Adjunct staff

Brit is the Senior Curator of Archaeology at the Queensland Museum, and a Partner Investigator for Australian Research Council (ARC) Centre of Excellence for Australian Biodiversity and Heritage (CABAH). She is passionate about people, the lives and histories of objects and archives, Queensland social history, decorative arts, and digital humanities.

Bianka is an adjunct lecturer in History. She is an active researcher in themes aligning with JCU’s tropical agenda: global sugar industry and Australian migration history. Bianka’s work has been published in high quality journals and books and is deposited in full with JCU Research Online.

Ruth’s central research interest is in the fields of arts and cultural management, cultural policy, cultural diplomacy, and cultural leadership. She is concerned with the relationship between governmental policies and their effects on the arts internationally and over time. Ruth is frequently invited to lecture internationally on this subject.

Michele is an experienced Archaeologist and the Director of North QLD Cultural Heritage Pty Ltd, a Townsville-based consulting company. She is passionate about archaeology and Indigenous heritage management, with a strong commitment to Indigenous reconciliation. Michele’s research interests include coastal archaeology and Indigenous maritime adaptions in the tropical coastal environment.

Wayne is a researcher with degrees in English and Politics. His book, The Ego Made Manifest: Max Stirner, Egoism, and the Modern Manifesto (2023) was described by Emeritus Professor John Carroll as “a masterpiece in the history of ideas.” His research focuses on the radical poet and nationalist, Arthur Desmond.

Alice is passionate about working with people, to understand and meet their aspirations for heritage projects on Country. Alice developed her expertise of cultural heritage work through consulting, administering legislation and research. Her thesis, investigating rock art, dendroglyphs and social identity in the Wet Tropics, won the 2018 Dean’s Award.

Iain is an Adjunct Senior Research Fellow focused on quantitative social-ecological systems. His research examines how we can use information about where marine organisms live to help guide evidence-based decisions that improve the lives of people that depend on those organisms. Iain’s research areas include ecology, conservation, and fisheries sciences.

Garry is interested in criminology, criminal justice, and social justice. His research focus has included major projects on youth crime, crime prevention, correctional practices, penology, and Sudanese refugees in Australia. Garry’s research interests include the social construction of social problems, criminological research, and evaluation research.

Luca has been working on the Zamucoan family, whose languages (Ayoreo and Chamacoco) are endangered and underdescribed. His book, Inflectional morphology in the Zamucoan languages (2016), is considered the most detailed morphological description of a South American language family. He is also working on non-verbal predication from a typological perspective.

Nicole is a Program Advisor for the Roderick Centre for Australian Literature and Creative Writing. She holds a PhD in Creative Writing. Nicole’s current areas of interest include creative non-fiction and crime fiction.

Ryan’s teaching and research focusses on creativity, the creative industries, and the ways in which the arts are taught at all levels. His goal is to educate people about the critical importance of creativity for resolving some of the world’s greatest challenges.

Glenn’s an Associate Professor of Sociology and Criminology. His research interests are youth crime, educational disadvantage and First Nations people and the criminal justice system. He’s worked extensively with government and non-government agencies on research projects and is working on developing a seamless throughcare model for young people exiting detention.

Jennifer is an applied anthropologist who seeks to contribute to sustainable livelihoods by advocating for gender equity and participatory community engagement in all collaborations. She is an expert consultant working with multilateral organisations and government partners. Jennifer’s research interests include PNG, social inclusion, and community-led development in the Pacific.

Claire is an award-winning educator with a passion for Shakespeare. Her research findings on Shakespeare have been widely published, including her recent book Shakespeare and Place-Based Learning (CUP 2023). Claire’s research interests include place studies, environmental and blue humanities and the health humanities.

Sylvia’s research has explored many works of fiction including Carole McDonnell’s “Wind Follower”, the works of Ursula K Le Guin, Peter Jackson’s “Lord of the Rings”, Lois McMaster Bujold’s “The Curse of Chalion” and Barbara Hambly’s New Orleans detective novels. Sylvia’s research interests include Australian science fiction and modern fantasy.

Matthew has been involved in projects all over the world, including in the Autonomous Region of Bougainville, East New Britian, Jiwaka, Madang, Milne Bay, and New Ireland. His research interests include Papua New Guinea, archaeomalacology, genomics, ethnography, and prehistoric human adaption to depauperate environments.

Harry is an Archaeologist, who is most well-known for his contribution to and support of, the theory of hunter-gatherer intensification by Aboriginal Australians. His research interests include Australian archaeology, prehistory, anthropology, and the archaeology of hunter-gather society.

Anita is a cultural Anthropologist whose interdisciplinary work engages material culture, art practice, science, and environment. Ethnographic interests include Indonesia, Singapore, and Malaysia. Anita has had exhibitions in NY, LA, Paris, Malaysia, and Sydney. She has published widely and is the Chief Editor of eTropic: journal of studies in the Tropics.

Russell is a highly accomplished author, who published the award-winning books Indifferent Inclusion: Aboriginal People and the Australian Nation (2011) and Imagined Destinies: Aboriginal Australians and the Doomed Race Theory (1993). His recent research and publications are mainly on the history of birdwatching in Australia.

