This interest also extends to her academic teaching: “Teaching Australia in Postcolonial and Intercultural Perspective” (summer semester 2018) will explore the theoretical question of representing cultural identities in view of lesson and sequence planning for school teaching at lower and upper secondary levels, with a special focus on the genres of fiction and short film.

She was also involved in the organization and coordination of the Dr R Marika Chair for Australian Studies at the English Department of the University of Cologne (from 2010-2014).

She is a member of the Centre for Australian Studies at the University of Cologne, Germany where she continues to contribute to conversations about communication in health contexts. With a background in research and evaluation for policy-making and first-hand experience with the impacts of policies applied to remote and regional settings, her academic publications and unpublished commissioned reports are topically diverse. Generally that work addresses gaps and opportunities in valuing livelihood and health and the ecologies of change-impact that trans-disciplinary and creative practice contribute. Communication across governments, organisations, and communities, as well as between cultural sectors and in intercultural settings crosscuts these things. With a role in the Graduate School at Batchelor Institute, Australia’s only First Nations Higher Education Institute, and based for two decades in the Arrernte homelands, she  works in close partnership with people whose responsibilities include to community, kin, knowledge and the more than human elements upon which we all rely. As an academic supervisor, she supports candidates whose approaches require them to apply their Indigenous Knowledge expertise, or who undertake inter or transcultural research.

She specialises in collaborative qualitative research and community education with remote Aboriginal communities. Her primary areas of interest include intercultural communication, particularly related to Indigenous health and early childhood; and culturally responsive policy and practice, in both research and provision of health and education services. Improving recognition of the critical importance of Indigenous cultural and linguistic expertise is an ongoing priority. Anne is collaborating closely with Prof. Adone and team.

My name is Brent Macpherson, and I’m a film director based in Auckland. I love telling stories about the Deaf community, especially those from the Pacific Nations. I’ve produced documentaries in the Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea including filming over 1000 signs for Papua New Guinea Sign Language dictionary, and I’ve also lived in Vanuatu for almost two years. Capturing the Pacific’s culture fascinates me.

I have a background in professional acting in theatre productions and short films. My first professional theatre show was A Spectacle of One at the Watershed, and I appeared in the short film I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry, directed by Michael Hurst. The film was screened at the Cannes Film Festival. I have been on several television shows, but I left the acting scene to pursue a psychology degree that would help me develop a deeper understanding of the different characters I might need to portray in future film projects. It was a dream come true to own a successful productions company.

I’ve directed many films well over 100 whether for TVCs, promotional videos, resources, short films, or documentaries. I directed New Zealand’s National Anthem in New Zealand Sign Language, which now has over 1.7 million views. As a Deaf director, it makes sense to me to produce resources featuring Deaf and Hard of Hearing people to help them feel at ease during filming.

I continue to have a passion for producing documentaries, whether filming in the Pacific Nations or in New Zealand.

During his three years at Kintore he began studying linguistics and was also learning the local language, Pintupi. Doug then moved to Geraldton in WA, where he was Teacher/Linguist at the Yamaji Language Centre for nine years. In this role he worked with the many endangered languages of the region. While in this position Doug completed an Honours thesis consisting of a description of Wajarri. Doug then moved to Canberra where he undertook a PhD for which he wrote a descriptive grammar of Wutung (Sko family). Following this Doug joined AIATSIS (the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies) as the Research Fellow in Linguistics. Currently Doug is heading up the newly formed AIATSIS Centre for Australian Languages. Doug’s research interests include language documentation and description, grammar writing and lexicography, with a core focus on language maintenance and revitalisation. Doug has worked intensively on a number of Australian languages in WA and in recent years has been working closely with the Ngunnawal community of Canberra to assist them with their language work. Doug has worked closely with members of CAS such as Prof. Adone. 

Professionally focused on the management of natural and cultural heritage including the protection of cultural and intellectual property, Liz is also a collected artist, see Liz McNiven, Badyidi (Budjiti) people – Spirit Dreaming – Search the Collection, National Gallery (nga.gov.au) and a published writer, see Titles curated by Liz McNiven on ASO – Australia’s audio and visual heritage online.

In her youth she completed a Cultural Resource Management Skills Development Program in the Film Archive of the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, complemented by a Degree of Bachelor of Arts in Communication, at the University of Canberra.

