Bulletin

Issue: April 2006

People

New Professors at La Trobe University

The Vice Chancellor of La Trobe University, Professor Brian Stoddard, has announced the appointment of a number of new professors.

Educational Studies

Dr Frank Hardman has been appointed to the Chair of Educational Studies.

Dr Hardman currently holds the position of Reader in Language and Education in the School of Education, Communication and Language Sciences at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne.

He has previously been a lecturer in Education, Director of Continuing Professional Development and Assistant Dean in the Faculty of Education and senior lecturer in Education. He has had held a number of senior management positions at the same university and has served on many university committees.

His work on literacy, teacher discourse and language more generally in the education field has had considerable impact in the United Kingdom and internationally.

Dr Hardman has a longstanding interest in classroom discourse and interaction and has contributed widely to debate in this area. His recent work on classroom talk, which utilises a computerised system for recording interaction, has attracted significant interest from practitioners, policy makers and researchers. Dr Hardman has an impressive publication record and has attracted funding from a range of sources.

He has undertaken collaborative work in Kenya on classroom interaction in primary schools and is about to extend this work with a cognate UNICEF-funded study in Nigeria.

Economics and Finance

Dr Xiangkang Yin has been appointed Professor of Economics and Finance.

Professor Yin did his PhD in Economic Cybernetics at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China in 1989, writing his doctoral dissertation on Random Control Theory and Its Applications to Financing and Investment.

He joined La Trobe as a lecturer in June 1995, was promoted senior lecturer in 1999, and to Reader in 2004.

His research interests are in the areas of Chinese economy, corporate finance and governance, financial markets, industrial economics, innovation and development, and micro/macro analysis of imperfect competition.

He has taught in a wide range of economics and finance areas at La Trobe and has supervised numerous postgraduate students.

In recent years Professor Yin has held major ARC Discovery and Linkage Grants and has helped provide World Bank funded consulting services to the Foreign Trade University, Vietnam.

He has also given numerous conference and seminar presentations as well as being a referee for most local and many international economic journals. He has 29 refereed journal articles including papers in the International Review of Financial Analysis, the Journal of Finance and the Journal of Development Economics. Professor Yin's research strengths lie in quantitative economic theory and in theoretical finance.

Postgraduate coordinator for the Department of Economics and Finance from 2003-2005 and a member of several University committees, he is currently working at the Australian Graduate School of Management on corporate governance issues.

Professor John Wiltshire

Leading Jane Austen scholar, Professor John Wiltshire of the English Program who has been appointed to a personal Chair, has been at La Trobe for more than 30 years.

Among his books are Samuel Johnson and the Medical World (1991), Jane Austen and the Body: 'the picture of health' (Cambridge University Press, 1992) - both reissued in paperback this year - and Recreating Jane Austen (Cambridge University Press, 2001).

In collaboration with colleagues at La Trobe, and with Professors Paul Komesaroff of Monash University and Professor Judith Parker of the University of Melbourne, Professor Wiltshire has also researched and written extensively in the fields of medicine, nursing, ethics and narrative.

His work in healthcare focuses on both informal and formal narratives of embodiment. With Professor Komesaroff he has published Drugs in the Health Marketplace (1995) and with Professor Parker articles and chapters on aspects of nursing, narrative and qualitative research. He is currently working on a history of Western medicine from the viewpoint of the patient, and preparing a volume for the Helm Information series, Icons of Modern Culture on Dr Johnson.

Professor Wiltshire will address the British Society for Medical Humanities in London in September, and the Jane Austen Society of North America in Tucson, Arizona in October, this year.

He is convenor of the conference, International Jane Austen, at La Trobe University in 2007.

Education

Dr Vaughan Prain, formerly Head of the School of Education, has been appointed to the Chair of Education at La Trobe University's Bendigo campus.

His previous positions at La Trobe include Associate Professor and Research Coordinator in the former School of Arts and Education and Head of Education, Research and Postgraduate Studies in the Faculty of Education.

Previously Professor Prain had been a secondary school teacher at Heywood High School and Brighton Grammar School and a tutor at the State College of Victoria, Bendigo. He has made substantive scholarly contributions to education literature in the areas of English and Science Education. His research interests include science literacy writing for learning in secondary science, the use of new technologies for learning and the teaching of writing at primary, secondary and tertiary levels, including writing research.

