Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences

Lisa Adkins is Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at The University of Sydney. Her home discipline is Sociology. She has previously held an Academy of Finland Distinguished Professorship (2015-19) and Chairs in Sociology at the University of Manchester and at Goldsmiths, University of London. She served as a member of the Australian Research Council's College of Experts (Social, Behavioural and Economic Sciences Panel), 2011-13.

Lisa's interventions in the discipline of Sociology lie in the areas of economic sociology, social theory and feminist theory. Currently, she is working on questions of asset ownership and social inequality, with a particular focus on the restructuring of lifetimes in the asset economy. This team-based research is supported by the Australian Research Council and by the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute (AHURI). Her most recent books are The Time of Money (2018, Stanford University Press) and The Asset Economy (2020, Polity Press) co-authored with Martijn Konings and Melinda Cooper. With Gareth Bryant and Martijn Konings, Lisa is currently directing a Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Strategic Research Theme on Asset Ownership and the New Inequality, one of six Faculty Strategic Research Themes known as FutureFix. Lisa is also joint editor-in-chief of the journal Australian Feminist Studies (Routledge/Taylor&Francis).

Dr Murali Agastya's main research interests are in the theory of auctions, optimal selling procedures/mechanism design, learning in games and market microstructure. He is also doing some work in modelling of decision rules when individuals have to make choices with an incomplete knowledge of the rules underlying strategic situations. His main teaching interests are in game theory, finance and microeconomic theory.

Before coming to Sydney University, Murali was a lecturer at University College London and a Research Fellow of The Center for Economic Learning and Social Evolution. He was also a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Rationality and Interactive Decision Theory at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and has held visiting professorial positions at University of Tokyo, University of Western Ontario and Ben Gurion University, Israel.

His major publications include: "Perturbed Adaptive Dynamics in Coalition Form Games", Journal of Economic Theory, December 1999; "Adaptive Play in Multi-player Bargaining Situations", Review of Economic Studies, July 1997; and "Multi-player Bargaining Situations: A Decision Theoretic Approach", Games and Economic Behavior, January 1996.

PhD, MA in Communication Disorders (Macquarie); MAPPCP (East London); GradDip in Learning and Teaching (Griffith); BCogSci (UWA)

Nobuaki completed his PhD in Cognitive Science at Macquarie University, specialising in language acquisition. His research interests focus on second language acquisition, technology-enhanced language learning and teaching, and the application of positive psychology in language education. Prior to teaching at the University of Sydney, he taught Japanese language at UNSW and Macquarie University.

BA (Hons)/BMus (Adelaide), MTS (Harvard), PhD (Sydney)

Dr Avril Alba is Professor of Holocaust Studies and Jewish Civilisation in Hebrew, Biblical and Jewish Studies and Head of the School of Languages and Cultures at the University of Sydney. She teaches and researches in the broad areas of Holocaust and modern Jewish history with a focus on Jewish and Holocaust museums. Her monograph, The Holocaust Memorial Museum: Sacred Secular Space, was published in 2015. From 2002 to 2011 Avril was the Education Director at the Sydney Jewish Museum (SJM). She has also served as the Project Director/Consulting Curator for the SJM permanent exhibitions 'Culture and Continuity' (2009), 'The Holocaust' (2017), and 'The Holocaust and Human Rights' (2018), the latter being a major output of her Linkage project 'The Holocaust, Human Rights and the Contemporary Museum'. She is currently working on an ARC Discovery project, 'The Memory of the Holocaust in Australia' and an ARC Linkage Project 'Evaluating the Impact of Holocaust Museum Education'.

