Speaker Profiles

Listed below are the profiles of our distinguished speakers.

Professor Michael Wesley

Professor Michael Wesley is one of Australia’s foremost foreign policy and Asia-Pacific security experts. Before joining the University of Melbourne, he was Dean of the College of Asia and the Pacific at the Australian National University. He has also held positions as the Executive Director of the Lowy Institute for International Policy, Director of the Griffith Asia Institute at Griffith University, and Assistant Director-General for Transnational Issues at the Office of National Assessments.

As Deputy Vice-Chancellor Global, Culture and Engagement at the University of Melbourne, Professor Wesley provides leadership across the University, with overall responsibility for strategic guidance and expert advice on internationalisation and global engagement. He is also Professor of Politics at the University of Melbourne. His research and writing focus on Australian foreign policy and the international affairs of Asia and the Pacific.

Dr Mike Green

Dr Michael Green is CEO of the United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney. Previously he was Senior Vice President for Asia, Japan Chair, and Henry A. Kissinger Chair at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C. He has also served as Director of Asian Studies, and Chair in Modern and Contemporary Japanese Politics and Foreign Policy at Georgetown University. He worked on staff at the National Security Council (NSC) from 2001 through 2005, first as Director for Asian Affairs, then Special Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs and Senior Director for Asia. Before joining the NSC, he worked at several organisations, including the Council on Foreign Relations, the Edwin O. Reischauer Centre, the Foreign Policy Institute, Johns Hopkins University, the Institute for Defence Analyses, the Office of the Secretary of Defence, and the National Diet in Japan. He has authored numerous books and articles on East Asian security.

Dr Lavina Lee

Dr Lavina Lee is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Security Studies and Criminology at Macquarie University. Dr Lee was appointed to the Council of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute by the Australian Defence Minister from 2020-2023 and was previously a Director of the Institute for Regional Security. She is a non-resident fellow of the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, Washington, D.C., as well as non-resident Senior Fellow at the United States Studies Centre. Dr Lee is the

author of US Hegemony and International Legitimacy: Norms Power and Followership in the Wars on Iraq and has published research and commentary on maritime security and strategy in the Indo-Pacific, the Quad, Indian foreign and security policy, and the US-Australia alliance. She has been published in The Australian, AFR, The Hindustan Times, and New Straits Times, and specialist policy outlets.

Dr Milton Osborne AM

Dr Milton Osborne AM was a non-resident fellow at the Lowy Institute for ten years. He was posted to the Australian Embassy in Phnom Penh in 1959 and has held academic positions in Australia, the UK, the US, and Singapore. In 1980-81 he was a consultant to the UN High Commissioner on Refugees working along the Thai-Cambodian border. In 1982 he served as Head of the Asia Branch of the Office of National Assessments, also serving for a year as Head of Current Intelligence. Since 1993 he has been an independent writer and consultant and Adjunct Professor at the Australian National University. He is the author of 11 books including: Southeast Asia: An Introductory History, now in its 14th edition; River Road to China: The Search for the Source of the Mekong (A New York Times ‘notable book’); Turbulent Past, Uncertain Future; and Pol Pot solved the Leprosy Problem.

Sam Roggeveen

Sam Roggeveen is Director of the Lowy Institute’s International Security Program and author of The Echidna Strategy: Australia’s Search for Power and Peace (2023). Previously Sam was a senior strategic analyst in the Office of National Assessments, where his focus was North Asian strategic affairs, including nuclear strategy and Asian military forces. Sam also worked on arms control policy in Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs, and as an analyst in the Defence Intelligence Organisation. Sam has an interest in politics and political philosophy, and in 2019 wrote Our Very Own Brexit: Australia’s Hollow Politics and Where it Could Lead Us. Sam writes for newspapers and magazines in Australia and globally and for Lowy’s digital magazine, The Interpreter, of which he was the founding editor. Sam also serves as lead editor at the Lowy Institute, and editor of the Lowy Institute Papers.

Remi Brague

Professor Brague, born in Paris in 1947, has spent a lifetime exploring the roots of Western civilisation, engaging with Classical, Medieval, and Modern texts in their own languages.

In addition to being Emeritus Professor at the Sorbonne, Rémi Brague is also the Romano Guardini Chair at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. He is a member of the Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques and has had visiting professorships with Penn State, Boston University, Boston College, Trinity College (Dublin), Universidad de Navarra, and Università San Raffaele (Milan).

His published books in English include Eccentric Culture, The Wisdom of the World, The Law of God, The Kingdom of Man, The Legend of the Middle Ages, On the God of the Christians, Anchors in the Heavens, Moderately Modern, The Legitimacy of the Human, Curing Mad Truths.

Robert Tombs

Robert Tombs is a historian at Cambridge, where he is Emeritus Professor of French History and a Fellow of St John’s College. He has served on the Conseil Franco-Britannique and holds the French Palmes Académiques for service to French culture. Recently, he has written The English and Their History (Penguin, 2015), which he has just finished revising to bring it up to 2023, and This Sovereign Isle: Britain in and out of Europe (Penguin, 2022).

