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Speakers

The Asian Conference on Asian Studies (ACAS) is an interdisciplinary conference held alongside The Asian Conference on Cultural Studies (ACCS). Keynote, Featured and Spotlight Speakers will provide a variety of perspectives from different academic and professional backgrounds. Registration for either conference will allow delegates to attend sessions in the other.

This page provides information about presenters. For details of presentations and other programming, please visit the Programme page.

Speakers

  • Sue Ballyn
    Sue Ballyn
    University of Barcelona, Spain
  • Grayson Cooke
    Grayson Cooke
    Southern Cross University, Australia
  • Donald E. Hall
    Donald E. Hall
    Binghamton University, United States
  • Alex del Olmo
    Alex del Olmo
    Underwater Filmmaker
  • Max Pensky
    Max Pensky
    Binghamton University, United States

Become a Speaker

Excellent plenary speakers are central to our conferences, ensuring that timely, innovative and engaging content is presented to our audiences around the world. If you would like to be considered for a speaking slot at one of our conferences, please apply below.

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Previous Speakers

View details of speakers at past ACAS conferences via the links below.

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ACAS2016 ACAS2015 ACAS2014
ACAS2013 ACAS2012 ACAS2011
Sue Ballyn
University of Barcelona, Spain

Biography

Sue Ballyn is the Founder and Honorary Director of the Centre for Australian and Transnational Studies Centre at the University of Barcelona, Spain, from where she graduated with a BA in 1982. Her MA thesis on the writings of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes won the Faculty prize in 1983. In 1986, she won the Faculty prize again, this time for her PhD thesis on Australian poetry, the first PhD on Australian literature in Spain.

She joined the English and German Philology Department on graduation in 1982 and has remained at the university ever since. In 1990, she founded the Australian Studies Program which was recognised as an official University of Barcelona Observatory-Studies Centre in 2000, known as CEA, Observatorio Centre d’Estudis Australians. It is the only Australian Studies Centre in Spain and one of the most active in Europe.

Over the last twenty-five years, Sue Ballyn’s research has been focused on foreign convicts transported to Australia, in particular Spanish, Portuguese, Hispanics and Sephardim, and she works closely with the Female Convicts Research Centre, Tasmania. She has published and lectured widely in the area, very often in collaboration with Professor Lucy Frost. May 25, 2018 will see the publication of a book on Adelaide de la Thoreza, a Spanish convict, written by herself and Lucy Frost.

More recently she has become involved in a project on ageing in literature DEDAL-LIT at Lleida University, Spain, which in turn formed part of a European project on ageing: SIforAge. As part of this project she is working on Human Rights and the Elderly, an area she started to research in 1992. In 2020, a book of interviews with elderly women, with the working title Stories of Experience, will be published as a result of this project. These oral stories are drawn from field work she has carried out in Barcelona.

She was recently involved in a ministry funded Project, run out of the Australian Studies Centre and headed by Dr Bill Phillips, on Postcolonial Crime Fiction (POCRIF). This last project has inevitably intertwined itself with her work on convicts and Australia. Her present work focuses on Sephardi Jews in Asian diaspora, and the construction of ageing.

Keynote Presentation (2019) | Can we agree to disagree? Unreclaimable Futures

Previous Presentations

Spotlight Presentation (2017) | “(…) For those in peril on the sea”: The Important Role of Surgeons on Convict Transports
Featured Panel Presentation (2017) | The Challenges of Doing Cultural Studies Today
Grayson Cooke
Southern Cross University, Australia

Biography

Born in New Zealand and based in Australia, Grayson Cooke is an interdisciplinary scholar, media artist and Associate Professor of Media at Southern Cross University. Grayson has presented media art and live audio-visual performance works in Australia and internationally, having exhibited and performed in major international festivals such as the Japan Media Arts Festival, the WRO Media Art Biennale and the Imagine Science Film Festival in New York. He works regularly with scientific tools and materials to explore new ways of understanding and exploring the environment and human impacts upon it. As a scholar he has published widely in academic journals on topics including art-science collaboration and creative research methods. He holds an interdisciplinary PhD from Concordia University in Montreal.