With a career spanning thirty years, Liz worked across leading Australian national and State based cultural and natural resource management institutions with roles including Art Consultant & Project Coordinator, National Gallery of Australia;  Program Director, Museum Victoria; Senior Curator and Branch Manager, National Film and Sound Archive of Australia; Senior Land Rights Officer, New South Wales Aboriginal Land Council; Senior Natural Resource Officer, New South Wales Department of Land and Water Conservation; and Senior Policy Officer and Assistant Program Director at the Murray-Darling Basin Authority. Now, as a BAC director, she is applying her skills and knowledge to support the BAC in managing native title rights and interests over Budjiti lands, waters, and natural resources and in asserting cultural authority over tangible and intangible dimensions of Budjiti heritage.

Liz is collaborating closely with Professor Adone and team.

(Photograph: (c) Romain Morton)

In 2016-2017, Martin Müller held a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Copenhagen, sponsored by the Danish Research Council. The research project was on Territoriality, Governmentality, and Colonial Rule: A Global History of the War on Non-Sedentary Peoples and Itinerant Cultures during the Long 19^th Century. The project is at present continued in other venues and within new national and international networks. Before this, he worked as a lecturer in history and social studies at the University of South-Eastern Norway from 2014 to 2015. He defended his doctoral dissertation at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy in 2013. The dissertation was entitled Civilization, Culture and Race in John Crawfurd’s Discourses on Southeast Asia: Continuities and Changes, c.1814-1868. Martin Müller has published in books and academic journals on imperial knowledge production, transfer and implementation in Southeast Asia and on how this continues to influence our approaches to- and conceptualization of this region, its peoples and history. Language has occupied a pivotal position in all of these studies; these have in particular focused on how nineteenth century metropolitan scholars, colonial civil servants, soldiers, settlers and travellers thought and theorised about the entangled relationships between language, race, civilization, history and society.

Her current research projects focus on the polycentric network of Anglophone world literatures and on postcolonial ekphrasis/ literary visuality. Together with Juergen Reulecke she is general editor of the series Forms of Remembering/Formen der Erinnerung (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, since 2004). Recent publications include co-edited volumes on Anglophone World Literatures (Special Issue Anglia, 2017) and on Literary Environments: Ecocritical Theories and Ethics in Anglophone Literatures (anglistik & englischunterricht, 2018) as well as a number of articles on verbal-visual configurations in Anglophone Literatures. She is currently writing a monograph on Postcolonial Ekphrasis and Counter-Visions in Anglophone Literatures – Contacts, Contests and Translations.

In his current research project, he examines the fight for the repatriation of Indigenous Ancestral Remains in Australia and the United States from the early 1970s to the present.

His project investigates the conflicts between Indigenous activists, scientists, and museum representatives regarding repatriations of Indigenous Ancestral Remains in Australia and the United States in the 1970s and 1980s. In addition, it analyses the differing implications of the return of Indigenous Ancestral Remains based on museum policies in Australia since the late 1980s and legally mandated practices of repatriation in the United States since 1990. Moreover, the project discusses the conflicts over the repatriation of Australian and US-American Indigenous Ancestral Remains from British and German museums and collections from the early 1990s until today.

In 2011 and 2012, Silvan Niedermeier was a postdoctoral research fellow at the DFG Graduate School “Cultural Contact and Discourses of Scholarship” at the University of Rostock. Since 2013, he works as a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer at the Chair of North American history at the University of Erfurt. His research and teaching focuses on imperial and colonial history, gender history, the history of racism and visual history. In 2019, he published The Color of the Third Degree. Racism, Police Torture, and Civil Rights in the American South, 1930−1955 (University of North Carolina Press).

Her interdisciplinary research in Digital Humanities, Web Science, and Library and Information Sciences looks at how digital technologies can enrich and diversify research in Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences, particularly in relation to the used of Linked (Open) Data and knowledge graphs for public culture and in the cultural heritage sector. She is the author of “Linked Data for Digital Humanities” (2023, Routledge), and has publications that cover a range of other topics from the role of gamification and informal online environments in education to 3D digital models.

Dr Michael Pickering has worked extensively with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander organizations, State and Territory Heritage Agencies, and museums across Australia. Dr Pickering moved to the National Museum of Australia as the Director of the Repatriation Program in 2001, later taking on the role of Head of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Program, from 2004 to 2011. He then moved to the Research Centre. From 2013 to 2014 he was the Acting Head of the Australian Society and History Program. In 2015 he took up the position as Head of Research Centre. From 2018 to 2022 he was the Senior Repatriation Advisor at the National Museum of Australia. He now works as an independent heritage researcher.