He is a frequent commentator on history and politics, including on British, French, and Australian television, and in the New Statesman, The Spectator, Le Monde, the Financial Times, the Australian Financial Review, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, The New York Times, The Times, and The Daily Telegraph.

He is also co-editor of the pro-Brexit website Briefings for Britain and in August 2021 he set up an international group of historians called History Reclaimed, to combat the ideological distortion of history.

John Carroll

John Carroll is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at La Trobe University in Melbourne, and a Senior Fellow of Yale University. He has degrees in mathematics, economics and sociology from the universities of Melbourne and Cambridge. His work focuses on culture, and its crucial role in the human search for meaning, with particular reference to the modern Western society.

His recent books include The Western Dreaming (2001), The Wreck of Western Culture—Humanism Revisited (2004), The Existential Jesus (2007), Ego and Soul—the Modern West in Search of Meaning (2008), Greek Pilgrimage—In Search of the Foundations of the West (2010), Land of the Golden Cities, Australia’s Exceptional Prosperity & the Culture that Made It (2017), and On Guilt, the Force Shaping Character, History, and Culture (2020). John Carroll is also a frequent writer of essays and newspaper articles. He delivered one of the Alfred Deakin Federation Lectures in 2001—a reflection on Australian culture titled ‘The Blessed Country’. He chaired the Panel reviewing the National Museum of Australia in 2003

Dr Emily Langston, Graduate Institute, St John’s College, Annapolis

Emily Langston was until recently the Associate Dean for Graduate Programs at St John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland, where she has been a member of the faculty since 1995. She holds Masters degrees from Oxford University and the University of Chicago, and a PhD from Emory University where she was a Jacob K. Javitz Fellow. Before assuming her role as Head of the Graduate Institute in 2015, she taught in the Graduate Institute and throughout the all-required multidisciplinary undergraduate program at St John’s. She has been particularly interested in efforts to expand and democratise access to discussion-based liberal education. She serves on the Advisory Council of the Touchstones Discussion Project and the Board of the Great Questions Foundation. She has been involved in the development and implementation of educational programming for K-12 schools, for community colleges, and for governmental and non-governmental organizations including the National Security Agency, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the Aspen Institute.

Elena Douglas, CEO, Knowledge Society

Elena Douglas is the founder and CEO of Knowledge Society, a social purpose business that designs and delivers school improvement and research to impact programs for Australian schools, universities and research institutes. Elena has led the establishment of Advance Global Australians in New York, as well as the Centre for Social Impact at the University of Western Australia (UWA), In the Zone Conference series and the Faith and Globalisation initiative, a partnership with the Tony Blair Faith Foundation. Her perspective is shaped by her career as an economist, entrepreneur, and historian. She teaches Philanthropy at the UWA Business School and researches eighteenth- and nineteenth-century conceptions of virtue, economics and ethics.

Dr Sarah Golsby-Smith, Head of Learning and Teaching, PLC Sydney

Dr Sarah Golsby-Smith has taught English in secondary English schools for over twenty years. She has taught in government and independent schools and has taught in co-ed, boys’ and girls’ schools, enjoying all of these spaces to teach and learn. Sarah has published work on literary theory and its relationship to pedagogy, the new rhetoric as a new theoretical space to occupy, Shakespeare in the classroom, Gwen Harwood’s poetry and theological considerations for the teacher. Her abiding interest is in the importance of the classroom as both a civic and holy space, where truth is both made and discovered.

Elizabeth Stone, Principal, Queenwood School

Ms Stone is Principal of Queenwood School. She sits on several boards, including the Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation and the Association of Independent Schools NSW. She took up a Rhodes Scholarship in 1998 and completed her master’s at University College, Oxford. She later moved into teaching and taught Mathematics first in Sydney and then in the UK. She returned to Australia in 2014 to take up the role of Principal at Queenwood and will return to the UK in September 2023 as Head of Winchester College, the first woman to hold this position in its 640-year history.

Joseph Henrich

Dr Joseph Henrich is the Ruth Moore Professor of Biological Anthropology at Harvard University. Before Harvard, Professor Henrich was a professor of both Economics and Psychology at the University of British Columbia, where he held the Canada Research Chair in Culture, Cognition and Coevolution. His research deploys evolutionary theory to understand how human psychology gives rise to cultural evolution and how this has shaped our species’ biological evolution. Using insights generated from this approach, Dr Henrich has explored a variety of topics, including economic decision-making, social norms, fairness, religion, marriage, prestige, cooperation and innovation.

In 2004 he won the Presidential Early Career Award for young scientists, and in 2009 the Early Career Award for Distinguished Contributions bestowed by the Human Behavior and Evolution Society. In 2013-14, Dr Henrich held the Peter and Charlotte Schoenfeld Faculty Fellowship at NYU’s Stern School of Business. In 2018, the Society for Personality and Social Psychology awarded him the Wegner Prize for Theoretical Innovation. From 2010 to 2019, he was a senior fellow in the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research in the Institutions, Organizations and Growth group and he became a fellow of the Cognitive Science Society in 2021. In 2016 he published The Secret of Our Success (Princeton), and in 2020 The WEIRDest People in the World.