Dr Ali Yunis Aldahesh (Orcid.org/0000-0002-7179-742X) is a Lecturer in Arabic Language, Literature and Culture at The University of Sydney, Department of Arabic Language and Cultures, School of Languages and Cultures, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dr Aldahesh joined the University of Sydney in February 2011. He worked before that at the Australian National University (ANU) for three years as a Lecturer in Arabic at the Centre for Arab and Islamic Studies (Middle East and Central Asia). He holds a PhD in Translation and Linguistics, an MA in Translation and Linguistics, and an MA in Semitic Studies. Dr Aldahesh’s area of research interest is translation and linguistics with special emphasis on the language, text, and translation of the Qur’an. His published works include:

• The (Un)Translatability of the Qur’anic Idiomatic Phrasal Verbs: A Contrastive Linguistic Study. Routledge. UK. 2022.
• English Translations of the Qur’an: A Descriptive Comparative Study in their Aspects of Disagreement. Cairo: Hala Publishing,2020.
• Translating Idiomatic English Phrasal Verbs into Arabic: A Contrastive Linguistic Study. VDM, Germany, 2009.
• The Concept of Taqwa in the Qur’an as understood by Muslim commentators(In Arabic). Ray Publishing, Syria, Aleppo, 2010.
• al-Raḥīl Ṣawba al-Māʾ ‘TravellingTowards Water’. A book of short stories (In Arabic). WSU, Sydney, 2007.

Robert Aldrich, Professor Emeritus of European History, carries out research in modern European and colonial history, especially the history of the French and British overseas empires; the history of modern monarchy; and the history of gender and sexuality.

Professor Tim Allender's principal research over the past 30 years concerns Indian education and empire studies using multidisciplinary approaches that focus on gender and feminism. His most recent book with Manchester University Press (Studies in Imperialism Series), entitled Empire Religiosity, explores female Roman Catholicism in colonial and postcolonial India and is now available in paperback. This book is the WINNER of the Triennial Distinguished Book Award, 2022-25, Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism, Notre Dame University, South Bend, USA. His previous book, Learning Femininity in Colonial India, also with Manchester University Press (Studies in Imperialism Series), now also available in paperback, develops key gender, feminist and knowledge transfer themes concerning India. This book is the WINNER of the Anne Bloomfield Triennial book prize awarded by the HES (UK) for best history of education book published between 2014 and 2017. As the nominee of the NSW/ACT Committee of Chairs of Academic Boards and Senates, Tim has consulted over many years with the NSW Education Standards Authority (NESA) on the development of the Australian National Curriculum (History).

Tim has held visiting fellowships at the University of Winchester and the University of London. He has held research Professorships at the Georg Eckert Institute, Braunschweig, Germany; at the University of Toronto, Canada; at the Institute of Advanced Studies in Shimla, India; at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India; at the National Institute of Education, Singapore, at the University of Birmingham, UK and, most recently, at Heidelberg University, Germany. He is co-editor of a forthcoming book on visual literacies and history. Tim was elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society of Great Britain in 2024.

Tim has published earlier single-authored books, 53 mostly single-authored international journal articles and book chapters, illuminating other sociological, medical and cultural aspects of empire. He is the lead co-editor of four edited books, five special issues of international journals and he is on the editorial boards of six leading international journals. Tim is founding co-editor of two successful international book series: ISCHE global histories (Europe); and Studies in Visual History (de Gruyter, Berlin). He has held two successfully completed ARC grants. In recognition of his international standing as a scholar of education of India he delivered the keynote address to the world ISCHE conference in Turkey (June 2015) - the first Australian invited to do so. He has also delivered 45 invited keynotes and other sole presentations in international and national forums in Europe, the US and in Asia.

Fiona Allon is a cultural studies theorist whose work analyses how everyday cultural practices intersect with social formations such as gender, race and class. She has a particular interest in theories of everyday life including the way in which everyday life is shaped by political and economic ideas such as neoliberalism and the financial rationalities of investment and calculation. Conversely, she is interested in everyday life as a space-time of subtle tactics and quiet rebelliousness where minoritised subjects contest the governmental agendas they encounter, struggle to survive within economic conditions of austerity and precarity, and endure indebtedness, contingency and growing inequality.

Her most recent research is concerned with the transformation of home and housing by asset-based capitalism, especially through the ongoing integration of real estate and financial markets. This research will be published in the monograph Home Economics: Speculating on Everyday Life which is forthcoming with Duke University Press.

