New funding sees researchers collaborate with top international universities

As part of the University’s Strategic Plan commitment to building a focused approach to global engagement, almost $430,000 has been awarded ($215,000 from Sydney and $215,000 from partner universities) in this round of international engagement funding.

45 academics from across the University will participate in visits with Harvard University, Zhejiang University, Yonsei University, the University of Glasgow and the University of Hong Kong to collaborate on new research ideas, co-author papers, run joint research workshops and build long-term relationships.

Professor Kathy Belov, Pro-Vice-Chancellor (Global Engagement), said the funding is part of a new whole-of-University strategic focus on global engagement.

“We’re actively building institutional-level strategic alliances to support our staff to collaborate with leading academics, build their profile and become leaders in their fields.”

By the end of the year, Professor Belov’s team aims to have signed priority partnerships with 20 universities around the world that align with Sydney's strategic objectives for multidisciplinary research and education.

Among the 45 academics and PhD students are seven SLAM academics, including:  

• Professor Mark Ledbury, Department of Art History, Harvard University
  
  Mark Ledbury will be working with Dr Cassandra Albinson, the Margaret S. Winthrop Curator of European Art at Harvard Art Museums on an exhibition and publication called Pink exploring the natural and cultural history of pink, especially in the eighteenth century. He will be out at Harvard to discuss the exhibition and to plan his writing for the exhibition, which follows other highly successful collaborations between the University of Sydney Department of Art History and Harvard Art Museums, including Stephen Gilchrist’s exhibition, Everywhen.
  
  He is also exploring with Cassandra the possibility of a research and teaching project focused on their collection of Ingres drawings – which they hope will culminate in an online exhibition and research project that will be available to SLAM “Masters of Art Curating” students through the Curatorial Lab unit.
  
  
• Associate Professor Mark Byron, Department of English, Zhejiang University
  
  Mark Byron's visit to the School of International Studies at Zhejiang University in May will foster new links with the University of Sydney and with the Department of English. His own research in Literary Modernism has long engaged with questions of the influence of China on Anglophone literature, especially poetry. In collaboration with Professor Gao, an expert on Virginia Woolf, during his residency of one week he will provide several lectures on Modernism and China, dealing with Woolf, Ezra Pound, Gary Snyder, and other major canonical figures in the Anglophone tradition. He also proposes to conduct a masterclass with senior undergraduate and postgraduate students, examining the kinds of Chinese sources used by Western writers and how these sources are located in Chinese Modernist scholarship.
  
  
• Dr Alana Mann, Department of Media and Communciations, Harvard University
  
  Alana Mann will be hosted by the Food Law and Policy Clinic (FLCP) of Harvard Law School in the month of April. There she will be working with scholars including Clinic Director Assistant Professor Emily Broad Leib, named in Fortune's 2016 list of Most Innovative Women in Food & Drink, and Clinical Instructor Nicole Negowetti, co-founder of the Northwest Indiana Food Council. Delivering lectures on her research on local food policy environments in Australia and the international movement for food sovereignty, Alana will be conducting research on US food systems and local governance models for her new monograph Resisting Corporate Capture in Food Politics and the forthcoming Online Learning Environment (OLE) The Politics of Food: From Consumer to Food Citizen. Her visit will establish strong links between the Harvard FLCP, FASS, the Sydney Environment Institute and the Charles Perkins Center.
  
  
• Professor Vanessa Smith, Professor John Frow, and Dr Melissa Hardie, Department of English, Harvard Mobility Exchange: The Novel and Media, Harvard University
  
  Rather than delimiting the sphere of inquiry to the text in isolation, the recent resurgence of formal analysis in literary criticism has multiplied the potential interfaces between literature and other disciplines—from design studies to political science, cognitive neuroscience to environmental history. Aiming to contribute to this recent project of methodological self-reflection, the participants in the Harvard exchange scheme on the novel and media will think about the intersection of the novel form, novel theory, and media studies. When we expand our reading practices to incorporate the insights available from media studies, what new accounts of the novel’s history and form become available? How have perceptions of media and their practical uses shaped the novel, and vice versa?
  
  
• Professor Daniel Anlezark, Medieval and Early Modern Centre, University of Hong Kong