ASLEC-ANZ Executive Committee 2024-2025
Jessica White Co-President (Australia)
Susan Ballard – Te Whanganui-a-Tara Co-President (Aotearoa)
Jennifer Hamilton Immediate Past-President
Rachel Fetherston Vice-President (Australia)
Raewyn Martyn – Ōtautahi Vice-President (Aotearoa)
Lottie van Wijck Secretary
Kate Judith Treasurer
Freya Grace-Macdonald Post-Graduate and ECR Representative (Australia)
Shelley Simpson – Tāmaki Makaurau Post-Graduate and ECR Representative (Aotearoa)
Rachel Fetherston Newsletter Editor
Shelley Simpson – Tāmaki Makaurau Website Editor
Chantelle Bayes Swamphen Representative
Dr Jessica White
Co-President (Australia)
Dr Jessica White is the author of the award-winning novels A Curious Intimacy and Entitlement, and a hybrid memoir about deafness, Hearing Maud, which won the 2020 Michael Crouch Award for a debut work of biography and was shortlisted for four national awards, including the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Nonfiction. Jessica has received funding from the Australia Research Council, the Australia Council for the Arts, Arts Queensland and Arts South Australia and has undertaken national and international residencies and fellowships. She is a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing and Literature at the University of South Australia.
Dr Susan Ballard
Co-President (Aotearoa)
Susan Ballard is an art writer, curator and Professor of art history and environmental humanities at Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand. Her research focuses on contemporary art, nature, extractivism, affect, memory, and decoloniality. Recent books include Art and Nature in the Anthropocene: Planetary Aesthetics (Routledge 2021) and Alliances in the Anthropocene (with Christine Eriksen, Palgrave 2020). Recent essays have appeared in October, Environmental Humanities, GeoHumanities, and Cultural Geographies. Her exhibitions include Listening Stones Jumping Rocks (2021) and Folded Memory (2023) both at Te Pātaka Toi Adam Art Gallery. Her new book Shift Work: Essays on Art and Life in the Third Millennium (with Liz Linden) will be published by Punctum in 2025.
Dr Jennifer Hamilton
Immediate Past-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 Rachel Fetherston
Vice-President (Australia) and Newsletter Editor
Rachel Fetherston is a Lecturer in Writing & Literature at Deakin University where she undertakes teaching and research in ecocriticism, popular genre, Australian literature, and the more-than-human. Her research has been published in JASAL, Extrapolation, Swamphen and Australian Humanities Review and in the edited collections Ethical Futures and Global Science Fiction (Palgrave Macmillan), Animals and Science Fiction (Palgrave Macmillan) and The Routledge Handbook of Crime Fiction and Ecology. Her current research projects are concerned with postcolonial crime fiction, the nonhuman in Australian ecofiction, and the literary and cultural histories of Australian fences and roads. She is Vice-President (Australia) of ASLEC-ANZ and the newsletter editor, and previously served as a Postgraduate & ECR Representative.
Raewyn Martin
Vice-President (Aotearoa)
Raewyn Martyn is Pākehā (Scotland, Ireland, England), and was born at Waitaki Bridge, Ōamaru in Te Waipounamu, the South Island of New Zealand. She is a practicing artist and a lecturer in Painting at Ilam School of Fine Arts, University of Canterbury. Raewyn’s paintings, installations, and lens-based works are often made during attentive occupation of site and situation, developed in response to histories and material relationships found within place. These artworks change over time and challenge the stability and temporality of painted surface, medium, and site. Raewyn’s practice-based PhD at Toi Rāuwharangi CoCA, Massey University, developed understanding of bio-based paint materials and time-based ‘biopolymer aesthetics’. She has an MFA in Painting and Printmaking from VCUArts, Virginia (2013), and was previously a visiting assistant professor of visual arts at Antioch College in Ohio (2013-2016), and a research participant at the Jan van Eyck Academy in the Netherlands (2016-2017).
Lottie van Wijck
Secretary
Lottie van Wijck (she/her) is a Monash University graduate and early career researcher with a practice spanning writing, translating, geopolitics, and multidisciplinary art. She is passionate about languages, biodiversity, eco-feminism, sustainable development, and urbanism. Currently, she is interning as a researcher with the Women’s Earth and Climate Action Network and translating for the Indonesian Feminist Journal, Journal Perempuan. Her work focuses on climate justice, gender equality, and land rights through storytelling and creative engagement with place. She lives, works, and creates on the unceded lands of the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung peoples of the Kulin nation.
Kate Judith
Treasurer
Kate Judith is an Environmental Humanities scholar interested in semiotic materialist, more-than-human approaches to decision-making. Her 2023 monograph, Exploring Interstitiality with Mangroves asked how filtering philosophical concepts regarding being in-between through mangrove ecologies might rework them away from anthropocentrism. She has a PhD in Environmental Humanities from UNSW, master’s degrees in environmental science and education, both from Monash, and Bachelors degrees in Science and Arts, both from The University of Melbourne. Kate has taught many courses at many institutions and is currently a Senior Lecturer at the University of Southern Queensland.
Freya Grace-Macdonald
Post-Graduate and ECR Representative (Australia)
Freya MacDonald is a Doctoral Fellow at the Sydney Environment Institute and a PhD candidate in the English Department at The University of Sydney. Her thesis elucidates the relationship between contemporary literature and socio-ecological imaginaries in the present era of environmental emergency and takes shape through a literary case study on the Black Summer Bushfires of 2019/20. Freya has spent the past year working as a RA on The Sydney Environment Institute’s Developing Systems and Capacities to Protect Animals in Catastrophic Fires research project which was funded by the Federal Government in the wake of the 2019/2020 Black Summer Bushfires.
Shelley Simpson
Post-Graduate and ECR Representative (Aotearoa) and Website Editor
Shelley Simpson (Pakeha, Ōtautahi Christchurch) is an artist based in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland. She holds a MFA (First Class Honours) from Te Waka Tūhura, Elam School of Fine Arts, University of Auckland and is currently a PhD candidate at Te Wānanga Aronui O Tāmaki Makau Rau, AUT University. Simpson’s sculptural and installation-based practice is underpinned by a new materialist framework and engages with lithic materials and their dynamic processes to consider how by attending closely to our cohabitants in the world, we may be able to unsettle dominant modes of anthropocentrism.
Chantelle Bayes
Swamphen Representative
Chantelle Bayes is a writer, researcher and academic with a background in the environmental humanities. Her book Reimagining Urban nature: Literary Imaginaries for Posthuman Cities was published in 2023 with Liverpool University press. Her research interests include urban nature, research-creation, posthumanism, creative writing practices and contemporary literature and has papers published in Swamphen, TEXT and Australian Geographer amongst others. She is currently a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Southern Cross University doing arts-based and youth-led research for climate change education.