Executive Committee
Professor John Keane, Director
 |
Email: Phone: Address:
|
+61 (2) 9036 7142 Room 505 |
John Keane is Professor of Politics at the University of Sydney and at the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin (WZB). Proud of his South Australian roots, John was educated at the Universities of Adelaide and Toronto (where he was mentored by C.B.Macpherson) and King’s College, University of Cambridge.
Well before the European revolutions of 1989, he first came to public prominence as a defender of ‘civil society’ and the democratic opposition in central and eastern Europe. His political and scholarly writing during that period was often published under the pen name Erica Blair. In 1989 he founded the world’s first Centre for the Study of Democracy in London. During his many years in Europe,The Timesranked him one of Britain’s leading political thinkers and a writer whose work has 'world-wide importance'.The Australian Broadcasting Commissionrecently described him as “one of Australia’s great intellectual exports". In 2009, following several public lecture tours of Iran, the government of that country accused him (falsely) of being a ‘MI6/CIA agent’ and ‘mastermind’ of the democratic opposition.
Among his best-known books are The Media and Democracy (translated into more than 25 languages); the best-selling biography Tom Paine: A Political Life (2009); a new interpretation of the gains and losses of globalisation Global Civil Society? (2003); Violence and Democracy (2004); and The Future of Representative Democracy (2011). He writes a column for the Melbourne-based web platform The Conversation. His Life and Death of Democracy was short-listed for the2010 Non-Fiction Prime Minister's Literary Award.It is the first full-scale history of democracy for over a century. Portuguese and Greek translations have appeared and Chinese, Korean, Japanese and Spanish editions are on their way.
Professor Nikolas Kompridis, Research Coordinator
 |
Email: Phone: Address:
|
+61 2 9772 6673 Room 3.G.17, |
I am a Professorial Fellow in Philosophy and Political Thought at the University of Western Sydney. Much of my work involves rethinking some essential concepts of political philosophy – primarily, the concepts of reason, freedom, and critique – in light of two new concepts I’ve been developing, namely, receptivity and world-disclosure. My goal is to shed some light on how a certain kind of change is possible – the kind through which citizens are able to express their own agency in response to the moral and political demands of others. Above all, I’m interested in how people come to change how they think and act, and how such change, in turn, can strengthen practices and institutions of democracy.
As a member of the Institute for Democracy and Human Rights, I am leading a research project which involves systematically rethinking the meaning of the human in relation to the non-human, a rethinking which responds to various challenges to our received views of what it is to be a human being, and of what distinguishes human beings from the non-human world.
My publications include Critique and Disclosure: Critical Theory Between Past and Future (MIT 2006), Philosophical Romanticism (Routledge 2006), and The Aesthetic Turn in Political Thought (Continuum 2012). I am currently completing a new book, Thinking Anew from A New Stance: Romanticism, Critical Theory and Democratic Politics. My papers have appeared in journals such as Philosophy and Social Criticism, International Journal of Philosophical Studies, New Literary History, Political Theory, The European Journal of Political Theory, Ethics and Global Politics, as well as in edited volumes such as The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Literature, Habermas: A Critical Reader, and Adding Insult to Injury: Social Justice and the Politics of Recognition.
Associate Professor Danielle Celermajer
 |
Email: Phone: Address:
|
+61 2 9351 7641 Room 444 |
Danielle Celermajer is currently the Director of the Torture Prevention Project a European Union funded project interrogating the root causes of torture and designing interventions for the Police and Military in Sri Lanka and Nepal. She was the founding director of the EU funded Asia Pacific Masters of Human Rights and Democratisation, a networked postgraduate human rights education program across the Asia Pacific Region. Her primary areas of research fields are human rights and political theory.
In the area of human rights, her research focuses on transitional justice and the question of how contemporary states and societies can deal with past violations, the relationship between human rights and religious norms and institutions and human rights education. Her primary research areas in political theory include collective responsibility, conceptual frameworks for human rights and the relationshipbetween secular philosophical and theological thought. She received her Ph.D. in political theory (summa cum laudae) from Columbia University. Prior to entering academia, she was Director of Policy at the Australian Human Rights Commission, where she authored numerous reports on Indigenous human rights and was principal speechwriter to the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner. Her book, Sins of the Nation and the Ritual of Apology, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2009.
Professor Glenda Sluga
 |
Email: Phone: Address:
|
+61 2 9036 6191 Room H603 |
Glenda Sluga has published widely on the cultural history of international relations, the history of European nationalisms, gender history, and is interested in the history of identity and difference more broadly. She is currently completing a book on the history of internationalism in the twentieth century, and is researching the international history of cosmopolitanism through a study of women at the Congress of Vienna. Both projects are generously funded by the Australian Research Council. In 2002 she was awarded the Max Crawford Medal by the Australian Academy of the Humanities. In 2006 she was appointed a member of the International Scientific Committee for the History of UNESCO. In 2009 she was elected to the Australian Academy of the Humanities. She is currently a member of the Humanities division of the Australian Research Council College of Experts.
- The UN, a lieu de mémoire? | On line Opinion | 22 May 2013
- Professor Glenda Sluga and Associate Professor Ariadne Vromen won FASS Research Mentoring Award 2012
Professor David Schlosberg
 |
Email: Phone: Address:
|
david.schlosberg@sydney.edu.au +61 2 9036 70946191 Room 270 |
David Schlosberg is Professor of Environmental Politics in the Department of Government and International Relations at the University of Sydney. Professor Schlosberg is known nationally and internationally for his work in environmental politics, environmental movements, and political theory, in particular the intersection of the three with his work on environmental justice (most recently Defining Environmental Justice, Oxford 2007). He is a co-editor, with John Dryzek of ANU and Richard Norgaard of UC Berkeley, of The Oxford Handbook of Climate Change and Society (Oxford 2011); the three are in the process of co-authoring a book on The Climate-Challenged Society (forthcoming from Oxford in 2013). Professor Schlosberg has held visiting appointments at the London School of Economics, Australian National University, and Princeton University. Current research includes work on climate justice – in particular justice, environmental rights, and democratic participation in adaptation strategies and policies. He is also planning a project examining the new sustainable materialist focus of many environmental movement groups on food and animals, energy, housing, crafting and making, and transportation.
Associate Professor Allison Weir
 |
Email: Phone: Address:
|
+61 2 9772 6879 Room 1.G.59, |
Allison Weir is an Associate Professor in Humanities at the University of Western Sydney, where she teaches in the Doctoral Program in Political and Social Thought. She works in the areas of social and political philosophy, feminist and gender theories, and critical theory. Her work focuses on intersections of gender, sexuality, class, ethnicity, and religion in the development of individual and collective identities, and on the relation of identity to agency and freedom, power and solidarity, as well as on caregiving as a global issue. She is currently working on a project exploring and developing diverse conceptions of freedom, and a book, Rethinking Freedom. Allison Weir is the author of Identities and Freedom (Oxford 2013) and Sacrificial Logics: Feminist Theory and the Critique of Identity (Routledge 1996). She moved to Sydney in 2010 from Wilfrid Laurier University in Canada, and has held visiting positions at Goethe University in Frankfurt, the New School for Social Research in New York, the University of Dundee, Scotland, and Concordia University in Montreal.