ASLEC-ANZ Executive Committee 2021-2022

  • Jennifer Hamilton, President
  • Susan Ballard, Vice-President (Aotearoa New Zealand)
  • Emily Potter, Vice-President (Australia)
  • Alexis Harley, Immediate Past President
  • Alanna Myers, Managing Coordinator
  • Victoria Team, Treasurer
  • Rachel Fetherston, Postgraduate & ECR Representative
  • Alda Balthrop-Lewis, Postgraduate & ECR representative
  • Renee Mickelburgh, Postgraduate & ECR Representative
  • Jessica White, Newsletter Editor
  • Sue Pyke, Editor of Swamphen: A Journal of Cultural Ecology
Dr Jennifer Hamilton

Dr Jennifer Hamilton

President

Jennifer Mae Hamilton is a feminist environmental humanities scholar with formal training in literary studies. Her first book, This Contentious Storm: An Ecocritical and Performance History of King Lear (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017) investigates the dynamic role of the storm in this iconic play. Her current research and writing continues this interest in weather, bodies, emotions and the politics of representation. Her most recent sole-authored publications are in Shakespeare Bulletin (36.3) and JASAL (18.1), and co-authoring with Astrida Neimanis, you can find work in Environmental Humanities (10.2), Feminist Review (118.1) and The Goose (17.1). She is currently a lecturer in English literary studies at the University of New England, Armidale.

Dr Alexis Harley

Dr Alexis Harley

Immediate Past President

Alexis Harley lectures in the Department of Creative Arts and English at La Trobe University, Melbourne. She’s the author of Autobiologies: Charles Darwin and the Natural History of the Self (Bucknell University Press, 2014), associate editor of Life Writing, and the annotating editor of an anthology of nineteenth-century responses to the life and work of William Blake. Current work concerns how nineteenth-century aesthetics shaped the representation – or disavowal – of species extinction, ecological change, and climate change in that century. She’s also co-editing a collection of essays on bees in nineteenth-century literature and culture.

Dr Emily Potter

Dr Emily Potter

Vice-President (Australia)

Emily Potter is a literary and cultural studies scholar with an enduring interest in the intersection of place-making and storytelling, particularly in the context of post-colonial cities and extra-urban environments. She has researched and written widely on the material effects of storytelling practices and the implication of colonial imaginaries and narratives in the generation of climate crisis. Her work is collaborative and community-based, including a recently awarded Special Research Initiative ARC project (with collaborators Brigid Magner, RMIT and Torika Bolatagici, Deakin) focused on the literary history of the Mallee region of Victoria. She is a convenor of the Swedish-Australian network of scholars and artists, The Shadow Places Network.

Dr Susan Ballard

Dr Susan Ballard

Vice-President (Aotearoa New Zealand)

Susan Ballard is an art writer and Associate Professor of Art History at Victoria University of Wellington Te Herenga Waka, Aotearoa New Zealand. Her research spans the fields of art history, creative nonfiction, and the environmental humanities, and examines the histories of nature in contemporary art with a particular focus on artists from Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand. She often works in collaboration with many others. Her books include Alliances in the Anthropocene: Fire, Plants and People (with Christine Eriksen), 100 Atmospheres: Studies in Scale and Wonder (with the MECO network) and Art and Nature in the Anthropocene: Planetary Aesthetics (due out in March 2021).

Dr Victoria Team

Dr Victoria Team

Treasurer

Dr Victoria Team is Research Fellow at Monash Partners. She is engaging with Monash Partners health services to enhance pressure injury surveillance through more effective capture of data. Victoria trained as a medical doctor in Europe and practiced in Africa for almost 10 years. Since completing her doctorate, she has been involved in research in women’s health and, lately, in the field of wound management. She coordinates an NHMRC-funded project in the School of Nursing and Midwifery, Monash University, focusing on the translation of evidence-based practice in venous leg ulcer management into general practices in Victoria (victoria.team@monash.edu).

Dr Alanna Myers

Dr Alanna Myers

Managing Coordinator

Alanna teaches in the Media and Communications program at University of Melbourne and also works as a research assistant to two ARC-funded research projects at University Canberra. Her research focuses on journalism, environmental communication and settler-colonial studies, with a particular interest in place and place-making around issues of mining and development. Her PhD thesis titled “A Pinprick on the Peninsula”: Place, Media and Environmental Conflict at James Price Point was completed in 2016. She is Managing Coordinator of ASLEC-ANZ and previously served as Newsletter Editor and Postgraduate Representative.

Rachel Fetherston

Rachel Fetherston

Postgraduate & ECR Representative

Rachel Fetherston is a PhD candidate in literary studies at Deakin University investigating the representation of the nonhuman in Australian ecofiction and the potential impact that such fiction has on the reader’s relationship with nature. Her research includes considerations of speculative and science fiction, crime fiction, multispecies studies, and the intersection of literary theory and nature connection. She is also a freelance writer and co-founder of Remember The Wild, a non-profit focused on engaging Australians with the natural world.

Dr Alda Balthrop-Lewis

Dr Alda Balthrop-Lewis

Postgraduate & ECR Representative

Alda Balthrop-Lewis is a humanities researcher at Australian Catholic University in Melbourne, where her work focuses on religion, ethics, and ecology. She has particular interests in the role of emotions in environmental politics and the way that the concepts of ‘religion’ and ‘politics’ are related to histories of gender, race, and class. Her first book, Thoreau’s Religion: Walden Woods, Social Justice, and the Politics of Asceticism (Cambridge University Press, 2021), treats Henry David Thoreau as an inheritor of traditional ascetic practices. The book argues that Thoreau’s asceticism and his delight are politically relevant – both in his period and for contemporary environmental ethics.

Dr Sue Pyke

Dr Sue Pyke

Editor, Swamphen: A Journal of Cultural Ecology

Sue teaches creative writing, literary criticism and environmental studies at the University of Melbourne. She is the author of Animal Visions: Posthumanist Dream Writing (Palgrave Macmillan 2019) and the general editor ofSwamphen, our biennial journal. Sue is currently working on a longer piece that responds to the tiger snakes of the Stony Rises in Tyacoort Woorroong country and is also struggling to write some kind of memoir that does justice to her mother’s story telling. For publication details see https://unimelb.academia.edu/SusanPyke. Sue twitters as @suehallpyke and blogs at http://suehallpyke.com.

Dr Jessica White

Dr Jessica White

Newsletter Editor

Jessica White is the author of the novels A Curious Intimacy (2007) and Entitlement (2012) and a hybrid memoir, Hearing Maud (2019). Her essays, short stories and poems have appeared widely in Australian and international literary journals and have been shortlisted or longlisted for prizes. Jessica is also the recipient of funding from Arts Queensland and the Australia Council for the Arts and has undertaken residencies in Tasmania and Rome. She is currently based at The University of Queensland where she is writing an ecobiography of Western Australia’s first female scientist, 19th century botanist Georgiana Molloy.