Personnel
Steering GroupUNESEX has a core group of eight researchers. The researchers form a multidisciplinary team with a focus in the humanities and social sciences. Researchers have qualifications and expertise in the disciplinary areas of gender studies; archaeology; East Asian cultures; cultural studies; history; sociology; and philosophy.
Teaching and Research Interests:Samantha Ackling is a social worker (Hons, Deakin, 2000) and has a background in clinical Social Work. She currently coordinates a service for parents who have premature babies (as the mother of twins born prematurely) and advocates for families at both a local and State level. Her PHD examines sexual intimacy and older people. This research project will use a qualitative design. The aim of the research is to find out from older people over the age of 65 how they define intimacy and sexual expression and to map the changes that may have occurred across the lifespan. This project is hoping to attract participants who identify as heterosexual, gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender as traditionally, most research has had a ‘heteronormative’ focus. It is envisaged that information gained from this research will be useful in several ways including; affirming a positive approach in how we perceive older peoples sexuality and changing the concept of penetrative sex as the only ‘true’ form of sexual expression. Potentially, there will also be implications in sexual health education/promotion for STI and HIV prevention. Frank Bongiorno researches in the area of Australian cultural and political history, and has published on the history of sexuality in Australia - most recently 'Every Woman a Mother: radical intellectuals, sex reform and the "woman question: in Australia, 1890-1918', Hecate, Vol.27, No.1, 2001, pp. 44-64. He also teaches a unit called Sexuality in Australian History (HIST378). Stephen Collier teaches a unit (ARPA 261) called the Evolution of Human Sexuality. It's part of our stream of units in Palaeoanthropology, which is concerned with human evolution and variation, and considers behaviour as a set of aspects of our species' adaptation. His unit sees sexuality from an evolutionary biology and psychology perspective, and sees some aspects of sexual behaviour as evolved strategies to maximize individual reproductive success. Collier, S. 1993, Sexual dimorphism in relation to big-game hunting and economy in modern human populations, American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 91: 485-504. 1992. Margaret Gibson teaches and researches in the area of embodiment, death, technologies, popular culture, ethics, gender, sexuality and family studies. Her unit, SOCY 372/472: Sex, Gender, Bodies, reads psychoanalytic texts exploring and deconstructing the relationship between sexed bodies, gender and sexuality. This unit focuses on topics such as clitoridectomy, homophobia and border/body panics, queer body politics, pregnancy, and cosmetic surgery. Her most recent academic research has focused on issues of representation, bodies, ethics, death and material culture, and technologies. Margaret is currently writing a book on death and material culture which is titled: The Ghosts of Objects: a collective memoir. She also completing a journal article "Bodies Without Histories: cosmetic surgery and the undoing of time". See, Gibson, M. "Menstrual blood and the scene of a crime", Journal of Interdisciplinary Gender Studies, 3, (1), 1998: 89-102. Gibson, M. "Guiltless credit and the moral economy of salvation", issue title "Ethics and Debt (or, Debt to the Other)", Journal of Social and Political Thought, Vol. 1, No. 3, 2001 http://www.yorku.ca/spot/jspot/. Gibson M. "The Truth Machine: polygraphs, popular culture and the confessing body", Social Semiotics, Vol. 11, No. 1, April 2001. Gibson M. "Death Scenes: ethics of the face and cinematic deaths", Mortality, Vol. 6, No. 3, November 2001.
Elizabeth Hale has taught in the School of English, Communication and Theatre at UNE since June 2002. She received her PhD and MA in English literature from Brandeis University, Massachusetts, and a double BA Hons in English and Latin from the University of Otago, New Zealand. She is currently an early career researcher, developing "The Marginal life of the Classical Scholar," a book-length study (which grew out of her doctoral thesis) which focuses on the ways that elite intellectuals (particularly classicists) in Victorian fiction are unsexed, and made sickly, strong, deviant, or monstrous in Victorian fiction. Her study draws on a wide range of genres, from children's literature, and school stories, to the domestic novel, novel of faith and doubt, the empire novel, as well as parliamentary reports, education theory of the period, and the history of the India Civil Service. Gail Hawkes joined UNE in Jan 2001. She was then President Elect of the International Association for Studies in Sexuality, Culture and Society (IASSCS) following her organization of a successful international conference for this organization at Manchester Metropolitan University in 1999. She remains on the International Advisory Board of the Association since the biannual Conference held at the University of Melbourne in 2001 She is on the International Advisory Editorial Board of Sexualities, (Sage Publications). While at MMU she established a Centre for Studies in Sexuality, Culture and Society. Her text, A Sociology of Sex and Sexuality (Open University Press 1996 was reprinted in 2001 and was translated and republished in Korean in 2002. She is currently completing a contracted manuscript for Polity Press, Regarding Sex: Pleasure, Desire, and the Social Order for publication in late 2003. She is contracted to Oxford University Press to coedit, with John Scott, a student text for publication in 