Dr Jennifer Mae Hamilton

Biography

Jennifer Hamilton has scholarly training in literary and gender studies and professional experience in creative and community arts. She's currently writing a book called 'Weathering the City' that draws on her diverse interdisciplinary training. In this book, she reads live art, urban reslience policy, eco-live art, Australian literature and poetry, popular television series and memoir through queer feminist and anti-colonial lenses to produce new ways of understanding climate adaptation.

She is also involved in several collaborative research projects: The Heteropessimists supported by the Freilich Foundation (with Christina Kenny, Matt Allen, Felicity Joseph and Daz Chandler, 2021-2022); The Weathering Collective (2016-ongoing) which was invited to be part of the 2022 Biennale of Sydney’s Water Lessons series (with Tessa Zettel and Astrida Neimanis, UBC) and its offshoot The Community Weathering Station (CoWS); a series of guided audio-walks called Weathering Waterways (with George Adamson and Ines Camara-Leret, Kings College London); Storying and the Environmental Humanities (Emily Potter, Deakin and Killian Quigley, ACU) and Reading Group as Method (Astrida Neimanis, UBC, Mindy Blaise, ECU, Hayley Singer, Melbourne and Jimmy Gardiner, USYD).

Prior to starting at UNE in early 2018, she held two linked Seed Box Postdoctoral Research Fellowship from the MISTRA-FORMAS Environmental Humanities Collaboratory at Linkoping University hosted in Gender and Cultural Studies at University of Sydney (2016-2018) and the Institute for Culture and Society at Western Sydney University (2017-2018). In addition, she taught ecocriticism at NYU Sydney (2013-2017).

Before training as an academic, she had a career as an arts worker in Sydney. She worked as a producer of live theatre and performance, as a facilitator of community art programs, as well as a live artist and curator. She worked with the Tamarama Rock Surfers at the Old Fitzroy Theatre, Serial Space Artist Run Initiative, Performance Space, Tiny Stadiums Festival, Verge Gallery and North Sydney Council. She grew up on Dharawal Country in Wollongong.