Professor Elspeth Probyn

Professor of Gender and Cultural Studies.
Fellow of the Academy of the Humanities of Australia,
Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia

Elspeth Probyn has taught media studies, sociology, and literature in Canada and the US, and is now the Professor of Gender & Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney. She has held several prestigious visiting appointments, including the Mellon Distinguished Scholar, The University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, Honorary Professor, Albert Schweitzer International University, Geneva, and Visiting Scholar at the Rockefeller Bellagio Centre. In 2002 she was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, and in 2011 she was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Social Sciences. She serves on the editorial boards of seventeen international journals across the fields of geography, cultural theory, media, cultural and gender studies, and the sociology of agriculture.

Her work focuses on questions of identity, material, and cultural practices. She has theorized these through the grounded analyses of a wide-ranging set of areas: from eating, sex, emotions and affects, spatiality, and writing. Elspeth has published several books in these areas, including Sexing the Self, Outside Belongings, Carnal Appetites, Sexy Bodies, and Blush: Faces of Shame (University of Minnesota Press, and UNSW Press, 2005), which focuses on shame as a positive force in society. In addition she has published over a hundred refereed journal articles and book chapters on research funded by competitive government grants from Canada, Hong Kong, the UK, and Australia totaling over several million dollars. Her current research brings together her interests in a new way – focusing on questions of food security, she is bridging paradigms of production and consumption through the study of fish, fishing and fishers globally and in regional Australia. This study, which elaborates a more-than-human perspective and methodology of fish-human communities, reveals alternative forms of globalization forged through routes of trade and technology, and brings into focus questions of ethnicity and gender.

Education

• Ph.D (Communication), Concordia University, 1990.
• M.A. (Media Studies), Concordia University, 1986.
• Graduate Diploma in media theory and production, Concordia University, 1983.
• B.A. (French Literature), University of British Columbia, 1980.

Research interests: Spatial theory and hybrid geographies, gender, sexuality and cultural studies, food consumption and production, theories of embodiment, social science methodologies

Teaching & supervision interests: production & consumption; bio-cultural sustainability; food cultures; gender & ‘the more-than-human’; new ethnographies & writing; theories and methodologies of embodiment ...

Currently supervising:

• Kate Johnston, Following Tuna: sustainability, regulations, and community.
• Rany Pen, Inclusive governance and development from gender perspective - Cambodia beyond 2015 Cambodian Millennium Development Goals (CMDGs).

Books

• (2005) Blush. Faces of Shame. Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, and University of New South Wales Press.
• (2003) Remote Control. New Media, New Ethics. (eds. C. Lumby and E. Probyn). Melbourne: Cambridge University Press.
• (2000) Carnal Appetites: FoodSexIdentities. London and New York: Routledge.
• (1996) Outside Belongings. New York and London: Routledge.
• (1995) Sexy Bodies: The Strange Carnalities of Feminism. Elizabeth Grosz and Elspeth Probyn (eds). London and New York: Routledge.
• (1993) Sexing the Self: Gendered Positions in Cultural Studies. London and New York: Routledge.

