Department at Tamkang University in Taiwan. Before accepting this position, Dr Ralph taught at the University of Texas at Austin (USA), Northern Melbourne Institute of TAFE (Australia) and Victoria University (Australia). Her areas of specialty are animal studies and ecocriticism. Her most recent journal articles have been published in CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture (Purdue University, Indiana, USA), Journal of Ecocriticism (University of Northern British Columbia, Canada), Journal of Poyang Lake (Jiangxi Academy of Social Sciences, Jiangxi, China), NTU Studies in Language and Literature (National Taiwan University) and Concentric (National Taiwan Normal University). A book chapter co-authored with Chia-ju Chang is published in International Perspectives in Feminist Ecocriticism edited by Greta Gaard, Simon C. Estok and Serpil Oppermann (Routledge 2013). Dr Ralph’s most recent publication is a book chapter in a critical collection of essays on Ted Hughes (Ted Hughes) edited by Terry Gifford (Palgrave Macmillan 2015). E-mail: irisralph@mail.tku.edu.tw.
	Student Representatives Emma Davies is a PhD student in Philosophy at the Australian National University.  Her PhD is an investigation of how ethics in the human-nonhuman relationship is, and might be, informed by the affects. This project aims to explore connections between ontology, affect, framing and ethics in the human-nonhuman relationship. Broadly, the project aims to explore the plausibility of moving beyond a human centred ethics; more narrowly, examining the roles of the affects, in the ethical encounter between humans and nonhumans.Her research interests include 19th and 20th Century Continental Philosophy, Feminism, Ethics, and Environmental Humanities.Email: emma.davies@anu.edu.au
	Alanna Myers  is a PhD candidate in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne. Her research explores the ethics and politics of place-based conservation as mediated through mainstream journalism texts, with a particular focus on the campaign against the construction of a gas plant at James Price Point in the Kimberley region of Western Australia (2008-2013). Central to this work is a genealogy of the idea of wilderness and its ubiquitous (though contested) presence in contemporary imaginings of Australian landscapes.Email: amyers@student.unimelb.edu.au
	CHAIR OF ADVISORY BOARD Professor Kate Rigby Kate Rigby is Professor of Environmental Humanities in the School of Languages, Literatures, Cultures and Linguistics at Monash University and a Fellow of the Australian Humanities Academy and of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. Her research ranges across German Studies and Comparative Literature, European philosophy, literature and religion, and culture and ecology. She is a Senior Editor of the journal Philosophy Activism Nature (http://www.panjournal.net/ ), and her books include Topographies of the Sacred: The Poetics of Place in European Romanticism (2004), Ecocritical Theory: New European Approaches (co-edited, 2011) and Dancing with Disaster: Environmental Histories, Narratives, and Ethics for Perilous Times (2015). Kate was a founding member of the Australian Ecological Humanities (http://www.ecologicalhumanities.org/about.html), the inaugural President of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (Australia-New Zealand) (http://www.aslec-anz.asn.au/), the founding Director of the Forum on Religion and Ecology@Monash (http://artsonline.monash.edu.au/fore/) and she is currently a board member of the Humanities for the Environment Mellon Australia-Pacific Observatory (http://hfemellon.com.au/). Email: kate.rigby@monash.edu