Professor Prain's pioneering work in bridging science education and English education led to his appointment to the Australian Academy of Science/ DEST national project entitled Primary Connections which links primary science and literacy.

Professor Prain has consistently presented his research at national and international conferences and has undertaken a leadership role in professional organisations.

Professor Gary Dowsett

Professor Gary Dowsett, who was recently appointed to a Personal Chair, is Deputy Director at La Trobe University's Australian Research Centre in Sex, Health and Society.

He is also an Associate Professor of Clinical Sociomedical Sciences at Columbia University, New York, where he spent US academic years 2003-04 teaching in the Department of Sociomedical Sciences, and working with the HIV Center for Clinical and Behavioral Studies.

A sociologist, Professor Dowsett has long been interested in sexuality research, particularly in relation to the rise of modern gay communities.

Since 1986 he has researched the HIV epidemic, particularly in Australia's gay communities, and has worked on many international HIV/AIDS and sexual health projects.

These include acting as a consultant to WHO's Global Programme on AIDS in Geneva, and as an adviser to other WHO programs, to the UN Development Programme and the Joint United Nations Programme on AIDS.

His international work also includes designing a sevencountry study of young people and contexts of risk in relation to HIV/AIDS, reviewing HIV/AIDS intervention programs for men who have sex with men in Bangladesh, and collaborating on similar research in Fiji.

He has recently developed training programs in community-based research and qualitative research design, and has taught research design courses in Australia, Fiji, and the USA.

Professor Dowsett is author, co-author or editor of five books, more than 70 book chapters and academic papers, and over 60 other publications.

He was elected to the International Academy of Sex Research in 2003, and his first book, co-authored with three colleagues, was voted one of the top ten most influential books in Australian sociology by the Australian Sociological Association.

In 2005, he was awarded a prestigious five-year VicHealth Senior Research Fellowship.

Economics

Dr Gary Bryan Magee, formerly Associate Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of Melbourne, has been appointed to the Chair in Economics.

The appointment is a 'return' for Dr Magee who started his academic career as a lecturer in Economics at La Trobe in 1991. Since then he has held a number of academic positions at Oxford University, Australian National University, University of London and the University of Melbourne.

He has also held a number of visiting appointments, including four in 2005. They were Australian Bicentennial Fellowship, University of London, Visiting Fellowships at the University of Oxford and the Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, and Distinguished Visitor, China Development Institute, China. Recognised as a leading economic historian, his research interests include British, Australian, American and global economic history, innovation, technological change and entrepreneurship, the economics of migration, international economics and public policy.

Professor Magee has published two major research monographs as well as many articles in key economic history and business history journals and has been invited to contribute to prestigious invitation-only publications including The Cambridge Economic History of Modern Britain.

A member of both the national and international economic and business history communities, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, UK, in 2001.

With extensive experience in lecturing, curriculum development and supervision, he has developed and delivered teaching and research programs in many economic subjects at different levels in Britain and Australia.

Professor Andrew Brennan

Andrew Brennan arrived in March as Professor and Chair of Philosophy. A graduate of St Andrews, Calgary and Oxford, he began his career at the University of Stirling in the UK before taking the Chair of Philosophy at the University of Western Australia, which he held for 14 years. His research interests range over logic, philosophy of language, personal identity, animal ethics and environmental policy.

He was chair of the Animal Ethics Committee in Western Australia and serves on the Board of the Australian and New Zealand Council for the Care of Animals in Research and Teaching.

In the last five years he has held visiting professorships at the University of Oslo and at City University Hong Kong.

His recent work includes a coauthored book on philosophy of logic, and papers on such topics as dryland salinity in Australia, globalisation, the birth of modern science and the ethics of place.

One of his reasons for moving to La Trobe was to take advantage of the research culture in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences.

'La Trobe offers an exciting research environment where there is scope for new interdisciplinary work on ethics, globalisation and sustainability.'

Professor Brennan hopes to develop projects focused particularly on sustainability, ethics and policy, building on existing research links with overseas groups in China and Europe while not losing his fundamental attachment to philosophy.

'My disciplinary home is - and always will be - philosophy,' he said, 'and I hope my work in other sectors is proof of the real contributions philosophy can make to the big issues facing us as individuals and as a community.'

He brings with him an ARC Discovery Project, 'Making Ethics Work'.