She is the author of Renovation Nation: Our Obsession with Home (2008) and the co-editor of The Temporalities of Waste: Out of Sight, Out of Time (2021). She is the author of numerous articles and book chapters in areas such as the environmental humanities, urban culture, the cultural geographies of space and place, travel and mobility, sport and gender, gender and finance, and money and cryptocurrencies.

In 2003 she curated the exhibition Flannelette: An Australian Story at the Liverpool Regional Museum. In 2004 she wrote the catalogue for the Australian Maritime Museum’s exhibition Sailor Style: Art, Fashion and Film. Popular culture, the vernacular and low/middle brow cultural history continue to be enduring research interests.

She has taught at universities in Australia and internationally. She has a background in film and media production and, with Lindsay Barrett, wrote and directed the 35mm short film Sacred.

Mark Allon teaches Sanskrit and other ancient languages of South Asia (Pali and Gandhari) and Buddhist and Asian studies. His primary research interests are the composition and transmission of early Buddhist literature, the ways in which texts have been used by Buddhist communities, and the Indic languages of early Buddhist texts (Pali, Gandhari, Sanskrit).

PhD (Warwick); MA (Warwick); BA (Catania).

Giorgia Alù completed a PhD in comparative literature at the University of Warwick (UK). Her research interests range from Italian cultural history to comparative literature and visual studies. Before joining the University of Sydney she taught at the University of Warwick and at the University of Reading (UK).

My research is in the areas of political economy, network empirics, institutions, conflict and development. I'm passionate about using innovative data and tools to explore the world around us.

I completed my PhD in East Asian history at the Australian National University in 2006. Prior to coming to Sydney in 2022, I taught Japanese Studies / Japanese History at the National University of Singapore.

My main area of expertise is the history of minority groups in Japan, with a special focus on Burakumin. I have written two monographs that cover both the early modern and modern historical dimensions of these communities. Some of my research also involves a comparative analysis of the experiences of these communities (comparative caste studies) as well as study of the transnational dimensions of their activities. I am also interested in researching and writing histories that meaningfully connect to the study of these communities, including religious/intellectual, material, and animal histories.

Dr Irene An's primary research interests are in the areas of CALL (Computer Assisted
Language Learning) and Second Language Acquisition, Second/Foreign Language Teaching. Her PhD was on E-learning in blended language learning environments. Her earlier MA was in Applied Linguistics, focusing on Second Language Acquisition and Second/Foreign Language Teaching. Her teaching focuses on modern Chinese language of all levels.

Ms Sun An is an Associate Lecturer (Education) in Korean Studies at The University of Sydney. With extensive experience in Korean language education, her teaching and scholarship focus on Korean language acquisition, student-centred pedagogy, and culturally responsive instruction. She is dedicated to fostering engaging, inclusive learning environments that support language proficiency and intercultural competence.

Teaching and Leadership

Coordinator & Lecturer: KRNS1621 (Korean 1), KRNS1622 (Korean 2), KRNS2621 (Korean 3), KRNS2622 (Korean 4)

Coordinator: KRNS3624 (Korean 8)

Tiho Ancev is a Professor of Agricultural and Resource Economics. He holds degrees from Saints Cyril and Methodius University (Bachelor), University of Iceland (Master) and Oklahoma State University (PhD). His main research areas are agricultural, environmental, natural resource and energy economics. Tiho’s main contributions have been in water economics and policy, economics of energy, economics of air pollution and climate change policies, and economics of precision agriculture and agricultural input use. He has published widely on these topics in top international peer reviewed journals. Tiho has led and contributed to national and international research projects in these research areas. He is currently the Managing Editor-in-Chief of the Australian Journal of Agricultural and Resource Economics.

