Professorial Lecture Series: Melbourne, 5 June

The Professorial Lecture Series is now in its second year, arising from the review of the Academic Promotions Policy and Procedures. The series is designed to provide our university community with an opportunity to celebrate and acknowledge those promoted to the role of Professor. 

The hybrid event will be held on Wednesday 5 June at the ACU Melbourne Campus and celebrate the success of Professor Catherine Bell, Professor Matthew Crawford and Professor Michael Champion.  

Join us to hear our newest professors speak about their impactful work being undertaken in teaching, research and service, with the opportunity to ask each presenter questions. All staff are welcome and encouraged to attend these events either in person at our Melbourne campus or online via MS Teams. The details of the event is listed below. 

Event details:
Wednesday 5 June 2024, 10am. Morning tea will be offered from 11am.

Hybrid locations:
In person: ACU Melbourne campus. The Greg Craven Centre, Saint Teresa of Kolkata Building, Level 7, 115b Victoria Parade, Fitzroy
Virtually: via MS Teams.

When you register, you will receive a registration confirmation. If you registered to attend virtually, the registration confirmation will contain the MS Teams link to join.

Professor Catherine Bell

Professor Catherine Bell will present on how modes of inclusive, relational, and collaborative art practice can address the formidable challenges health, disability, ageing and social care face.  
Professor Bell is a multi-disciplinary artist, curator and lecturer in of visual art. Her art practice explores the role of the artist in health care settings, feminist interventions in the archive, neurodiverse/neurotypical art collectives, socially engaged approaches to art making, and exploring how modes of care can be communicated through different relational and situational forms of creativity. Professor Bell has undertaken two, grant-funded, year-long artist residencies in the oncology ward at St Vincent’s Hospital and Caritas Christi Hospice in Melbourne. She curated the 2020-21 national touring exhibition, ‘Fem-affinity’, that explores inclusive practice as a feminist mode of production. Recent achievements include a 2022 Creative Australia grant to work with her neurodiverse collaborator at RMIT Health Transformation Lab and a 2022 City of Melbourne grant to activate forgotten public monuments and re-imagine their future through a feminist lens. 

Professor Michael Champion

Professor Michael Champion will be presenting on ‘Exploring Late Antique Gaza’. Professor Champion studies the ancient Mediterranean up to Byzantium, with expertise in early Christianity, late-antique Gaza, and histories of emotion, education, philosophy, and violence. His most recent books are Dorotheus of Gaza and Ascetic Education (Oxford 2022) and The Intellectual World of Late Antique Christianity (Cambridge 2023, co-edited with Matthew Crawford and Lewis Ayres). Professor Champion co-leads an Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Project examining Chinese, Sanskrit, Greek and Latin language pedagogy in comparative and contemporary perspective. He directed ACU’s node of the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions, helped develop the Institute for Religion and Critical Inquiry, and has served on scholarly societies for classics and religious history.

Professor Matthew Crawford

Professor Matthew Crawford will share his research on a thousand-year-old Greek manuscript that contains a doctrinal treatise by a famous Christian teacher in the fourth century named Didymus the Blind.  
Professor Crawford joined ACU’s Institute for Religion and Critical Inquiry in 2015. He has served as Director of the institute's Program in Biblical and Early Christian Studies since 2018. Professor Crawford has just completed the first ever English translation of a major fifth-century defence of Christianity against the critiques of the Roman Emperor Julian and is currently preparing a new edition of a fourth-century Greek doctrinal treatise preserved in a thousand-year-old manuscript in the Biblioteca Angelica in Rome, while also serving as co-editor for the forthcoming Cambridge History of Early Christian Theology.

For event related questions, please contact ACU Events via email: acuevents@acu.edu.au or phone: 02 9465 9068