Dr Pickering is an Honorary Associate Professor with the Department of Museum and Heritage Studies at the Australian National University, an Honorary Professor with the Global Station for Indigenous Studies and Cultural Diversity, Hokkaido University, Japan, and a Partner with the Centre for Australian Studies, Cologne University, Germany. Dr. Pickering is collaborating closely with Prof. Adone and team.

Dr Pickering is on the editorial boards of the journals ‘Museum Management and Curatorship’ and ‘Museums and Social Issues’.  He is an ‘Expert Examiner’ under the Australian Protection of Moveable Cultural Heritage Act 1986.

He has a wide range of research interests and has published articles on topics ranging from material culture, cannibalism, settlement patterns, museum exhibitions, museum ethics, workplace health and safety, and repatriation.

Research Field(s)

Repatriation, Cannibalism, museum management of Indigenous cultural heritage, Hunter-gatherer settlement patterns.

Her research interests lie in Indigenous Futurisms, cli-fi, posthumanism, environmental colonialism, and decolonial ecology. Her most recent monograph in English is Futuristic Worlds in Australian Aboriginal Fiction (Peter Lang, 2017). Some of her recent papers in English include “Wording Mute Posthumanism in Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book”, Antipodes, 36/1, 2022: 107-122; “Indigenous Futurism” in The Cambridge History of the Australian Novel, ed. David Carter (Cambridge University Press, 2023); and “Claire G. Coleman’s Terra Nullius: Welcome to Australia’s ‘future past’” in Mapping the Megatext: Essays on Global Science Fiction, ed. Dale Knickerbocker (University of Wales Press, forthcoming). She has taught and lectured at universities in France, Croatia, Czechia, Italy, Hungary, Lithuania, Japan and Australia, and has presented at over thirty international conferences. She chairs the European Association for Studies of Australia (EASA) and serves on the advisory board of Peter Lang series World Science Fiction Studies. Her current project is on a third monograph on Anthropocene fiction and film, with a focus on Indigenous cultural production. Professor Polak is collaborating closely with Professor Adone and team.

She holds a PhD in Linguistics from the Australian National University (Canberra, 2014), with additional background in Philosophy (PhD Université Paris-8, 2005). She has extensive experience working with speakers of Indigenous languages in communities of inland Arnhem Land, in the Top End of Australia. In line with her combined linguistic, philosophical and anthropological interests, Maïa Ponsonnet’s research concerns the role of language in humans’ lives, and in particular how language may channel or modify people’s experience and management of emotions. She is the author of a number of articles and books, in particular a 2014 monograph on the encoding of emotions in Dalabon (Arnhem Land) and a 2019 monograph on a comparison between Dalabon and Kriol, the creole that has replaced Dalabon. Some of her work is also available via the website: www.EmotionLanguageAustralia.com. Maïa has worked closely with Prof. Adone at CAS.

John is a nationally, and increasing internationally, recognised teaching and multidisciplinary research scholar. His teaching is directed toward Education for Sustainability Development  and Community Engagement and Citizen Science. A substantial body of his research is directed toward institutional and education responses to climate change and the role of science education in future environments. John’s current research projects are centred Citizen Projects and embedded  John and his colleagues as leaders in the emerging field of Wildlife Sociology

John also is a strong advocate for the integration of First Nation’s knowledges and understandings to be incorporated  all mainstream science offerings. John is an active member of CSU’s Indigenous Board of Studies; Human Research Ethics Committee; and, University Senate.

She is the author of Practices of Proximity: The Appropriation of English in Australian Indigenous Literature (2010), which won the ESSE Book Award in 2012. The book investigated the appropriation of the English language taking place in the Australian literary contact zone between an official ‘white’ Australia – the apparent owners of both the land and the English language – and Australian Indigenous peoples. Documenting language variation and rescuing the debate from seemingly peripheral locations – the ‘empty’ Great Sandy Desert, or the abject urban margin – it insisted on the complex, ultimately open-ended and multilateral ownership of the English language by all who inhabit its intersubjective space, rendering the inherited authority of who ‘owns’ meaning problematical and ethically suspect. Her second monograph, Global English, Transnational Flows: Australia and New Zealand in Translation, addressed the central, yet unresolved, theoretical debate concerning the translation of post-colonial English language varieties. Her recent research centers on Climate Change and Climate-induced Migration Discourse, Populist Discourse, and Social-media Activism with many case-studies from the Australian context.  Her most recent monograph, The Evaluation of Risk in Institutional and Newspaper Discourse: the Case of Climate Change and Migration, provides an analysis of the evaluation of climate change and climate-induced migration risks in institutional and newspaper discourse. Katherine is collaborating closely with Prof. Adone and team.