Recent Refereed Publications

• 2012 ‘Sentiments oceaniques: les representations du “poisson durable”’, Poli-Image. 4.
• 2012 ‘Women Following Fish in a more-than-human world’, Gender, Culture & Place.
• 2012 ‘Conflicting fish tales: The muddied waters of the bio-cultural sustainability of fish.’ In Peter Howland and Carla Rey Vasquez (eds.) Food, Globalisation and Human Diversity, ICAF Food and Nutrition Series. Oxford: Berghahn Books.
• 2012 ‘Enganglement: fish, guts and bio-sustainability.’ In Emma Jayne Abotts and Anna Lavis (Eds.) Why We Eat, How We Eat: Contemporary Encounters Between Foods and Bodies, Critical Food Studies Series. Farnham, Ashgate.
• 2012 Ruth Holliday, Kate Hardy, David Bell, Emily Hunter, Meredith Jones, Elspeth Probyn and Jacqueline Sanchez Taylor, ‘Beauty and the Beach.’ In David Botterill, Guido Pennings and Tomas Mainil (Eds.) Medical Tourism and Transnational Health Care. Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan (forthcoming).
• 2012 ‘Sustaining fish-human communities? A more-than-human question.’ In Clive Pope & Bob Reinhart (Eds.) Contemporary Ethnography across Disciplines. Amsterdam: Springer.
• 2012 ‘Only connect? Communicating across the core-peripheries of geography and discipline.’ In Kylie Brass, Ian Donaldson, Marilyn Lake, Stephen Garton, and Mark Finnane (eds.) Taking Stock: The Humanities in Australian Life Since 1968. Perth: University of Western Australia Press.
• 2012 ‘In the Interests of Taste & Place: Economies of attachment’. In G. Pratt and V. Rosner (eds.) The Global Intimate. New York: Columbia University Press.
• 2012 ‘ Eating Roo: Of Things That Become Food’, Special Issue: ‘Food on the move’, New Formations. 74.
• 2011 ‘Swimming with Tuna: Human-ocean entanglements’, Australian Humanities Review. November. 51.
• 2011 ‘Glass Selves: Emotions, Subjectivity and the Research Process.’, in S. Gallagher (ed.) Oxford Handbook of the Self. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• 2011 ‘In the Interests of Taste & Place: Economies of attachment’, In Mandarin, translated by Z. T. Qiu China Media Report (Vol. 38, No. 2, summer 2011, p.84-95) China Media Report (Vol. 38, No. 2, summer 2011, p.84-95).
• 2011 (with Gilbert Caluya and Shvetal Yvas) ‘Affective Eduscapes: The case of Indian students within Australian Higher Education’, Cambridge Journal of Education.
• 2011 ‘Moving Food: of roo’, New Formations.
• 2010 ‘Researching Spaces of Intimacy’ (with C. Evers), Special Issue Emotion, Society & Space.
• 2008 ‘Silences behind the mantra: Critiquing Feminist Fat’, Feminism and Psychology. 18:3.
• 2008 ‘Troubling Safe Choices: Girls, Friendship, Constraint and Freedom’. South Atlantic Quarterly. Vol 107, No. 2. pp. 231-249
  .

Recent Keynote and Plenary Presentations at Refereed Conferences

• 2011 Keynote, ‘Pathways from production through distribution to consumption’, Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia Annual Symposium, Canberra.
• 2011 Keynote, ‘A fluid local: More-than-human ethnographic connections in food studies’,
• The Inaugural Conference of the Australasian-Pacific Journal of Regional Food Studies, Southern Cross University.
• 2011 Invited Speaker, ‘Re-orienting the more-than-human?Gender, ethnicity and politics in the anthroposcene’, Cultural Studies Association of Australasia, Adelaide.
• 2010 Keynote, New Methods in Ethnography, University of Waikato, New Zealand.
• 2010 Swimming with Tuna. 3rd International & Interdisciplinary Emotional Geographies Conference, Adelaide.
• 2010 ‘Alimentary Cultural Studies: Human-fish entanglements’, EAS HDR Annual Conference, Adelaide.

10 Career-best Outputs

1. Blush: Faces of Shame. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press. Co-publication with UNSW Press, 2005. The influential Blush: Faces of Shame is included in various syllabi, including the Feminist and Queer Theory Course at the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. It was the subject of a 2 day Mellon ‘State of the Art’ conference at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
2. Carnal Appetites: FoodSexIdentities. London and New York: Routledge, 2000. Carnal Appetites offers exciting means of thinking about food “outside of traditional anthropological and sociological frameworks”, as suggested by Elizabeth Edmonds of George Washington University.
3. ‘The Anorexic Body’, in Arthur and Marilouise Kroker (eds.), Body Invaders. New York: St. Martins Press. Considered a landmark article in formulating the sociology of the body and still widely influential in studies in anthropology, sociology, consumption studies, public health and addiction studies, feminism, law, and literature.
4. 'Mc-Identities: Food and the Familial Citizen’, Theory, Culture & Society, Vol 15: 155–173, 1998. ERA: A* A highly influential article in food studies, hybrid geographies, social theory, and cited in journals such as Studies in political economy Geographies of commodity chains, International Journal of Sociology of Agriculture and Food, and Progress in Human Geography. It resulted in an invitation to consult at the Migros Foundation, the largest food retailing company in Switzerland, on their environmental and community leadership plans.
5. Outside Belongings. London and New York: Routledge, 1996.
6. New Traditionalism and Post-Feminism: TV does the Home’, Screen. Vol 31, no 2, 1990. Reprinted in J. D’Acci, C. Brunsdon and L. Spigel (eds.) Feminist Television Criticism. Oxford University Press (1997).
7. [[i|Sexing the Self: Gendered Positions in Cultural Studies]]. London and New York: Routledge, 1993.
8. ‘The Spatial Imperative of Subjectivity’, in Kay Anderson, Mona Domosh, Steve Pile and Nigel Thrift (eds.) The Handbook of Cultural Geography. Sage, 2003.
9. ‘Technologizing the Self: A Future Anterior in Cultural Studies’, in Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson and Paula A. Treichler (eds.) Cultural Studies. London: Routledge, 1992.
10. “Eating for a Living: a Rhizo-ethology of bodies”, in H. Thomas and J. Ahmed (ed.) Cultural Bodies: Ethnography and Theory. Oxford and Boston: Blackwell. 2004.