Peter Boghossian

Dr Peter Boghossian is a former Professor of Philosophy at Portland State University, and current Founding Faculty member at the University of Austin. He has a teaching pedigree spanning more than 25 years that focuses on the Socratic Method, scientific skepticism, and critical thinking.

Dr Boghossian travels globally promoting techniques for civil discourses, with his work centered on bringing the tools of professional philosophers to a wide variety of contexts to help people think through what seem to be intractable problems.

His most recent book is How to Have Impossible Conversations, and his writing can be found in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Scientific American, Time Magazine, and the National Review. He is director of the National Progress Alliance, a US organisation with the stated aim to “promote free expression and civil discourse through grants, partnerships, and raising public awareness”.

The University of Austin is a new university announced in 2021, with a stated aim of being an institution “dedicated to the fearless pursuit of the truth”. It was soft launched in 2022 with the introduction of a summer program called “Forbidden Courses”.

Paul Kelly

Paul Kelly is Editor-at-Large on The Australian. He was previously Editor-in-Chief of the paper, and he writes on Australian politics, public policy, and international affairs. Paul has covered Australian governments from Gough Whitlam to Scott Morrison. He is a regular television commentator on Sky News. He is the author of nine books including The End of Certainty on the politics and economics of the 1980s. His recent books include Triumph and Demise on the Rudd-Gillard era and The March of Patriots which offers a re-interpretation of Paul Keating and John Howard in office.

Dr John Lee

Dr John Lee is a Senior Fellow at Hudson Institute. From 2016 to 2018, he was senior advisor to Australian Foreign Minister Julie Bishop. In this role, he served as the principal adviser on Asia and for economic strategic, and political affairs in the Indo-Pacific region. Dr Lee was also appointed the Foreign Minister’s lead adviser on the 2017 Foreign Policy White Paper, the first comprehensive foreign affairs blueprint for Australia since 2003. He has held adjunct professorships at the Australian National University and University of Sydney. He is one of the foremost experts on the Chinese political economy and on strategic and economic affairs pertaining to the Indo-Pacific.

Dave Sharma

As a former Member of Parliament, Ambassador and company director, Dave Sharma has a wealth of high-level experience in national security, trade, international relations, public policy, and technology and innovation. Dave is a law graduate of the University of Cambridge, has chaired and worked with a number of publicly listed technology companies, and was chair of Parliament’s Joint Standing Committee on Treaties and the Foreign Affairs and Aid Subcommittee. Prior to his election to Parliament, Dave was an Australian ambassador and diplomat, serving in Israel, Washington DC, and Papua New Guinea. He was awarded an Australian Service Medal for his peacekeeping duties in Bougainville.

John Minford

Emeritus Professor John Minford was educated at Winchester College, where he was awarded the Goddard Prize in Classics in 1962, and in the same year the Queen’s Gold Medal for Latin Verse Composition. In 1964 he won a scholarship in classics to Balliol College, Oxford. He began studying Chinese in 1966, graduating in 1968 with First Class Honours. 

In 1970 he and David Hawkes began their collaborative 5-volume translation of the great 18-century novel The Story of the Stone, sometimes known as The Dream of the Red Chamber, completing it in 1986. He wrote his doctoral dissertation at the Australian National University from 1977 to 1980, under the supervision of Professor Liu Ts’un-yan. In 1980 he travelled to China, where he taught translation for two years in Tianjin.

From 1982 to 1986 he worked at the Chinese University of Hong Kong with Stephen C. Soong, editing the translation journal Renditions. Since then, he has published several translations of Chinese literature, classical and modern, and taught Chinese literature and translation in various universities in China, Hong Kong, New Zealand and Australia.

Now retired and living in rural New Zealand, John Minford is Emeritus Professor of Chinese at the ANU and Sin Wai Kin Distinguished Professor of Chinese Culture and Translation at the Hang Seng University of Hong Kong. In November 2016 he was awarded the Australian Academy of Humanities Inaugural Award for Excellence in Translation, for I Ching.

Kim Beazley

Mr Beazley served as an esteemed Ramsay Centre Board Director from 2017 until his appointment in 2018 as the 33^rd Governor of Western Australia. Prior to being installed as Governor, he dedicated almost three decades to a career in Federal Parliament, representing the WA seats of Brand and Swan.

He was a Minister in the Hawke and Keating Labor Governments (1983-1996) holding, at various times, the portfolios of Defence, Finance, Transport and Communications, Employment Education and Training, Aviation, and Special Minister of State. From 1995 to 1996, Mr Beazley was Deputy Prime Minister and Leader of the Australian Labor Party, and he was Leader of the Opposition from 1996 to 2001, and 2005 to 2006.

After his retirement from politics in 2007, Mr Beazley was appointed Winthrop Professor in the Department of Politics and International Relations at The University of Western Australia. In July 2008 he was appointed Chancellor of the Australian National University, a position he held until December 2009.