Donald E. Hall
Binghamton University, United States

Biography

Donald E. Hall is Provost and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs at Binghamton University (SUNY), USA. He was formerly Dean of the Faculty of Arts, Sciences, and Engineering at the University of Rochester, USA, and held a previous position as Dean of Arts and Sciences at Lehigh University, USA. Provost Hall has published widely in the fields of British Studies, Gender Theory, Cultural Studies, and Professional Studies. Over the course of his career, he served as Jackson Distinguished Professor of English and Chair of the Department of English (and previously Chair of the Department of Foreign Languages) at West Virginia University. Before that, he was Professor of English and Chair of the Department of English at California State University, Northridge, where he taught for 13 years. He is a recipient of the University Distinguished Teaching Award at CSUN, was a visiting professor at the National University of Rwanda, was Lansdowne Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the University of Victoria (Canada), was Fulbright Distinguished Chair in Cultural Studies at Karl Franzens University in Graz, Austria, and was Fulbright Specialist at the University of Helsinki. He has also taught in Sweden, Romania, Hungary, and China. He served on numerous panels and committees for the Modern Language Association (MLA), including the Task Force on Evaluating Scholarship for Tenure and Promotion, and the Convention Program Committee. In 2012, he served as national President of the Association of Departments of English. From 2013-2017, he served on the Executive Council of the MLA.

His current and forthcoming work examines issues such as professional responsibility and academic community-building, the dialogics of social change and activist intellectualism, and the Victorian (and our continuing) interest in the deployment of instrumental agency over our social, vocational, and sexual selves. Among his many books and editions are the influential faculty development guides, The Academic Self and The Academic Community, both published by Ohio State University Press. Subjectivities and Reading Sexualities: Hermeneutic Theory and The Future of Queer Studies were both published by Routledge Press. Most recently he and Annamarie Jagose, of the University of Auckland, co-edited a volume titled The Routledge Queer Studies Reader. Though he is a full-time administrator, he continues to lecture worldwide on the value of a liberal arts education and the need for nurturing global competencies in students and interdisciplinary dialogue in and beyond the classroom.

Professor Donald E. Hall is a Vice-President of the IAFOR Academic Governing Board. He is Chair of the Arts, Humanities, Media & Culture division of the International Academic Advisory Board.

Keynote Presentation (2023) | There Is No New Normal

Previous Presentations

Keynote Presentation (2020) | Dislocation/Invitation
Keynote Presentation (2019) | Resisting the Cynical Turn: Projections of a Desirably Queer Future
Keynote Presentation (2018) | The Cities We Fled
Featured Panel Presentation (2017) | The Challenges of Doing Cultural Studies Today
Alex del Olmo
Underwater Filmmaker

Biography

With an interest in underwater life from a very young age, Alex became a certified diver at the age of 18.

Having earned a degree in Audiovisual Communication, two master's degrees in Creative Documentary and Production & Directing in Audiovisual Fiction, as well as a PhD in Cinema and Audiovisuals, Alex's academic background provided a solid foundation to work in the realm of television, film and documentary-making for over 25 years.

Alex secured full-time tenure as a PhD Professor at the Tecnocampus-Universitat Pompeu Fabra, but ultimately decided to pursue his dream of travelling and filming in the Indo-Pacific, where he became the cruise director for the renowned Seven Seas liveaboard. This proved to be a perfect fit, allowing him to combine his passion with his work as an underwater cameraman for production companies, television and documentaries.

Alex has been filming underwater for over 15 years, logged over 8,000 dives, and has a theoretical background that is unique in the underwater profession. As such, he has mastered the audiovisual arts to create compelling stories specialising in filming all kinds of marine life in the most challenging underwater environments worldwide.

Alex's work earned him awards prestigious from underwater image festivals all over the world, and his films have been broadcast on a variety of national and international television networks worldwide.

Max Pensky
Binghamton University, United States

Biography

Max Pensky is Co-Director of the Institute for Genocide and Mass Atrocity Prevention (I-GMAP) at Binghamton University, the State University of New York, United States, where he is also a Professor of Philosophy. He oversees multiple research initiatives at I-GMAP, including projects on forced displacement and international refugee law. His published research focuses on international criminal law, transitional justice, and political theory. His books include Authoritarianism: Three Inquiries in Critical Theory (University of Chicago Press, 2018) (with Wendy Brown and Peter Gordon), The Ends of Solidarity (State University of New York Press, 2009), and Melancholy Dialectics: Walter Benjamin and the Play of Mourning (University of Massachusetts Pr, 1993). He has held fellowships at Johann-Wolfgang Goethe University Frankfurt, Cornell University, and Oxford University.