Project members

Giorgia Alù is an accomplished Italian scholar whose work intersects literary studies, cultural and visual studies, and Italian cultural and social history. She has contributed to numerous projects and publications that explore photographic culture, travel, migration, and war and the transcultural relationship between words and images. Her recent research delves into the ethical and emotional dimensions of photographs and other texts, particularly in transnational contexts of exclusion, exploitation, and confinement affecting both human and non-human subjects. As part of her work with OMAA, she is investigating the experiences of Italian settlers, the Italians during WWI as well as the plight of Italian prisoners of war and internees during WWII in Australia.

Andrea Bandhauer worked at the University of Sydney for over two decades and was Chair of the Department of Germanic Studies for nine years. She co-founded the International and Comparative Literature Program (ICLS) in 2001 and was Director of ICLS for three years.

Her research has not only been determined by her own interests, but also by the academic direction of the department and broader overarching topics in literary and cultural studies worldwide. She is an expert in contemporary German-language literature by women authors and has published primarily in the areas of feminist, intercultural and post colonial literary studies.

Andrea also developed an interest in German-language material held in the Strehlow Research Centre in Alice Springs. The archive holds a great number of letters written by German missionaries and especially German missionaries’ wives. Most of these letters were not translated from German and were still written in old German script. Together with Maria Veber, she translated and transcribed a large amount of this correspondence and published in the area of missionary projects through the lens of colonialism, monotheism and violence. One of these publications is Migration and Cultural Contact: Germany and Australia. Sydney: Sydney University Press, 2009.

Eva Boleti was born and raised in Athens, and later resided in Portugal, Spain, Belgium, Vietnam, and now Australia. She is currently a PhD cand in the area of Anthropology and Culture Studies at the University of Sydney, and she derives inspiration from the immigration story of her beloved Greek grandparents who travelled by boat to Australia in 1950s.

Siobhan Campbell is a scholar of Indonesian art and material culture, with an interest in the histories of museum collections, exhibitions and art communities and the linkages between people and objects in the context of colonialism and globalisation. Her research combines the study of visual and textual archives with fieldwork into art and representational systems and perceptions of indigenous art. Siobhan’s work on the OMAA explores image annotation in databases and the historical experiences of the Indonesian community in Australia.

Currently, Siobhan is the lead research officer on the OMAA project. 

Sophie Loy-Wilson is a historian of Chinese Australian communities. Her first book was a study of China-Australia relations in the interwar years, seen through the prism of Chinese Australian communities in Shanghai. In the book, she highlighted the importance of economic archives for immigration historians; these archives often preserve migrant agency. She combines methodological insights from labour history, overseas Chinese history, and the New History of Capitalism to bring a ‘New Materialist’ approach to Australia’s multiethnic and multilingual past.

Xulong He researches on early Australian Chinese literature primarily published on Chinese language newspapers in Australia. He is working on a dissertation in order to unveil more social and historical factors of the early Chinese diaspora through the literary works. He is also interested in ancient Chinese literature, cross-cultural research, and translation studies.

Yixu Lu is a major scholar in the field of cultural history, particularly in relation to Sino-German encounters in the 19th and 20th centuries. She was awarded the Jakob und Wilhelm Grimm-Preis for her distinguished contribution to research, teaching and international collaboration in German Studies by the German Academic Exchange Services (DAAD) in 2014. Yixu is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities and a Corresponding Fellow of the Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen (Göttingen Academy of Sciences and Humanities, Germany). 

She has extensive experience in joint research projects and management and leadership of the School of Languages and Cultures. She will look particularly at German and Chinese language materials focusing both on settlement and WWI. 

Judith Rozeboom is originally from the Netherlands, where she was awarded a master’s degree in History at Leiden University.  

About ten years ago, she moved to Sydney. At Macquarie University, she gained a Master of Research degree. She has recently finished her PhD at the University of Sydney (History Department) on the topic of Indonesian migrants in Australia during and just after WWII. Through this research project, she became interested in migration history and the personal stories of non-English-speaking immigrants to Australia.  

Josh Stenberg researches and publishes on Chinese-language literature, theatre, and translation, with a focus on diaspora. His previous projects considered xiqu (“Chinese opera”) in central and southern China as well as in Taiwan and in diaspora. He holds a Discovery Early Career Research Award from the Australian Research Council with a project on Sino-Southeast Asian performance and fiction.

Rebecca Suter’s main research interest is in modern Japanese literature and comparative literature, Japanese history, multiculturalism, and transnationalism. She recently published Two-World Literature: Kazuo Ishiguro’s Early Novels. This book explored the Nobel Prize-winning author’s double cultural positioning and its use to challenge the conventional understanding of World Literature. At the moment, she is working on a comparative study of Japanese and Australian cultures of soft drink consumption and their relationship with corporate strategies and health policy. Rebecca also works as a translator of manga.

Maria Veber (Germanic Studies) researches on 19th century gender and sexuality, and German Lutheran Missions, with a focus on missionary wives and missionaries in South Australia. She has co-written and co-edited, with Andrea Bandhauer, articles on Frieda Strehlow at the Hermannsburg mission in Alice Springs, and the volume Migration and Cultural Contact: Germany and Australia (SUP, 2010). She contributed a chapter on authority, masculinity and reform at the Dresden mission in South Australia to the volume Reform, Revolution and Crisis in Europe (Routledge, 2020).

Adrian Vickers, FAHA, is the lead Chief Investigator of the project. He researches and publishes on the cultural history of Southeast Asia and relations between Asia and Australia. He was born in Tamworth, where he first became aware of the multilingual and multicultural nature of Australian society. His previous projects looked at modern and contemporary Indonesian art, Balinese paintings, Cold War history, Australian-Indonesian relations, and labour and industry in Southeast Asia. He co-authored The Pearl Frontier (U of Hawai’i Press, 2015), a study of labour connections between Indonesia and Australia, with Julia Martínez.

Sonia Wilson researches and publishes on French-language life writing, with a particular focus on the intersection between everyday practices (diaries, letters and related objects) and gender in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.