Dr Michael Anderson is Professor of Creativity and Arts Education in the Sydney School of Education and Social Work at The University of Sydney and Co-Director of the CREATE Centre. He is an internationally recognised educational leader in school transformation processes. He has taught, researched and published in education and transformation for over 20 years, including 20 books and 65 book chapters and journal articles. His international research and practice focuses on how the 4Cs can be integrated using coherent frameworks to support leaders as they work towards transformation in their contexts. Michael's most recent work emerging from his research and partnerships with schools include How Schools Transform (2024 ed), Transforming Education (Bloomsbury, 2021) and Transforming Schools (2017)

• Transforming Organizations (with Miranda Jefferson, Bloomsbury, 2019)
• Transforming Schools (with Miranda Jefferson, Bloomsbury, 2017)
• Applied Theatre: Research (with Peter O'Connor, Bloomsbury, 2015),
• Partnerships in Education Research: Creating Knowledge that Matters (with Kelly Freebody, Bloomsbury, 2014),
• Masterclass in Drama Education (Continuum, UK),

The research reported in these publications uncovers innovative linkages between drama, the arts play, creativity and learning that have the potential to significantly improve learning for young people. Michael was a drama a teacher and Creative Arts Consultant with the NSW Department of Education and has worked for NESA in senior assessment and curriculum roles.

B.Med.Sc., M.B., B.S., M.D. (Melbourne), M.A., Ph.D. (Pennsylvania); FAHA, FASSA, FAHMS, FRSN

Warwick Anderson is the Janet Dora Hine Professor of Politics, Governance and Ethics in the Discipline of Health and leader of the Politics, Governance and Ethics Theme with the Charles Perkins Centre. From 2012-17 Warwick Anderson was ARC Laureate Fellow in the Department of History and the Center for Values, Ethics and the Law in Medicine. Additionally, he has an affiliation with History and Philosophy of Science at Sydney and is a Professorial Fellow of the School of Population and Global Health at the University of Melbourne. In 2018-19 he was the Gough Whitlam and Malcolm Fraser Chair of Australian Studies at Harvard University, based in the Department of the History of Science.

As an historian of science, medicine and public health, focusing on Australasia, the Pacific, Southeast Asia and the United States, Professor Anderson is especially interested in ideas about race, human difference, and citizenship in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He has also studied the history of immunology (particularly autoimmunity) and perceptions of 'waste'. Occasionally he writes programmatically on postcolonial science studies and, more generally, on science and globalisation. In recent years, his research has focussed on the conceptual development of disease ecology and planetary health, i.e., the population health impacts of climate change.

Before moving to Sydney in 2007, Prof. Anderson was Robert Turell Professor of Medical History and Population Health, Professor of the History of Science, and Chair of the Department of Medical History and Bioethics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. At Wisconsin he also served on the steering committee of the Holtz Center for Science and Technology Studies and was a Faculty Affiliate of the Center for Southeast Asian Studies. Previously Prof. Anderson taught at Harvard, Melbourne (where he founded the Centre for Health and Society, now the Centre for Health Equity), UCSF and Berkeley. He has been awarded grants and fellowships from the Australian Research Council, American Council of Learned Societies, the National Science Foundation, the Social Science Research Council (US), and the Rockefeller and Mellon Foundations. He was the Frederick Burkhardt Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton (2005-6), and a Guggenheim Fellow (2007-8). He has held visiting professorships at Harvard, Manchester and McMaster universities. In 2013 he was John Hope Franklin Fellow at Duke University and the Whitney J. Oakes Fellow in the Humanities Center at Princeton University. His books have been awarded the W.K. Hancock Prize (AHA, 2004); the Philippines National Book Award for Social Science (2008); the NSW Premier's General History Prize (2009 and 2014); the William H. Welch Medal (AAHM, 2010); and the Ludwik Fleck Prize (4S, 2010).

Prof. Anderson is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities (FAHA), the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia (FASSA), the Australian Academy of Health and Medical Sciences (FAHMS), and the Royal Society of NSW (FRSN). In 2023, he was awarded the John Desmond Bernal Prize of the Society for Social Studies of Science for distinguished contributions to science and technology studies, the Society's lifetime achievement award. In 2025, he was awarded the Arthur J. Viseltear Prize for lifetime achievement in public health history by the American Public Health Association. The Australian's research review named him Australia's 'top historian' for 2026.

