AEGIS RESEARCH NETWORK

About the talk

Invited speakers: Professor Paul James (WSU) and Assoc. Professor Chris Peterson
Chair: Linda Williams

Paul James is Professor of Globalization and Cultural Diversity in the Institute for Culture and Society at the Western Sydney University. He is author or editor of over 30 books, including Globalization Matters (with Manfred Steger, Cambridge University Press, 2019) and Urban Sustainability in Theory and Practice (Routledge, 2015). He is Scientific Advisor to the Mayor of Berlin, and has been an advisor to a number of agencies and governments including the Papua New Guinea Minister for Community Development. From 2007 till 2014 he was Director of the United Nations agency, the Global Compact Cities Programme.

Chris Peterson is Associate Professor of English at Western Sydney University. He is the author of Kindred Specters: Death, Mourning, and American Affinity (University of Minnesota Press, 2007). He has also published two books and several book chapters and articles in the fields of animal studies and posthumanism. They include Monkey Trouble: The Scandal of Posthumanism (Fordham University Press, 2017); Bestial Traces: Race, Sexuality, Animality (Fordham University Press, 2012); “Animal,” The Oxford Encyclopedia of Literary Theory (Oxford University Press 2019); “Races,” The Edinburgh Companion to Animal Studies (Edinburgh University Press, 2018); “The Posthumanism to Come,” Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities (2011); and “Normal Monsters and Monstrous Monstrosities: A Response to Cary Wolfe,” Angelaki, (2013).

Linda Williams is Associate Professor of Cultural History & Theory in the School of Art at RMIT University where she co-leads the AEGIS Research Network, and coordinates the Higher Degrees by Research Programs. She has published widely in the field of the Environmental Humanities, particularly in the history of human-animal relations. She also publishes on the question of how the arts are responding to global climate change and loss of biodiversity, on which she also led an international ARC project and curated several international exhibitions. Publications can be accessed at: https://rmit.academia.edu/LindaWilliams or https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5273-7683