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Associate Professor Susan Ballard
Senior Lecturer in Software EngineeringSchool of Engineering and Computer Science
- I am an interdisciplinary art historian and writer. My research sits in the fields of art history, creative nonfiction, and environmental humanities, and examines the histories of nature in contemporary art with a particular focus on artists from Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand. I write on contemporary art and media with a particular concern for the diverse ways that artists negotiate the ecological and social transformations of the twenty-first century. I have a particular passion for collaborative practice, and through collaborative partnerships and projects with artists, musicians, curators, writers and geographers I facilitate discussions of the role of the arts and media in the age of the Anthropocene. My recent publications have focused on artistic and other cultural manifestations of species extinctions, energy, disaster, geology and landscape in the Anthropocene. I have written essays for October, Artlink, Art and Australia, Art New Zealand, Eyeline, The Anthropocene Review, and Environmental Humanities. My books include Alliances in the Anthropocene: Fire, Plants and People (with geographer Christine Eriksen, 2020),100 Atmospheres: Studies in Scale and Wonder (with the MECO network, 2019), and A Transitional Imaginary: Space, Network and Memory in Christchurch (with the ADA network, 2015). In 2008 I edited The Aotearoa Digital Arts Reader with Stella Brennan. My book Art and Nature in the Anthropocene: Planetary Aesthetics, was published by Routledge in March 2021. Before moving to Wellington I was Head of Postgraduate Studies in the School of Arts, English and Media, Co-Director of the Centre for Critical Creative Practice (C3P), and Director of MECO: the Material Ecologies research network at the University of Wollongong, Australia. And before then, I taught art history and electronic arts at the Dunedin School of Art where I explored the histories and networks of sound and noise, feminist understandings of media, and new aesthetic media forms. My PhD in art history from the University of New South Wales unpacked the role of materiality in new media arts.
- Collaborative projects
- Masters Research or PhD student supervision