Her research focuses on oral history and cultural change of indigenous communities in Australia, New Zealand and Samoa, as well as the colonial history of Oceania. She was Visiting Fellow at the Research School of Pacific Studies at the Australian National University, Canberra. In 2004, she received her Ph.D. She conducted several ethnological research trips to Australia, New Zealand, Samoa, and Hawai’i, where she worked with people from Indigenous cultures. She has worked with these communities to repatriate Ancestral Remains from the (SES) and has ongoing work on provenance research as well as restitution and repatriation. Dr. Scheps-Bretschneider is collaborating closely with Prof. Adone and team.

She has published numerous articles on postcolonial theory and literatures, especially on Australian literature and culture. Together with Elisabeth Bähr, she has edited the collection of essays by Australian and German scholars, ‘And there‘ll be NO dancing’: Perspectives on Policies Impacting Indigenous Australia since 2007 (Cambridge Scholars 2017). She has served on the board of the German Association for Australian Studies (GASt) and is a member of the association’s Academic Advisory Council as well as co-editor of its book series KOALAS.

More recently, she has specialized in the field of Precarity Studies and co-edited the collections of essays Ecocritical Explorations of the Climate Crisis: Planetary Precarity and Future Habitability (Routledge 2025), Representing Poverty and Precarity in a Postcolonial World (Brill 2022), and Representing Poverty in the Anglophone Postcolonial World (V&R unipress/Bonn University Press 2021). She serves on the steering committee of the international network “Challenging Precarity”.

He holds a Bachelor of Adult Education and a Masters in Education (Aboriginal Studies) and has extensive experience in teaching Aboriginal art, culture and heritage in Australia and abroad.

In his role as a cultural practitioner, Jimmy’s scope ranges from early childhood, primary, highschool to university, TAFE and community groups. He currently works with the Australian Museum, EORA TAFE Redfern, and other agencies that employ him as a cultural educator. Jimmy believes that through education about Aboriginal history, culture and knowledge, we can bring about social change: “People don’t fully understand the depth and breadth of Aboriginal culture or Australian history and therefore make assumptions and believe the negative stereotypes that exist in Australia. Education is the key to changing this problem.”  Jimmy has particular passion in Aboriginal science and technology including Astronomy and traditional land usage. Further to this he is keen to share the strength of epistemologies and Aboriginal ways of knowing and doing. Jimmy is passionate about health particularly inspiration from Eastern (Asian) cultures that look at health and well being from a holistic perspective which is related to many Indigenous knowledge’s about traditional health.

Before joining Heidelberg University in 2014, he was Postdoctoral Fellow of the Graduate School Society and Culture in Motion, Martin Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg (Germany) and Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow of the Social Policy Research Centre at the University of New South Wales (Australia). Dr. Wergin’s work is located at the intersections of heritage, culture and ecology.

He has published widely on diverse topics such as music, tourism, heritage, environmental activism, resource exploration, as well as more general theoretical aspects of anthropology and transcultural studies research in Australia and elsewhere. Among others, he is author of Der Ruf des Schneckenhorns: Hermann Klaatsch (1863-1916). Ein Heidelberger Wissenschaftler in Nordwestaustralien (with Corinna Erckenbrecht, HeiUP 2018), co-editor of Musical Performance and the Changing City (with Fabian Holt, Routledge 2013) and the Special Issue “Materialities of Tourism” (with Stephen Muecke, Tourist Studies 2014). In his current project, he examines the restitution of artefacts and repatriation of human remains as transcultural processes of connectivity and healing. Dr. Wergin is collaborating closely with Prof. Adone and team.

A trained Americanist, she is interested in the transnational entanglements of Atlantic slavery. While her previous work examined American antislavery literature and looked at, among other literary genres, German immigrant women’s fiction in the United States, her current research explores German immigrants’ recruitment to and involvement in Australia’s cotton and sugar economies and how Atlantic discourses of anti/slavery reverberated in multifaceted ways in German immigrant writings in Australia. She is also working with Emma Christopher (UNSW) on a project tentatively entitled “Atlantic Slavery’s Long Shadow in the Pacific.”

