Academic and General Staff

Margaret Jolly is a historical anthropologist. She received her BA(Hons) and PhD from the University of Sydney, and taught for many years at Macquarie University in Sydney. She has published extensively on women in the Pacific and especially Vanuatu, on the Cook voyages, on gender in colonial history and on the politics of tradition.

Her major publications are Women of the Place: Kastom, Colonialism and Gender in Vanuatu (1994), Women's difference: sexuality and maternity in colonial and postcolonial discourses (ed) (1994), Family and gender in the Pacific: domestic contradictions and the colonial impact (1989) co-edited with Martha Macintyre, and Sites of desire, economies of pleasure: sexualities in Asia and the Pacific. (1997) co-edited with Lenore Manderson, Maternities and modernities: colonial and postcolonial experiences in Asia and the Pacific. (1998) co-edited with Kalpana Ram, Borders of being: citizenship, fertility, and sexuality in Asia and the Pacific. (2001) co-edited with Kalpana Ram, Birthing in the Pacific: beyond tradition and modernity? (2002) and Engendering health in the Pacific: colonial and contemporary perspectives. (forthcoming), both co-edited with Vicki Lukere. Her latest book is An ocean of difference (forthcoming).

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Dr Carolyn BREWER BA (Canterbury), BA Hons first class (Murdoch), PhD (Murdoch).

Carolyn Brewer trained as a primary school teacher at Canterbury Teachers’ College in Christchurch, Aotearoa/New Zealand. She was posted to Ashburton, a small town in mid-Canterbury, where she eventually married, had two daughters and from where she escaped in 1989. As a mature-aged student she studied Feminist Studies and Religious Studies at Canterbury University, before going to Murdoch University in Perth to focus her honours year on the debates surrounding the ordination of women into the Anglican Church in Australia. She accepted a Murdoch doctoral scholarship to further explore the impact of Christianity on women’s lives – this time Catholicism in the Philippines.

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Dr Michelle ANTOINETTE, BA (Hons) Monash, PhD ANU
Visiting Fellow

Dr John BALLARD, BA Dartmouth, JD Harvard, PhD Tufts
Visiting Fellow

John Ballard's research interests are public policy, particularly on health issues including HIV and on gender and sexuality, in Australia, Papua New Guinea and the region.

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Dr Katherine LEPANI, BA (University of Hawai‘i at Manoa), MPH (Queensland), PhD (ANU)
GRC Visiting Fellow, Gender Relations Centre

Katherine is a long-term resident of Papua New Guinea, where she has extensive community-based and public sector work experience in primary health care, HIV, gender and development, and theatre arts. She coordinated the development of PNG’s first national multi-sectoral strategy for responding to HIV and currently serves as an adviser for Sanap Wantaim, the AusAID-funded HIV and AIDS support program in Papua New Guinea. Katherine holds a Bachelor of Arts (Anthropology) degree awarded with Distinction from the University of Hawai‘i (1991), and a Master of Public Health (Tropical Health) degree from the University of Queensland (2001). She received the Australasian College of Tropical Medicine Medal in 2001 for her MPH thesis. A recent PhD student in the Gender Relations Centre, she was awarded her doctorate in February 2008. Her PhD thesis, “In the process of knowing”: Making Sense of HIV and AIDS in the Trobriand Islands, Papua New Guinea, explores the interface between biomedical and cultural models of sexuality, risk, and disease and argues for the importance of community engagement in responding to the HIV epidemic. Her current research interest in HIV focuses on gender vulnerabilities, perceptions of risk, and the social context of voluntary counselling and testing (VCT) services in Papua New Guinea. She is a lecturer in Social Foundations of Medicine in the ANU College of Medicine and Health Sciences and teaches qualitative methods for health research in the Master of Culture, Health, and Medicine program.  

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Dr Markus PANGERL,
GRC Visiting Fellow, Gender Relations Centre

Dr Elizabeth REID AO, FASSA
Visiting Fellow

Elizabeth Reid is a development practitioner and a Visiting Fellow at the Gender Relations Centre at The Australian National University.

As a development practitioner she has worked on a range of aspects of socio-economic development, including the developmental dimensions of the HIV epidemic, social and community development, including health and gender, agricultural production, transportation and marketing, including land usage and ownership and rural development.

Her work has included: policy, programme and project analysis, design, review and evaluation; the design and conduct of training, team building and capacity building courses for multi-lateral, national and local institutions; and the development of methodologies for community mobilisation, national consensus building, and capacity building approaches to development.

Her work has been consistently based on gender and equity principles and oriented towards the strengthening of social capital. She works in English and French and has published extensively.

Elizabeth has worked in Africa and Asia as well as in the Middle East, the Caribbean and Central America, and Eastern Europe and the CIS States.