PhD Queen's University of Belfast, MPhil University College Cork, BA (Licenciatura) Universidad de Granada

Luis is a teacher and researcher in Anthropology and Spanish & Latin American Studies. He has extensive fieldwork experience in Latin America and Spain. In Venezuela he started conducting fieldwork in 2003 and has since spent over a decade living, working, and researching there. In addition to his scholarly work, he is a contributor to various public media outlets.

His first book, Venezuela Reframed (Zed, 2015), provided the first diachronic analysis of the formation of a social movement in Bolivarian Venezuela. With a focus on the indigenous movement, the book theorises the emergence of “state-supporting” social movements, showing the political synergies that unite some state actors and large sectors of the indigenous population in pursuit of socio-economic enfranchisement.

Luis’s new book project, entitled Property in Paradise, is a historical ethnography of the production of space, property relations and class formation in Southern Venezuela. In this work, he builds on the concepts “modern accumulation” and “defetishisation of environments” to shed light on the sociocultural dynamics and outcomes of a process of land enclosure that is transforming radically the lives of the inhabitants of that region.

In another ongoing project, Luis is studying the usage of national symbols in contemporary political scenarios. Grounding this study in anthropological theory on political communication and behaviour in periods of social instability, he contributes to debates about the distinctive foundations of democratic and authoritarian ideals and the social conditions that enable their realisation. As part of this project, he has coordinated the first comparative exploration of usages and functions of national flags in Spain and Latin America (with contributions published in AIBR, 2022).

In the early 2010s, Luis also co-coordinated pioneering comparative studies of race and ethnic categorisation in Latin American censuses. His co-edited volumes Everlasting Countdowns (2012) and The Politics of Identity in Latin American Censuses (2016, originally published as a special issue of JILAR [2014]) set theoretical foundations for scholars who have subsequently approached this area of research. Building on those projects, Luis recently completed a small project exploring understandings of race, mestizaje, and criollismo among blind people in Chile and Venezuela (published in LARR, 2025). This project demonstrates that visually perceived markers are not self-evidently constitutive of race as a social category and enables a reconsideration of how different notions of admixture continue to permeate ideals of personhood and social relations in Latin American countries.

Editorial work is an important part of Luis’s academic experience. This includes membership in the boards of Latin American Perspectives (Participating Editor) and two open-access anthropology journals that publish primarily in Spanish: AIBR and Antropologías del Sur.

Luis was born in Villarrobledo (Spain) and has personally experienced the positive results that solid state investment in public education and health systems can generate. His primary and secondary schooling took place in his local public institutions, and his BA degree was also obtained at a public University in Spain. When he needed to visit doctors, he was able to attend clinics and hospitals that did not make patients pay fees when leaving the premises. He is married and has two sons, and for their and other kids’ future he’d very much like to see strong public services supporting civic citizenship growth in our societies.

BA (Macquarie), BTh (SCD), MStud (Oxford), DPhil (Oxford), FAHA

I research and teach in the area of Old English language and literature.

My research interests range across the literature and culture of early medieval England, commonly known as the Anglo-Saxon period.

My current projects include research on Old English literature and history, early medieval literature and science, and theology and early medieval literature. I have published extensively on Old English biblical poetry, early Old English prose, and science in early medieval literature.

Derrick Armstrong is Professor Emeritus in the Faculty of Education and Social Work. His roles in the University included:Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Education) and Registrar; Deputy Provost & Pro-Vice Chancellor Learning and Teaching; and, Dean of the Faculty of Education & Social Work. From 215 to 2020 he was Deputy Vice Chancellor Research, Innovation and International at the University of the South Pacific.