2004. She is currently collaborating with Monash University, The Royal Women’s Hospital and Family Planning Health (NSW) to mount a research proposal for the ARC in 2003 to study sex education and young people. She has taught a unit on the Sociology of Sex and Sexuality at UNE and in the UK for 10 years. She is currently attracting a number of honours and post-graduate students in studies on sexuality both locally and nationally. Sylvia Martin is an adjunct senior lecturer in the School of English, Communication and Theatre at UNE, and holds a PhD from Griffith University in Women's Studies, School of Historical and Cultural Studies. Louise Noble has an MA and Ph.D. from Queen’s University in Canada and is Lecturer in English, specializing in early modern English literature and culture in the School of English, Communication and Theatre. Her research interests include the history of the body, in particular early modern literary representations of cannibalism that intersect with medical, religious and erotic discourses of eating the human body circulating in the period. Two new projects are underway: a study of representations of Protestant appetite and desire in Milton’s Paradise Lost, and an exploration of the connection between sixteenth and seventeenth-century deployment of the human body for medicine and twenty-first century trade in human body parts for transplants. She has published articles on constructions of the female body and female sexuality in the work of Nietzsche and in Shakespeare’s Othello. Her MA thesis is a study of the transformation of female corporeality in the poetry of Christina Rossetti. An article, " ‘And make two pasties of your shameful heads’: Healing the Body Politic in Titus Andronicus," is forthcoming in ELH in October. Another essay, "The Fille Vièrge as Pharmakon: The Therapeutic Value of Desdemona’s Corpse" is a chapter in a forthcoming collection, Disease,Diagnosis and Cure on the Early Modern Stage: Praxis and Performance to be published by Ashgate Press. She is currently revising a book-length manuscript entitled The Healing Corpse: Medicinal Cannibalism in Early Modern English Culture. Jane O’Sullivan coordinates the interdisciplinary Women’s and Gender Studies program at UNE and as such is well placed to identify students and academic staff with research interests in the related areas of gender and sexuality. Jane’s own research work includes the analysis of constructions of gender and sexuality in literary and popular cultural texts (including film, television and print media). In particular, this work focuses on popular cultural representations of gender and sexuality as components in power structures within workplace cultures. Jane’s research work in this area includes: Holland, F. and O’Sullivan, J. ‘Lethal Larrikins: Cinematic Subversions of Mythical Masculinities in "Blackrock" and "The Boys"’ Antipodes: North American Journal of Australian Literature 13: 2, 1999, pp. 79—84, and O’Sullivan, J. ‘Gals on the Slab: Fetishism, Re—animation, and the Dead Female Body’ Social Semiotics, 6: 2 1996, pp.231 — 246. Dr. Samuels is a senior lecturer in psychology. His research interests cover a range of topics related to human sexuality. He has been participating in some large international studies (with 30+ and 100+ cultures) looking at the topic of mate selection (with David Buss) and jealousy (with Martin Voracek). Dr. Samuels, along with Brenda Woodhill, has been developing a new and differentiated approach to the measurement of androgyny. Work is ongoing with respect to the development of a new and contemporary measure of this construct, along with positive and negative masculinity and femininity. Additionally, work with Kate Spencer is looking at the meaning of virginity. Finally, research into sexual behaviour and its implication for general life satisfaction is ongoing. John Scott has conducted extensive research into female and male sex work and its regulation through criminal and public health legislation. In 2002, John was awarded an international first prize for an early career researcher, with an article examining prostitution and public health in New South Wales. John’s recent research in the area of sexuality includes: Scott, J. [accepted] "Prostitution and Public Health in New South Wales" Culture, Health and Sexuality; Scott, J. (2001) "The Management of Venereal Disease in New South Wales, 1871-1916" Venereology, vol. 14, no. 2, pp. 69-80. John is currently co-editing, with Gail Hawkes, a student textbook on ‘Social Perspectives in Human Sexuality’, which will be published by OUP in 2004. John is also collaborating with Elaine Barclay (Institute of Rural Futures) on a research project investigating prostitution in rural communities. Cuncun Wu was previously a lecturer and associate-professor in the Chinese Department of Nankai University, Tianjin, she moved to Australia as an exchange scholar, later completing her doctoral thesis Male Homoerotic Sensibilities in Late Imperial China at The University of Melbourne. She has published widely on gender and sexuality, specialising on male homoeroticism in late imperial China. Her latest book is Ming Qing shehui xing’ai fengqi [Sex and sensibility in Ming and Qing society] (Beijing: Peoples Literature Press, 2000). Her publications in English include the paper "‘Beautiful boys made up as beautiful girls…’: elements of anti-masculine taste in Qing dynasty writing and male homosexual sensibilities" (forthcoming in Kam Louie ed. Asian Masculinities: The Meaning and Practice of Manhood in China and Japan, London: Routledge Curzon) and a translation of the classical Chinese erotic novel A Tale of an Infatuated Woman (co-translator with Mark Stevenson, in Renditions, No. 58, 2002). She is preparing a new unit, Gender and Sexuality in China, for the 2004 academic year. |