Mr Beazley took up an appointment as Ambassador to the United States of America in February 2010. He served as Ambassador until January 2016. Upon returning to Australia from Washington in 2016, Mr Beazley was appointed as President of the Australian Institute for International Affairs (2016-17), Co-Chairman of the Australian American Leadership Dialogue (2016-18), Distinguished Fellow at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, and a Director and Distinguished Fellow at the Perth USAsia Centre.

Mary Eberstadt

Mary Eberstadt holds the Panula Chair in Christian Culture at the Catholic Information Center in Washington, DC and is a Senior Research Fellow at the Faith and Reason Institute. She is the author of several books including Primal Screams: How the Sexual Revolution Created Identity Politics; How the West Really Lost God; and Adam and Eve after the Pill: Paradoxes of the Sexual Revolution.

She has written for numerous magazines and journals and her 2010 novel The Loser Letters, about a young woman in rehab struggling with atheism, was adapted for stage and premiered at Catholic University in 2017.

Her work is available on her website, maryeberstadt.com

Roosevelt Montás

Dr Roosevelt Montás is Senior Lecturer in American Studies and English at Columbia University and the former director of Columbia’s Center for the Core Curriculum (2008-2018). He was born in the Dominican Republic and moved to New York as a teenager, where he attended public schools in Queens before entering Columbia College in 1991 through its Opportunity Programs. In 2003, he completed a PhD in English, also at Columbia; his dissertation, Rethinking America, won Columbia University’s 2004 Bancroft Award. In 2000, he received the Presidential Award for Outstanding Teaching by a Graduate Student and in 2008, he received the Dominican Republic’s National Youth Prize. He regularly teaches moral and political philosophy in the Columbia Core Curriculum as well seminars in American Studies. He is also director of the Center for American Studies’ Freedom and Citizenship Program, which brings low-income high school students to the Columbia campus to study political theory and then helps them prepare successful applications to college.

Professor Carr has received the Fulbright Distinguished Fellow Award Scholarship. He has served as Honorary Scholar of the Australian American Leadership Dialogue. He is the author of Thoughtlines (2002), What Australia Means to Me (2003), My Reading Life (2008), Diary of a Foreign Minister (2014) and Run for Your Life (2018).

Bob Carr

Professor Carr is a former Australian Labor Party politician. He served as NSW Minister for Planning and Environment from 1984 to 1988, and as Leader of the NSW Opposition from 1988, until his election as Premier in March 1995. He was re-elected in 1999 and 2003, securing an historic third four-year term. He retired from state politics in 2005.

In March 2012 he was designated by Prime Minister Julia Gillard as Australia’s Foreign Minister, elected to the Australian Senate to fill a casual Senate vacancy, and sworn into the Senate and Cabinet on March 13, 2012.

Following his resignation from the Senate in 2013, in 2014 he was appointed the Director of the newly established Australia China Relations Institute at the University of Technology Sydney, the first think tank devoted to Australia-China relations, serving there for five years. Between 2019 and 2022, he served as Professor of Industry in Climate and Business at the University of Technology Sydney helping to shape debate on climate and energy.

Professor Carr has received the Fulbright Distinguished Fellow Award Scholarship. He has served as Honorary Scholar of the Australian American Leadership Dialogue. He is the author of Thoughtlines (2002), What Australia Means to Me (2003), My Reading Life (2008), Diary of a Foreign Minister (2014) and Run for Your Life (2018).

Gary Johns

The Hon Dr Gary Johns took up the role of Commissioner in 2017 following a career in public service and policy advice, including as the author or editor of nine books on public policy. He was an inaugural board member of Volunteers Australia, a member of the Prime Minister’s Business Community Partnership, and the committee to design the Redress Scheme for survivors of institutional child sexual abuse.

Gary was a member of the House of Representatives from 1987-1996 and served variously as Parliamentary Secretary to the Deputy Prime Minister, Parliamentary Secretary to the Treasurer, and Special Minister of State and Assistant Minister for Industrial Relations. He served as an Associate Commissioner of the Commonwealth Productivity Commission 2002-2004.

He received the Centenary Medal in 2001 and the Fulbright Professional Award in Australian-United States Alliance Studies in 2002, which was served at Georgetown University, Washington DC.

He was Senior Fellow at the Institute of Public Affairs, senior consultant with ACIL Tasman, Associate Professor, Australian Catholic University, Visiting Fellow at QUT Business School, and is an adjunct Professor at the University of Queensland.

Peter Craven

Peter Craven is a culture critic. He was the founding editor of Scripsi, of Quarterly Essay and the Black Inc Best Of annuals. He writes about every aspect of culture from Shakespeare and the Bible to television.

He is a frequent contributor to both the Murdoch and the Nine press. He writes a weekly column for The Spectator and is the former drama critic of the The Saturday Paper. 

Rowan Callick OBE

Rowan Callick is an Industry Fellow at Griffith University’s Asia Institute. He is an author, and a writer and speaker on contemporary China. He grew up in England, graduating with a BA Honours from Exeter University, and worked for a daily newspaper before moving to Papua New Guinea in 1976, becoming general manager of a locally owned publishing, printing, and retail group. In 1987 he moved to Australia, working for almost 20 years for The Australian Financial Review including as Hong Kong based China Correspondent, and for two years as a senior writer for Time magazine.