His research field is the sociology of education. Major projects have included: the Global Challenges Research Fund (UK) "One Ocean Hub", global partnership of universities and stakeholder organisation investigating the investigating development challenges at the nexus between the worlds oceans and local and indigenous communities who are connected to the ocean environment;Economic and Social Research Council Research Priority Network"Pathways Into and Out of Crime", exploring the experiences and perspectives of children and young people in relation to anti-social and criminal behaviour in contexts of multi-agency intervention; and, the national evaluation of the UK government's "On Track" crime-reduction program which examined the efficacy of multiple interventions with childrren aged 6-12 year and their families. He has also undertaken work on the history of special educational policy since 1944, on 'Self-advocacy, Civil Rights and the Social Model of Disability', on the construction of motivational styles in the context of school subject and classroom contexts, and he has a longstanding interest in the experience and perspectives of children and their parents involved in special educational assessment.

In addition, Professor Emeritus Armstrong has worked extensively with teachers, non-government organisations and education ministries in educational development and capacity building in developing countries, particularly in the Caribbean and China.

Currently, he serves on the Executive Committee of the Network for Interdisciplinary and Transdiscplinary Research Organisations which includes universiteis in Australia, New Zealand, and Oceania. He has published 9 books and over 150 journal articles and papers.

PhD McMaster

The main strand of his research focusses on studying the health and economic circumstances of individuals as they age with particular emphasis on late-life experiences, as well as the broader economic consequences of population ageing. A related strand of his research focuses on the interaction between the housing market and the economic outcomes. He examines how housing shapes opportunities and outcomes throughout the life cycle.

MPhil, PhD (Macquarie)

Bunty Avieson spent a year in 2008-2009 in the Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan, jointly funded by the United Nations and the Bhutan Observer newspaper, to teach journalists and editors, as well as to advise media stakeholders, as part of the country’s move to democracy. This provided the opportunity to undertake research for her PhD thesis, which she completed in 2013, receiving the Vice Chancellor’s Commendation from Macquarie University. During the year-long posting in Bhutan she acted as a consultant to Reporters Without Borders, Asia-Pacific desk.

Avieson’s Master of Philosophy (Macquarie, 2008), titled The Poetics of Paranoia, investigated the construction of self with reference to the theories of Jacques Derrida and 1st century Indian philosopher Nagarjuna.

Avieson’s journalism practice includes news and feature writing in Britain, Australia and Asia for newspapers, including The Australian and the Straits Times in Singapore, as well as a wide range of Australian magazines, including Good Weekend and Good Reading. In the 1990s she was editor of Woman’s Day, and editorial director of New Idea.

She has published three novels, a novella and two memoirs, which have been variously translated into Japanese, German and Thai, and been awarded two Ned Kelly Crime Writing Awards for her crime fiction.

She has taught across a variety of media subjects since 2008, including news journalism, feature writing, creative non-fiction and international communications. She joined University of Sydney in 2014.

Since 2018 Bunty Avieson has been a Principal Investigator (Bhutan) in the Worlds of Journalism Study. In 2020 Avieson was awarded a Discovery Early Career Research Award by the Australian Research Council for a project titled: The Bhutan-Wiki project: knowledge, literacy and orality in the digital age.

Lionel Babicz is a historian of Japan, Asia, the Earth, and the Universe. He teaches in the disciplines of Japanese Studies and Asian Studies. His research focuses on the history of Japanese–Korean relations and the intellectual history of the Meiji period (1868–1912). He also works on Big History, a transdisciplinary approach that integrates knowledge across the humanities and sciences.

Lionel Babicz completed his PhD in Japanese history at INALCO in Paris, under the supervision of the eminent historian Michel Vié. He also holds a degree in the History of the Islamic World from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where his studies included Arabic and Urdu. Prior to joining the University of Sydney, he taught East Asian Studies at the Hebrew University and served as a researcher at the Maison Franco-Japonaise in Tokyo.

Having lived in Tokyo for over a decade, Lionel Babicz studied at Hitotsubashi University under the supervision of the renowned historian Yasumaru Yoshio (安丸良夫).

His work moves from detailed analyses of key moments in modern Japanese history – such as the promulgation of the Meiji Constitution on 11 February 1889 – to comparative explorations of colonial and postcolonial relationships, particularly Japan-Korea and France-Algeria.

He is also an associate researcher at the Japan Center of EHESS in Paris.