Academic experience

• 2010-2011 Director of the Hawke Research Institute, The University of South Australia; 2010 Distinguished Researcher Award, The University of South Australia; 2009 - Research SA Chair Professor of Gender & Cultural Studies, Director of the Hawke Research Institute, and co-Director of the Centre for Postcolonial and Globalization Studies, The University of South Australia.; 2010 Resident Scholar, The Rockefeller Centre, Bellagio, Italy.; 2010 Distinguished Scholar, The University of South Australia.; From 2008: Board member, Food Standards Agency Australia and New Zealand.; 2007 Visiting Professor, The Institute of Geography, The University of Edinburgh.
• 2005 Mellon Distinguished Scholar, The University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

Editorial/Advisory Boards

• Emotion, Society & Space (Elseviers)
• Culture, Theory & Critique (Routledge)
• International Journal of the Sociology of Food and Agriculture (Official publication of the [[||Research Committee on Sociology of
  Agriculture and Food]] of the International Sociological Association)
• Cultural Studies (Taylor & Francis)
  Locale: the Australasian-Pacific Journal of Regional Food Studies
• Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies (Taylor & Francis)
• Feminist Media Studies (Routledge)
• Feminist Theory An International Interdisciplinary Journal
  (Sage)
• Environment and Planning D: Society & Space (Pion)
• The Journal of European Cultural Studies (Sage Publications)
• Sexualities (Sage Publications)
• Body & Society (Sage Publications)
• Continuum: Journal of Media and Culture (Carfax)
• Cultural Studies Review (Melbourne University Publishing)
• Cultural Politics (Duke University Press)
• Australian Feminist Studies (Carfax)
• Journal of Consumer Culture (Sage)
• The Communication Review (Routledge)
• Feminist Transformations (book series, Routledge)
• Cultural Spaces (book series, The University of Toronto Press)
• Queer Asia Book series (University of Hong Kong Press)

Selected grants

• 2011-2013: co-Investigator, ‘Sun, Sea, Sand and Silicone: Aesthetic Surgery Tourism in the UK and Australia’. Economic and Social Sciences Research Council, UK.
• 2009-2012: Sole Investigator, ‘Taste and Place: The Transglobal Production and Consumption of Food and Drink.’ Australian Research Council Discovery Project.
• 2008 Co-investigator with Jocalyn Lawler and Trudy Rudge, ‘Body Shopping: Gender, Ethnicity, Place & Medical Tourism’. International Program Development Fund International Network Research.
• 2007-2010 Co-investigator with Kath Albury, Catharine Lumby and Clifton Evers. Best Practice in Peer-based Mentoring in Elite Sport. ARC Linkage with the National Rugby League of Australia.
• 2007. Lead investigator with Catherine Driscoll, Jennifer Germon, Michael Moller and Clifton Evers. Respectful Relationships in NSW High Schools, NSW Board of Education.
• 2005-2009 Co-investigator with Catharine Lumby, Jennifer O’Dea and Kath Albury The Well-rounded Person: The Role of Sport in Shaping Physical, Emotional and Social Development. Australian Research Council Discovery Project.