He worked for The Australian from 2006 to 2018, including two postings to Beijing as China Correspondent. He was Asia-Pacific Editor of both The Australian Financial Review and The Australian. His work has also been published by The Wall Street Journal, Foreign Policy magazine, and The Times. He is a member of the advisory board of the Australian Government’s National Foundation for Australia-China Relations, a governor of the Foundation for Development Cooperation, and a member of the advisory boards of La Trobe Asia and of the Australia China Relations Institute at the University of Technology, Sydney.

He was appointed an Honorary Fellow of the Australian Institute for International Affairs and has won two Walkley Awards and the Graham Perkin Award for Australian Journalist of the Year in 1995. He was awarded the OBE in 2015, at the nomination of the government of PNG, for services to the training of PNG journalists. He has written three books, each published in English and Chinese, the most recent being Party Time: Who Runs China and How (Black Inc in Australia, and internationally by Palgrave Macmillan as The Party Forever: Inside China’s Modern Communist Elite).

Professor Bettany Hughes OBE

Professor Bettany Hughes is an award-winning historian, author and broadcaster, who has devoted the last 25 years to the vibrant communication of the past. Her speciality is ancient and mediaeval history and culture. A Scholar at Oxford University she has taught at Oxford and Cambridge Universities and lectured at Cornell, Bristol, UCL, Maastricht, Utrecht, Manchester and Swansea. She is a Tutor for Cambridge University’s Institute of Continuing Education, a Research Fellow of King’s College London and recently joined the New College of the Humanities as Professor of History.

​Her first book Helen of Troy: Goddess, Princess, Whore has been translated into ten languages. Her second, The Hemlock Cup, Socrates, Athens and the Search for the Good Life was a New York Times bestseller and was shortlisted for the Writer’s Guild Award. Her latest book Istanbul – A Tale of Three Cities was shortlisted for the Runciman Award and was a Sunday Times bestseller. Istanbul – A Tale of Three Cities has already been translated into twelve languages. She has written and presented over 50 TV and radio documentaries for the BBC, Channel 4, Netflix, Discovery, PBS, The History Channel, National Geographic, BBC World and ITV. Her programmes have now been seen by over 250 million worldwide. 

Tom Holland

Tom Holland is the presenter of BBC Radio 4’s Making History and co-writer and co-presenter of the podcast, The Rest is History, with Dominic Sandbrook. He has written and presented several TV documentaries, for the BBC and Channel 4, on subjects ranging from dinosaurs to ISIS. 

He is the author of Rubicon: The Triumph and the Tragedy of the Roman Republic, which won the Hessell-Tiltman Prize for History and was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize; Persian Fire which won the Anglo-Hellenic League’s Runciman Award in 2006; Millennium: The End of the World and the Forging of Christendom; In the Shadow of the Sword, and Dynasty, a portrait of Rome’s first imperial dynasty. 

 Mr Holland has adapted Homer, Herodotus, Thucydides and Virgil for the BBC. In 2007, he was the winner of the Classical Association prize, awarded to ‘the individual who has done most to promote the study of the language, literature and civilisation of Ancient Greece and Rome’. In 2019 Tom released his latest book and Sunday Times best-seller Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind. 

Professor Gigi Foster

Gigi Foster is a Professor and the Director of Education with the School of Economics at the University of New South Wales Business School, having joined UNSW in 2009 after six years at the University of South Australia. Formally educated at Yale University (BA in Ethics, Politics, and Economics) and the University of Maryland (PhD in Economics), she works in diverse fields including education, social influence, corruption, lab experiments, time use, behavioural economics, and Australian policy. Her research contributions regularly inform public debates and appear in both specialised and cross-disciplinary outlets (e.g., Quantitative Economics, Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, Journal of Population Economics, Journal of Economic Psychology, Human Relations). Her teaching, featuring strategic innovation and integration with research, was awarded a 2017 Australian Awards for University Teaching (AAUT) Citation for Outstanding Contributions to Student Learning. Named 2019 Young Economist of the Year by the Economic Society of Australia, Professor Foster has filled numerous roles of service to the profession and engages heavily on economic matters with the Australian community, including most recently in regard to Covid policy. Amongst other service roles, she co-founded and runs the Consortium for Inclusive Economics Education at UNSW. As one of Australia’s leading economics communicators, Professor Foster writes for both the academic and the popular press and is regularly interviewed on mainstream television and radio programs across the country, and quoted in national print media, about economic matters. Her regular media appearances include co-hosting The Economists, a national economics talk-radio program and podcast series now in its fifth season, with Peter Martin AM on ABC Radio National.

Chris Uhlmann

Chris Uhlmann replaced Laurie Oakes as Nine News political editor in late 2017. Before that he spent 19 years with the ABC, working in a range of roles, on a variety of programs, including flagship national programs like 730, Insiders and AM. He won a Walkley Award for broadcast interviewing in 2008 and was part of the 4 Corners team that won the Golden Quill in 2017 for an investigation into China’s power and influence in Australia.

With Steve Lewis, he co-authored three works of political fiction: The Mandarin Code, The Marmalade Files and Shadow Game. The first two were adapted by Matchbox Pictures as a six-part television miniseries, Secret City.

