Prof. Martina Horáková, Masaryk University, Czech Republic

Masaryk University (MUNI) offers Australian Studies at the Faculty of Arts, the Department of English and American Studies. Several undergraduate and postgraduate courses offer a survey of Australian cultural history, literature, and film. There is also a strong focus on Australian Indigenous cultural production. Research in Australian studies, conducted by Dr. Martina Horakova at DEAS, focuses mainly on contemporary Australian settler memoirs, Australian women’s (travel) writing, and Indigenous narratives.

Prof. Salhia Ben-Messahel, University of Toulon, France

Prof. Salhia Ben-Messahel is a Professor of Anglophone Literatures at the University of Toulon in France, where she also serves as Dean of the Faculty of Languages. Her research focuses on Australian fiction, postcolonial literature, and cultural studies.

Prof. Ben-Messahel brings extensive expertise in academic program evaluation, having served on the Haut Conseil de l’évaluation de la recherche et de l’enseignement supérieur (HCERES – High Council for the Evaluation of Research and Higher Education) in France. Within the cooperation she represents the University of Toulon in overseeing the trial phase of the future study program, contributing to the design and implementation of evaluation processes.

Prof. Iva Polak, University of Zagreb, Croatia

Iva Polak is Associate Professor in the Department of English, University of Zagreb, Croatia, where she teaches courses on Australian literature and film, Indigenous Australian storytelling, theory and history of the fantastic, contemporary British fiction, and Anthropocene fiction and film. 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, 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 sits on the advisory board of Peter Lang series World Science Fiction Studies. She is currently working on a third monograph focused on Anthropocene fiction and film, with emphasis on Indigenous cultural production.