Meet the team

Andrea Baker

Belinda Smaill

Over the last two decades Associate Professor Belinda Smaill has built an international reputation in the field of screen studies and documentary studies in particular. She has published over 40 journal articles and book chapters and her two books, The Documentary: Politics, Emotion, Culture (Palgrave MacMillan 2010) and Regarding Life: Animals and the Documentary Moving Image (State University of New York Press 2016)have garnered international recognition for their role in rethinking the documentary tradition in the history of the moving image. Her research has consistently explored issues relating to women and documentary, and female directors more broadly. Her work also focuses on the environment, more than human and fact-based storytelling in screen media.

Claire Perkins

Claire Perkins is Director of the Bachelor of Media Communication. She researches in feminist screen studies, with a particular interest in independent and 'indie' screen cultures, post-network television, and serial media formats. She is the author of American Smart Cinema (2012) and co-editor of seven collections, including Independent Women: From Film to Television (2021) and Indie Reframed: Women's Filmmaking and Contemporary American Independent Cinema (2016).

Deb Anderson

Deb Anderson is a journalist and academic whose research draws on oral history to examine how climate shapes culture, and how culture shapes climate. She spent more than a decade writing and editing for The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald before joining Monash, where she now works on projects that explore women's reportage on climate-related disasters, women's significant roles in environmental advocacy to protect the Great Barrier Reef, and Australian journalism, community and trauma. Deb is the author of Endurance: Australian Stories of Drought (CSIRO 2014).

Earvin Cabalquinto

Earvin is an ARC DECRA Fellow and Senior Lecturer in the School of Media, Film and Journalism. His research lies in the intersecting field of digital media, mobilities, migration, and ageing. One of his research expertise is applying an intersectional lens on unpacking the formation and negotiation of the digital divide in a migration context. He also deploys a gendered lens on examining the transnational subjectivity of Filipino migrants and their distant networks in performing family life at a distance.

Emily van der Nagel

Emily van der Nagel is a Lecturer in Social Media at Monash University. She researches social media identities, platforms, and cultures, with a focus on anonymity and pseudonymity. Emily's book, Sex and Social Media, co-authored with Katrin Tiidenberg, takes a feminist, sex-positive approach to how social media platforms shape and restrict sex, and how sexual identities, practices, and communities must all negotiate platforms to survive and thrive.

Maura Edmond

Maura Edmond is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Media, Film and Journalism. She researches the media, arts and cultural industries with a focus on gender, cultural policy and the impact of digital platforms. She is also interested in independent, diy, radical or feminist creative scenes and consumer cultures.

Olivia Khoo

Olivia Khoo is Associate Professor and Head of Film and Screen Studies. She has researched widely on gender, race and sexuality in Asia and Australia in publications including The Chinese Exotic: Modern Diasporic Femininity (Hong Kong University Press, 2007), Asian Cinema: A Regional View (Edinburgh University Press, 2021) and in edited collections including The Routledge Handbook of New Media in Asia (with Larissa Hjorth, 2016). With Loani Arman, Olivia is co-Chair of the Screen Diversity and Inclusion Network (www.sdin.com.au).

Whitney Monaghan

Whitney Monaghan is a Lecturer in Communications and Media Studies. Broadly interested in intersections of screen cultures and social justice, her research examines the politics of representation in popular media. She is the author of Queer Girls, Temporality and Screen Media: Not Just a Phase (Palgrave, 2016), co-editor of Screening Scarlett Johensson: Gender, Genre, Stardom (Palgrave, 2019) and co-author of Queer Theory Now: From Foundations to Futures (Bloomsbury, 2019).

Verity Trott

Dr Verity Trott researches the political, cultural and social dimensions of digital media technologies and digital cultures from feminist and intersection perspectives. Her recent work examines digital feminist activism and cultures of masculinity online.

Zala Volcic

Dr Zala Volcic’s work has garnered an international reputation for its role in rethinking the intersection of media, gender, conflicts, nationalism, and social cohesion, while showing how news media have the potential to strengthen democracy by promoting civic engagement, but also the ability to undermine and fragment shared identities and thereby to reinforce tendencies toward political conflict and violence. Since 2001, Zala has built an internationally significant track record of research in media, cultural, gender, and communications studies. This record includes a monograph, three co-authored books, and four co-edited books, as well as over 50 articles, chapters and research reports published in influential international, interdisciplinary journals including Information Communication and Society, The European Journal of Cultural Studies, Feminist Media Studies and the International Journal of Cultural Studies. Zala also has an established track record of developing media literacy programs that translate the results of her research into meaningful forms of public engagement designed to foster democratic understanding and civic engagement.