Previous positions she has held include United Nations Resident Coordinator and UNDP Resident Representative in Papua New Guinea, Founding Director of the UNDP HIV and Development Programme, Founding Director of the Asia and Pacific Centre for Women and Development, and adviser to the Prime Minister of Australia, the Hon. E. G. Whitlam QC, on matters relating to the welfare of women and children.

Elizabeth was made an Officer of the Order of Australia (AO) in 2001 for service to international relations, particularly through the United Nations Development Programme, to the welfare of women and to HIV/AIDS policy development, both in Australia and internationally. She is also a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia.

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Larissa Sandy’s research explores women’s agency in sex work and the complexity of life choices available to women in developing countries. Her research interests include women’s agency; sex work; contract labour; HIV, gender and development; women’s labour migration; forced migration and trafficking; sexual violence and gender-based violence; working conditions in the sex industry; and regulations. Larissa has a BA in Asian Studies with Honours (IA) in Social Science from Curtin University. Her PhD, entitled, “My blood, sweat and tears: Female Sex Workers in Cambodia – Victims, Vectors or Agents?, was carried out at the ANU. As a part of her work at the GRC, Larissa is exploring women’s experiences of debt-bondage in the Cambodian sex industry.

Frances' research interests centre on the maritime dimensions of colonialism in the Pacific, with a particular focus on New Zealand's regional seaborne influence in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Her PhD thesis, ‘Oceania under Steam: Maritime cultures, Colonial histories, 1870s-1910s' was a cultural history of steamship operations in the western Pacific, drawing on the archives of the largest shipping company in the southern hemisphere, the Union Steam Ship Company of New Zealand. Her current research explores the colonial origins of cruise ship tourism in the Pacific, bringing together the operations of British, Australian, New Zealand and American shipping companies between the 1880s and 1950s. The colonial history of the now-derelict Grand Pacific Hotel on Suva's harbour front, built by the Union Company, forms a central part of this research. Frances also has research interests in food history, particularly the cultural history of butter in New Zealand and Australia. She is a lecturer in the School of History and Politics at the University of Wollongong where she teaches Pacific History and Australian Studies.

Serge Tcherkézoff is Directeur d'études (Professor) at the École des Hautes études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), Paris and Marseilles (French national institute of advanced studies in social sciences) and the Director of the tri-institutional Centre de Recherche et de Documentation sur l'Océanie (CREDO) (national centre for Pacific studies founded by CNRS, the French national centre of research, with the école des Hautes études en Sciences Sociales and Université de Provence). Along his constant interest in the history of anthropological models (he has published Dual classification reconsidered, Cambridge University Press, 1987, and various articles on the Durkheimian and Dumontian school) he is engaged in Polynesian studies. He has edited Le Pacifique-Sud aujourd'hui: identités et transformations culturelles, Paris, CNRS Editions, 1997. Some results of his fieldwork in Samoa (since 1981) are presented in a recent book, FaaSamoa, une identité polynésienne (économie, politique, sexualité): l'anthropologie comme dialogue culturel (Paris, L'Harmattan, 2003). Another book analyzes the "Mead-Freeman debate": Le mythe occidental de la sexualité polynésienne: Margaret Mead, Derek Freeman et Samoa (Paris, Presses universitaires de France, 2001).

While at the GRC he finalized two ethno-historical studies: the Samoan discovery of the Europeans ("First contacts" in Polynesia: the Samoan case (1722-1848), published in English at ANU, JPH Monograph, 2004), the Tahitian discovery of the French (Tahiti — 1768. Jeunes filles en pleurs: la face cachée des premiers contacts et la naissance du mythe occidental, published in French in Papeete, Au Vent des Îles, 2004), and is currently working on the long history of the Polynesia/Melanesia invention (1585-1985). In these three works he is giving particular attention to the effects produced by the French male-and-racial gaze during these early Oceanic encounters

John Taylor's current research explores gender relations and male subjectivities in northern Vanuatu, particularly through the social, economic and symbolic context of kava bisnis. This represents the initial component of a more extensive project that aims to expand knowledge of island Melanesian communities, sexuality and gender through the study of masculinities. John holds a BA in English literature and anthropology and a MA in social anthropology from the University of Auckland. Research for the latter resulted in the monograph Consuming Identity: Modernity and Tourism in New Zealand (1998). His PhD was carried out at the Australian National University and the thesis "Ways of the place: History, cosmology and material culture in North Pentecost, Vanuatu" (2003) won the inaugural prize for a doctoral thesis awarded by the Australian Anthropological Society in 2004. He is currently revising it for publication as a book. Other research interests include the anthropology of Vanuatu and island Melanesia; cosmologies and colonialism in cross-cultural perspective; ethnohistory and historiography; kinship and gender; modernity, ethnicity and identity politics in the Pacific region.

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