The Academics
David Bennett
School of Culture and Communication
Associate Professor David Bennett is Reader in English and Cultural Theory at the University of Melbourne where he established the popular course on the politics and history of art-censorship, called Art/Pornography/Blasphemy/Propaganda. Several objects in this exhibition are on loan from his teaching collection.
Violence + Sex: A Taboo Combination – Censored
Jenny Lee
School of Culture and Communication
Jenny Lee became an editor by accident in 1982, when she began working on a multi-author critical history of Australia (A people’s history of Australia, 4 vols, 1988). She edited Meanjin from 1987 to 1994, then spent six years working as a freelance book editor. She taught in the Professional Writing program at Deakin University from 2000 to 2002.
Jenny has been co-ordinator of the postgraduate Publishing and Communications program in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne since 2003. Her research interests include the history of books and reading and technological and cultural change in the contemporary publishing industry. She is deputy chair of the OL Society, which publishes Overland magazine.
Richard Pennell
School of Historical Studies
Richard Pennell did both his BA (in Arabic and Spanish) and his PhD (in Islamic History) at the University of Leeds in Britain. Before joining the History Department at the University of Melbourne he taught for nine years, on and off, at the National University of Singapore. He taught for two years at the University of Nairobi in Kenya in the late 1980s and has also taught in Garyounis University in Benghazi, Libya and at Bogazici University in Istanbul, Turkey. In the second half of 2003 he was a visiting scholar hosted by Al-Akhawayn University at Ifrane in the Middle Atlas Mountains of Morocco.