At Mirima Dawang Woorlab-gerring, Brandon facilitated a team of Miriwoong language teachers at the Miriwoong Language Nest Program, which teaches the language to school children in Kununurra. Brandon’s project investigates ways of understanding how language revitalisation programs work in Australian contexts, redefining what makes language revitalisation efforts successful in terms of how language communities see the future of their languages, and co-designing language learning programs with the local communities. His research seeks to establish theories on which methods of language revitalisation are most effective and how contextual factors of program implementation affect outcomes. Using the tools of realist inquiry, this project intends to gain a deeper understanding of how language programs work, for whom, and in which circumstances, as well as facilitate development of language programs that are sensitive to local contexts and in doing so, are more effective. Brandon is collaborating closely with Prof. Adone and team.

He received the Rubinlicht Prize for his outstanding contribution to Yiddish scholarship in 2023. He is the Chair of the Jury for the Jeonju International Awards for Promoting Intangible Cultural Heritage.

Professor Dr Dr Zuckermann is the author of Revivalistics: From the Genesis of Israeli to Language Reclamation in Australia and Beyond (Oxford University Press, 2020), the seminal bestseller Israelit Safa Yafa (Israeli – A Beautiful Language; Am Oved, 2008), Language Contact and Lexical Enrichment in Israeli Hebrew (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 多源造词研究 (A Study of Multisourced Neologization; East China Normal University Press, 2021), three chapters of the Israeli Tingo (Keren, 2011) and Engaging – A Guide to Interacting Respectfully and Reciprocally with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander People, and their Arts Practices and Intellectual Property (2015). He is a co-author of the first online Dictionary of the Barngarla Aboriginal Language (2018), and the Barngarla trilogy: (1) Barngarlidhi Manoo (‘Speaking Barngarla Together’): Barngarla Alphabet & Picture Book, 2019; (2) Mangiri Yarda (‘Healthy Country’): Barngarla Wellbeing and Nature, 2021; and (3) Wardlada Mardinidhi (‘Bush Healing’): Barngarla Plant Medicines, 2023. He is the editor of Burning Issues in Afro-Asiatic Linguistics (2012), Jewish Language Contact (2014), a special issue of the International Journal of the Sociology of Language, and the co-editor of Endangered Words, Signs of Revival (2014).

Professor Zuckermann was elected fellow of the Academy of Oriental Scholars (Shanghai) in 2011 and the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS) in 2014. He was President of the Australian Association for Jewish Studies in 2017-2023, President of AustraLex in 2013-2015, Chief Investigator in an NHMRC research project assessing language revival and mental health in 2017-2021, Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Fellow in 2007–2011, and Gulbenkian Research Fellow at Churchill College Cambridge in 2000-2004.

He has been an elected board member of the Foundation for Endangered Languages (FEL). He has been Consultant and Expert Witness in (forensic) linguistics, (corpus) lexicography and trademarks in court cases all over the globe.

Professor Zuckermann is the founder of Revivalistics, a new global, comparative, trans-disciplinary field of enquiry surrounding language reclamation, revitalization and reinvigoration. On 14 September 2011 he launched, with the Barngarla Aboriginal communities of Eyre Peninsula, South Australia, the reclamation of the Barngarla language. He has been closely involved with many other language revivals in Australia (e.g. Bayoongoo, Western Australia, and Nharangga, South Australia) and all over the globe.

Zuckermann is Professor (Level E) at Flinders University (Adelaide), Adjunct Professor at the Institute for Positive Psychology and Education, Australian Catholic University (Sydney) and Visiting Professor at Middlebury College (Vermont, USA) and Weizmann Institute of Science (Israel). He has taught at the University of Adelaide (2011-2024), University of Queensland (2006-2011), University of Cambridge, National University of Singapore, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, East China Normal University, Shanghai International Studies University, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and University of Miami. He has been Research Fellow at Tel Aviv University; Rockefeller Foundation’s Study and Conference Center, Villa Serbelloni, Bellagio, Italy; Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin; Israel Institute for Advanced Studies, Hebrew University of Jerusalem; Institute for Advanced Study, La Trobe University (Melbourne); Mahidol University (Bangkok); and Kokuritsu Kokugo Kenkyūjo (National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics, Tokyo). He has been Denise Skinner Scholar at St Hugh’s College Oxford, Scatcherd European Scholar at the University of Oxford, and scholar at the United World College of the Adriatic (Italy).