Lord Daniel Hannan

The Right Honourable The Lord Hannan of Kingsclere, is a best-selling author, columnist, and political figure.  Lord Hannan has written nine books, including the New York Times best seller Inventing Freedom:  How the English Speaking People Made the Modern World.

He is a columnist for several newspapers including the UK’s The Sydney Telegraph; and has been published in The Australian newspaper and The Wall Street Journal. He was a founder of Vote Leave in the UK, and sat as a Conservative Member of the European Parliament for 21 years.  He now serves on the UK Board of Trade, and is a Vice-Chairman of the Conservative Party, responsible for its international relations.

Professor Deirdre McCloskey

Deirdre Nansen McCloskey is Distinguished Professor Emerita of Economics and of History, and Professor Emerita of English and of Communication, at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Trained at Harvard in the 1960s as an economist, she has written twenty books and some four hundred academic articles on economic theory, economic history, philosophy, rhetoric, statistical theory, feminism, ethics, and law.

She taught for twelve years at the University of Chicago in the Economics Department in its glory days, but now describes herself as a “literary, quantitative, postmodern, free-market, progressive-Episcopalian, ex-Marxist, Midwestern woman from Boston who was once a man. Not ‘conservative’! I’m a Christian classical liberal.”

Her most recent popular books, for example, are Why Liberalism Works: How True Liberal Values Produce a Freer, More Equal, Prosperous World for All (Yale University Press, 2019) and with Art Carden Leave Me Alone and I’ll Make You Rich: The Bourgeois Deal (University of Chicago Press, 2020). Also in 2019 the Chicago Press published a third edition of her classic manual on style, Economical Writing, and a 20^th-anniversary re-issue of Crossing: A Transgender Memoir, with a new Afterword. But she’s technical and quantitative, too. For example, with Stephen Ziliak in 2008 she wrote The Cult of Statistical Significance, widely praised, which shows that null hypothesis tests of “significance” are, in the absence of a substantive loss function, meaningless. The point, made long before McCloskey by a few statisticians, is becoming widely accepted, for example in the American Statistical Association, though not yet in economics and medicine.

Her latest scholarly book again from the University of Chicago Press, Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World (2016), was the final volume of the Bourgeois Era trilogy. It argues for an “ideational” explanation of the Great Enrichment of 3,000 percent per person 1800 to the present in places like Britain and Japan and Finland. The accidents of Reformation and Revolt in northwestern Europe 1517–1789 led to a new liberty and dignity for commoners—ideas called “liberalism” in the proper sense—which led in turn to an explosion of commercially tested betterment, “having a go.” The second book in the trilogy, Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can’t Explain the Modern World (2010), had shown that materialist explanations such as saving or exploitation, don’t have enough economic oomph or historical relevance to explain the Enrichment. The alleged explanations that do not focus on the new ideology of “innovism”—her name for the ill-named “capitalism”—are mistaken. And the Enrichment did not corrupt our immortal souls. The inaugural book in the trilogy, The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce (2006), had established that, contrary to the clamor since 1848 of the clerisy left and right, the bourgeoisie is pretty good, and that commercially tested betterment is not the worst of ethical schools. In short, the trilogy looks forward, if populism does not spoil the prospect, to a world of universal dignity and prosperity created by liberal innovism.

Professor Patrick Deneen

Patrick J. Deneen is Professor of Political Science and David A. Potenziani College Chair of Constitutional Studies at the University of Notre Dame. Prior to joining the faculty of Notre Dame in 2012, he taught at Princeton University (1997-2005) and Georgetown University (2005-2012). From 1995-1997 he served as Speechwriter and Special Assistant to the Director of the U.S. Information Agency.

Deneen is author of several books, including Why Liberalism Failed, published by Yale University Press in 2018 (paperback 2019). The book has been widely discussed and debated, earning a recommendation by former President Barack Obama, who wrote that “the book offers cogent insights into the loss of meaning and community that many in the West feel, issues that libreral democracies ignore at their own peril.” It has been translated into 15 languages.

Deneen received a B.A. in English literature from Rutgers University in 1986, and his Ph.D. in political science from Rutgers University in 1995. His dissertation was awarded the American Political Science Association’s Leo Strauss Award for Best Dissertation in Political Theory in 1995.

Lord Charles Moore

Charles Hilary Moore, Baron Moore of Etchingham is an English journalist and a former editor of The Daily Telegraph, The Spectator and The Sunday Telegraph, he still writes for all three.

He is known for his authorised  biography of Margaret Thatcher, published in three volumes (2013, 2016 and 2019).

Under the government of Boris Johnson in July 2020 Moore was given a peerage and made a member of the House of Lords.

Professor Peter Tregear OAM

Professor Peter Tregear OAM is a Principal Fellow of the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music and the inaugural Director of Little Hall, University of Melbourne. He worked extensively across Australia and the United Kingdom

 as a performer, teacher, and educational advocate. A graduate of the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music, he subsequently undertook doctoral studies at King’s College, University of Cambridge, and from 2000 to 2006 was Lecturer and Director of Music at Fitzwilliam College.