Lyndon is an award-winning author, skilled researcher, and tertiary teacher. His book, Northern Dreams: the Politics of Northern Development in Australia (2018), won the 2019 Chief Minister’s Northern Territory History Book Award. Recently Lyndon published Robert Philp and the Politics of Development (2022).

Richard is a highly regarded leader in the Humanities field, specialising in Historical and Literacy Studies. He is an accomplished author, editor, and educator on an international scale. Richard’s research interests include cultural history, medical humanities, history of emotions, Australian studies, digital humanities, and studies in war and peace.

Marie has over a decade of experience as a foreign correspondent for various francophone and anglophone news media outlets. She has been teaching journalism and communication courses in Australia since 2009. Marie’s research interests include media, communication, political and socio-cultural issues and globalisation in post-colonial contexts and non-Western countries.

Ashley currently works at the Brisbane Campus and supervises the combined degree of Master of Education and Master of Business Education. He teaches into the subjects Educational Leadership and Education for Sustainability. Ashley’s research interests concern Australian Higher Education and how expectations and experiences of international students are managed.

Ton has widely published his anthropological research findings. Ton’s research interests include design anthropology, cultural heritage in Melanesia, preserving artefacts using digital technologies, the arts, culture and society, and ethnography.

Fiona is an Environmental Scientist, who has undertaken research across the globe, including dating rock art sites in Australia, Iron Age burials in the UK and Neolithic burials from Portugal. Her research interests include archaeological science, oceanography, Australian archaeology and the archaeology of New Guinea and the Pacific Islands.

Sophie is the Curator of First Nations and Social History at Queensland Museum, Tropics. Sophie is also currently Acting Senior Museum Development Officer for Central Queensland. Sophie’s curatorial and project management practice prioritises community-led research and engagement. She is an advocate for accessibility and knowledge sharing between people and collections.

Christian is an Archaeologist, with experience in assessing cultural heritage sites across the globe and was involved in the inscription of ‘Rock Islands / Southern Lagoon area’ site in Palau into the UNESCO World Heritage list. Christian’s research includes the study of prehistoric movement, and geochemical sourcing of archaeological materials.

Robin is an Anthropologist and Latin Americanist, with an interest in political theory, especially in relation to biopolitics, democracy, memory, and citizenship. His research explores what being a citizen means in different places and at different points in time. Robin also researches medical anthropology including drug use and shamanism.

Daniel’s research has focused on the Holocene epoch, including sea-level changes, coastal landscape evolution, human occupation of Northern Australia and changes in shellfishing behaviours. Daniel’s research interests include Aboriginal stone-walled intertidal fishtrap morphology, radiocarbon dating, changes in vegetation, palynology, and the southern Gulf of Carpentaria, Australia.

Michael is a partner Investigator at Centre of Excellence for Australian Biodiversity and Heritage (CABAH), and the Director of Scarp Archaeology. He specialises in remote arid and semi-arid environments and has excavated hundreds of archaeological sites in the Pilbara region, with many being over 30,000 years in antiquity.

Chrystopher’s research field is the cultural relationships between people, place, and literature, some of which he explored in his 2020 book Cyclone Country in relation to the tropics. His current research project is the life and work of Louis Becke (1855-1913), Australia's most internationally renowned author of the South Pacific.

Cheryl Taylor, B.A. Hons, MA., Ph. D., lectured in English and other literatures at JCU in Townsville, where she is an adjunct Associate Professor. From 2008 to 2016 she was a research fellow at Griffith University. Her research fields are Middle English, Medieval Latin, and Australian literature.

Daniela is a Creative Visual Anthropologist. She established The AV Lab and was a founding member of the Anthropological Laboratory for Tropical Audiovisual Research (ALTAR). Along with her interest in different cultures, Daniela explores the relationship between anthropology and visual communication, between written accounts, photography, and anthropological filmmaking.

Alex’s undergraduate and graduate work in linguistics focused on the documentation of Southern Pomo, a recently extinct language native to California’s greater Santa Rosa area. Additionally, he works on Northeastern Pomo, a related language with no living speakers. Alex’s research interests include writing systems, phonetics, historical linguistics, and lexicography.

Jan is a north Queenslander who became fascinated by the region's history and has been researching and teaching it ever since. Her principal research area is mining history, but she is also interested in other regional themes such as environmental history, specifically invasive species.

As a part of his PhD, Nathan created the Hmong Medical Corpus, a gold-standard biomedical corpus with an integrated AI-based question-answering system, the first of its kind for a low-resource minority language. His research interests include computational linguistics, machine learning, speech signal processing and big data analytics.

Patrick is an Adjunct Lecturer with degrees in both History and Politics. His primary research focus is the political history of development in northern Australia and the role of the north in federal policy. He has teaching experience in history, politics, and media studies.

Katherine is a zooarchaeologist who specialises in coastal and submerged palaeolandscape archaeology. Her research takes a holistic approach combining archaeological, anthropological, biological, and ecological data to reconstruct past environments, examine long-term human-environmental ecodynamics, and to understand site formation and preservation processes.

Michael’s an Anthropologist, interested in the history and ethnography of Papua New Guinea. He’s written about and published extensively on the politics of resource extraction from the PNG rainforests, the legacies of colonialism, the World Heritage values of the Nakanai Mountains, transnational and intergenerational care, and the Chinese in PNG.