Encounters: place | situation | context

Marion May Campbell is currently an honorary fellow supervising graduate Creative Writing students at the University of Melbourne. She initially studied French Literature and gained a Maitrise on Mallarme's Poetics from the University of Provence, 1973.More recently she gained her PhD on the topic of The Problem of the Poetic Revolutionary: Intertextuality & Subversion from Victoria University, which awarded her the Medal for Academic Excellence 2011. Her four novels (Lines of Flight, Not Being Miriam, Prowler and Shadow Thief) were shortlisted for Australian awards and she was twice short-listed for the Canada-Australia Literary Award. Not Being Miriam won the Western Australian literary Week Award in 1988. She has also written poetry, works for the theatre, essays and reviews. The cross genre work Fragments from a Paper Witch was shortlisted for the Innovation category in the 2010 Adelaide Festival Literary Awards. Her most recent publication is 'if not in paint' [poem], Electio Editions, 2011.The novella konkretion, which was part of the PhD project, will appear with UWAP late 2012. konkretion explores the relations of poetics and revolution, staging a dialogue between two contemporary writers around a poem sequence revisiting the Baader-Meinhof group with a special focus on Ulrike Meinhof and Gudrun Ensslin.

Darren Tofts is Professor of Media and Communications, Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne.
He is a well-known cultural critic who writes regularly for a range of national and international publications on issues to do with cyberculture, new media arts, remix culture and literary and cultural theory. Darren teaches in the areas of Australian and International media arts, postmodernism and the historical avant-garde, literary history and twentieth century writing, critical and cultural theory and cyberculture.
He is the author (with artist Murray McKeich) of Memory Trade. A Prehistory of Cyberculture (Sydney, Interface Books, 1998) and Parallax. Essays on Art, Culture and Technology (Sydney, Interface Books 1999) and Interzone: Media Arts in Australia (Thames and Hudson: Sydney, 2005). With Annemarie Jonson and Alessio Cavallaro he edited Prefiguring Cyberculture: An Intellectual History (Power Publications/MIT Press, 2003) and with Lisa Gye edited Illogic of Sense: The Gregory L. Ulmer Remix (ALT-X Press, 2007).
He is a member of a number of national and international editorial boards including Postmodern Culture, Continuum. The Australian Journal of Media and Culture, fibreculture journal, Hypermedia Joyce Studies, Rhizomes: Critical Studies in Emerging Knowledge, Scan Journal of Media Arts Culture and 21C and RealTime, where he is a commissioning editor for new media arts.

Julian Meyrick

Incoming Professor of Creative Arts, Flinders University. Honorary Associate, La Trobe University. Honorary Fellow, Deakin Universities. Associate Director and Literary Advisor at Melbourne Theatre Company 2002-2007. Kickhouse theatre artistic director 1989-1998. Julian has directed many award-winning theatre productions, including Angela's Kitchen for the Griffin, which attracted the 2012 Helpmann for Best Australian Work. For fortyfive Downstairs: Whiteley's Incredible Blue, Do Not Go Gentle...; for MTC: Tribes, The Birthday Party, Thom Pain, Enlightenment, The Ghost Writer, A Single Act, Cruel and Tender, Dinner, The Memory of Water, Blue/Orange and Frozen; for STC: The Vertical Hour, Doubt and The Snow Queen; for the Griffin: October; and many other new Australian works such as Luke Devenish's Grace Among the Christians, St. Rose of Lima and Fun and Games with the Oresteia. He directed Fever and the inaugural production of Who's Afraid of the Working Class? for the Melbourne Workers Theatre and won the 1998 Green Room Award for Best Director on the Fringe. He was responsible for expanding the Affiliate Writers Scheme at MTC and for initiating the Hard Lines new play program. He was a founding member and Deputy Chair of PlayWriting Australia 2004-2009. As a historian he has published an account of Nimrod Theatre, See How It Runs (2003), a history of MTC, The Drama Continues, a Currency House Platform Paper, Trapped By the Past, and academic articles on post-war Australian theatre, the theory-practice nexus, and contemporary dramaturgy. He is currently researching a series of case studies from Australian theatre in the 1980s and 1990s focusing on the relationship between cultural policy and creative practice.

Dr Patrick West

Senior Lecturer

Dr Katya Johanson

Dr Katya Johanson is a unit chair and teaches undergraduate and postgraduate Editing and Publishing units in the School of Communication and Creative Arts. She joined Deakin in 2004, having worked as a tutor at the University of Melbourne and as an editor in educational publishing. Katya maintains her industry links through active involvement in national and Victorian professional bodies.

Dr Cassandra Atherton

Dr Cassandra Atherton has established record of outstanding academic performance. Her PhD thesis, dealing with a previously neglected aspect of a major Australian writer, has appeared as a monograph published by Australian Scholarly Press. Several related articles have appeared in refereed journals. Work on a second book, dealing with the role of public intellectuals in the United States, is well-advanced.

Rhonda Dredge

PhD Student, English Program, La Trobe University

Ruby Todd

Ruby Todd is a Melbourne-based emerging writer of prose and poetry, currently undertaking a PhD in Creative Writing at Deakin University, where she is
conducting research in metaphysics, while writing her second novel.