Since returning to Australia in 2006 he has served as Executive Director of the Academy of Performing Arts at Monash University and Head of the School of Music at the Australian National University and has performed as a soloist or conductor with Melbourne Opera, Victorian Opera, Kronos Quartet, The Rolling Stones, Australian Chamber Orchestra, and Australian Youth Orchestra, among other leading ensembles.  He also remains active as a teacher and academic, and is currently the convenor of the International Centre for Suppressed Music at Royal Holloway, University of London, which promotes the recovery of the history and music of composers and performers who were banned, exiled, or murdered as a result of the rise of Fascism in Europe. Published work include Ernst Krenek and the Politics of Musical Style (2013) and Enlightenment or Entitlement: Rethinking Tertiary Music Education (2014). In 2019 he conducted the Australian premiere of Krenek’s Zeitoper ‘Jonny spielt auf’ to international acclaim.  Earlier this year he was awarded a Medal (OAM) of the Order of Australia for services to music education.

Ita Buttrose AC OBE

Ita Buttrose has held executive and editing roles for major Australian media companies including Australian Consolidated Press, News Ltd and Fairfax, and has run her own media company, Capricorn Publishing. She has served on the boards of Australian Consolidated Press, News Corp Australia, and Television & Telecasters Pty Ltd. (Network TEN). She has worked in print, radio and television and has written 11 books. She was inducted into the Australian Media Hall of Fame in 2017.

A founding member and former president of Chief Executive Women, Ita is a committed community and welfare contributor. She chaired Arthritis Australia from 2003 to 2006 and later Alzheimer’s (now Dementia) Australia from 2011 to 2014 and is now National Ambassador for Dementia Australia. She is Chair of The Australian Mental Health Prize Advisory Group.

She has been a member of the Sydney Symphony Council since 2010 and served as a Trustee of Centennial and Moore Park Trust in Sydney from 2012 to 2020. She is a member of the Australian Institute of Company Directors.

Peter Baldwin

Peter Baldwin first became involved in politics as a factional activist in the Australian Labor Party (ALP) in the early 1970s. This led to a parliamentary career, first as a member of the NSW Legislative Council, then a long stint as the federal MP for the inner-city seat of Sydney that included six years as a minister in federal Labor governments.

Throughout his political career he was affiliated with the Left faction of the ALP and participated in many debates about policy and ideology. In recent years he has become profoundly disturbed by the turn to ‘identity politics’ in leftist politics, and in society more generally.

He sees this ideology as atavistic and reactionary, the antithesis of what decent progressive politics should be about, and has made this case in a number of articles and speeches.

Lionel Shriver

A prolific journalist with a column in The Spectator magazine, Lionel Shriver has published one collection and thirteen novels, including the bestsellers The Mandibles: A Family, 2029-2047, Big Brother, So Much for That, The Post-Birthday World, and the Orange-Prize winner We Need to Talk About Kevin (a 2011 feature film starring Tilda Swinton). 

Her latest novel is The Motion of the Body Through Space (2020), with the forthcoming Should We Stay or Should We Go scheduled for June of 2021. Her work has been translated into over 30 languages.

Professor Andrew Roberts

Professor Andrew Roberts read Modern History at Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge, from where he is a PhD. He has written over a dozen books including Salisbury: Victorian Titan (which won the Wolfson Prize) Masters and Commanders (which won the International Churchill Society Book Award), The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War (which won the British Army Military Book of the Year Award), Napoleon the Great (which won the Grand Prix of the Fondation Napoléon and The Los Angeles Times Biography Prize) and Churchill: Walking with Destiny, which won the Council on Foreign Relations Arthur Ross Prize. Dr Roberts is the Roger & Martha Mertz Visiting Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford, the Lehrman Institute Distinguished Lecturer at the New-York Historical Society, a visiting professor at the Department of War Studies at King’s College, London, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the Royal Historical Society. He lives in London. His website is www.andrew-roberts.net

Emeritus Professor John Fitzgerald AM

Before joining Swinburne in 2013 John served five years as Representative of The Ford Foundation in Beijing where he directed the Foundation’s China operations. Before that, he was Head of the School of Social Sciences at La Trobe University and before that again directed the International Centre of Excellence in Asia-Pacific Studies at the Australian National University. In Canberra he served as Chair of the Education Committee of the Australia-China Council of the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, as chair of the Committee for National and International Cooperation of the Australian Research Council, and as International Secretary of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. He is currently the President of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. His research focuses on territorial government and civil society in China and on Australia’s Asian diasporas. His publications have won international recognition, including the Joseph Levenson Prize of the US Association for Asian Studies and the Ernest Scott Prize of the Australian Historical Association.

John Bell AO OBE

John Bell AO OBE has been a major influence on the development of Australian theatre in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. He is one of the nation’s most illustrious theatre personalities. Award-winning actor, acclaimed director, risk-taking impresario, torch-bearing educationalist and speaker on leadership; John has been a key figure in shaping the nation’s theatrical identity as we know it over the past 50 years.

