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The Melbourne Branch formed largely out of what was the Contemporary European Studies Association of Australia and is currently the largest branch committee. The Melbourne branch seeks to further the works of CESAA while also spearheading a number of new initiatives including the ESAANZ Blog Series and seminars on European Studies.
ESAANZ President and Committee Member
Senior Lecturer at the Centre for Vocational and Educational Policy, at the University of Melbourne. Graduated with a political science degree in European Studies. Her current academic and practical interests lie in the field of education policy in Australia and Europe. She is currently a Chief Investigator of the Australian component of the Horizon 2020 research project developed with partners from the University of Melbourne and a consortium of nine European universities.
Chair
Dr Matt Harvey is a Senior Lecturer in Law at Victoria University Melbourne. His PhD (Monash) was on the constitutional development of the European Union. He was a Robert Schuman Scholar at the European Parliament and has taught EU Law and Comparative Law for many years. His research interests are principally in Constitutional Law and wine law in Europe and Australia.
Committee Member
Jessica is a recent Swinburne graduate and has an interest in contemporary European issues and international relations. She has been a committee member since 2018 and enjoys exploring the varying aspects of European culture.
Committee Member
Dr Perparim (Rimi) Xhaferi has completed his PhD from The University of Sydney in 2019. His thesis explored Albanian identity and the tendency of escaping the Ottoman heritage in the twenty-first century. His areas of interest are EU enlargement in Western Balkans, nation-building theories, language and culture. He is an active member of ESAANZ and currently works for both RMIT and as a casual lecturer at Melbourne University.
Committee Member
Professor Bruce Wilson is Director of the European Union Centre at RMIT University, and Co-Director of the PASCAL International. In these roles, Bruce helps to build linkages between Australia and Europe, and to link an international network of researchers and policy makers with city and regional governments in policy formation related to social and economic policy, lifelong learning and environment.
Committee Member
Maren Klein originally trained as a secondary teacher in Germany, she has worked as a teacher and lecturer, in education policy development, and a in higher education regulation. Her PhD explored mobility in the Global North. Her current research interests include the European Union as a global actor, the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals, governance, and transnational education.
Committee Member
Adjunct Professor Stephen Alomes of the Centre for Global Research at RMIT University is a contemporary historian of nationalism and populism and has also published books on Australian expatriates in the arts and on sport and global and commercial culture. Co-author of a study of Silvio Berlusconi and Nicolas Sarkozy as mainstream celebrity populists, his books include two edited works, French Worlds Pacific Worlds (on French nuclear testing and the Pacific responses) and A Changing France in a Changing World. He is also a former vice president of the Institute for the Study of French Australian Relations (ISFAR) and a former chair of the editorial board of its journal, the French Australian Review
Committee Member
Will is a Graduate Research student at the Melbourne Graduate School of Education. He is the Chair of the Graduate Student Advisory Committee (GSAC) at MGSE.
Committee Member
Dominic is a graduate in Communications and a postgraduate student of International Relations with an interest in education as development. He has worked extensively as an English facilitator to people seeking asylum in Australia and in Europe. His writing has been published in Australian Foreign Affairs, the Lowy Institute, and he was the 2019 Young Australians in International Affairs Eurasia fellow.
Committee Member
Gorana Grgic is a jointly appointed Lecturer at the Department of Government and International Relations and the United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney. She is also an Adjunct Lecturer at the Faculty of Arts, Business, Law and Education – School of Social Sciences at the University of Western Australia. Gorana was a Visiting Fellow at the Harvard Center for European Studies in 2018-2019. Gorana’s research interests include US politics and foreign policy, transatlantic relations, conflict resolution and democratisation. She has been a regular political analyst for the ABC News Australia and has contributed to a number of Australian and international media outlets and policy institutes.
Committee Member
Kamran Keshavarz is a veteran Enterprise Architect with over 20 years’ experience in Solution Design and Management and a broad range of expertise and skills in IT Architecture, Technology, Leading People and Projects and Business analysis. He is currently undertaking his master's in International Cooperation, Finance and Development at Unitelma La Sapienza University in Rome. His focus is on decentralised finance strategies in developing countries.
Committee Member
Professor Peter Morgan is Director of the European Studies Program at the University of Sydney, and has written widely in the areas of German Studies, comparative literary studies, and European Studies. Peter Morgan is currently Vice President of the Contemporary European Studies Association of Australia (CESAA), and is an editor of Australian and New Zealand Journal of European Studies, and member of the Editorial Boards of Oxford German Studies, Journal of European Studies, EFLaC: Essays in French Literature and Culture, Transpositionen, and LIMBUS
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