John founded The Bell Shakespeare Company in 1990 where he served as Director until 2015. His productions include over 15 of Shakespeare’s greatest works, which have been played to almost 2.5 million Australians.

John Bell has received recognition from many bodies for his leadership and significant contributions to national culture. He is an Officer of the Order of Australia and the Order of the British Empire; has an Honorary Doctorate of Letters from the Universities of Sydney, New South Wales and Newcastle; and was recognised in 1997 by the National Trust of Australia as one of Australia’s Living Treasures.

Anastasia Lin

Anastasia Lin is an award-winning actress, beauty pageant titleholder, and human rights advocate. In 2015, Lin won the Miss World Canada title, and was to represent Canada at the Miss World pageant in China. However, she was refused a visa and declared a persona non grata by Chinese authorities for her outspoken views on the country’s human rights violations. The news of her rejection—and subsequent attempt to enter China—caused global media attention for weeks, leading to a front page article in The New York Times and op-eds in major newspapers. Since then, she has been invited to speak at the National Press Club in Washington, DC, the Oxford Union, United Nations Human Rights Council, the Geneva Human Rights Summit, Oslo Freedom Forum and has testified in the US Congress, the UK Parliament, and the Taiwanese Legislative Assembly.

Lin has appeared in over 20 films and television productions. She often works at the confluence of activism and acting, playing roles that carry messages of freedom, human rights, and ethics. Her films have received the Gabriel Award for Best Feature Film, the Mexico International Film Festival’s Golden Palm Award, and the California’s Indie Fest Award of Merit. Lin also won the Best Leading Actress in a TV Movie at the Leo Awards in 2016. As a model, she’s made appearances on runways around the world, including the New York Fashion Week show at the prestigious Waldorf-Astoria.

Lin has been listed as one of the “Top 25 under 25” by MTV, a “Top 60 under 30” by Flare, and called “The Badass Beauty Queen” by Marie Claire. She was one of eleven stakeholders selected to meet with Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird upon the establishment of Canada’s Office of Religious Freedom. Her articles have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, The Huffington Post, The Globe and Mail, The Daily Telegraph and other major newspapers.

Rachel Fulton Brown

Rachel Fulton Brown is Associate Professor of History at the University of Chicago, where she has taught since 1994. She is the author of From Judgment to Passion: Devotion to Christ and the Virgin Mary, 800-1200, and Mary and the Art of Prayer: The Hours of the Virgin in Medieval Christian Life and Thought, as well as co-editor of History in the Comic Mode: Medieval Communities and the Matter of Person, all published by Columbia University Press. She writes for the public on her blog Fencing Bear at Prayer. She has appeared on numerous videos, podcasts, and radio shows over the past several years, talking about her conversion to Catholicism and her role in the culture wars. Her engagements with her colleagues in academia have been recounted in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Inside Higher Ed, The New York Times, and First Things.

Jonathan Haidt

Jonathan Haidt (pronounced “height”) is a social psychologist at New York University’s Stern School of Business. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1992 and taught for 16 years in the department of psychology at the University of Virginia.

Haidt’s research examines the intuitive foundations of morality, and how morality varies across cultures––including the cultures of progressive, conservatives, and libertarians. His goal is to help people understand each other, live and work near each other, and even learn from each other despite their moral differences. Haidt has co-founded a variety of organizations and collaborations that apply moral and social psychology toward that end, including HeterodoxAcademy.org, OpenMindPlatform.org, and CivilPolitics.org.

Haidt is the author of The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom, and of The New York Times bestsellers The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion, and The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas are Setting Up a Generation for Failure (co-authored with Greg Lukianoff). His next book is tentatively titled Three Stories about Capitalism: The Moral Psychology of Economic Life.

Helen Pluckrose

Helen Pluckrose is the editor-in-chief of Areo, a digital magazine focusing on humanism, reason, science, culture and art. She is a political and cultural writer and commentator and her most popular essays include “How French Intellectuals Ruined the West: Postmodernism Explained,” “No, Liberal Lefties are Not Right-Wing,” and, with James A. Lindsay, “A Manifesto Against the Enemies of Modernity.” Helen is an exile from the humanities with research interests in late medieval and early modern women’s religious writing. She got her Bachelor degree in English literature from the University of East London and her Masters in Early Modern Studies, 1300-1700, from Queen Mary University London. She recently took part in the “Grievance Studies Affair” with James A. Lindsay and Peter Boghossian. The trio got seven absurd, unevidenced and unethical papers accepted by academic journals in order to demonstrate the problem with scholarship in identity/cultural studies. Helen is currently writing a book about the problems with epistemology and ethics on the academic left. A left-wing liberal secularist, Helen constantly criticises illiberalism and irrationalism on the left and right. 

Rod Dreher

Rod Dreher is a senior editor at The American Conservative. He has written and edited for the New York Post, The Dallas Morning News, National Review, the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, the Washington Times, and the Baton Rouge Advocate. Rod’s commentary has been published in The Wall Street Journal, Commentary, the Weekly Standard, Beliefnet, and Real Simple, among other publications, and he has appeared on NPR, ABC News, CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, and the BBC. He lives in St. Francisville, Louisiana, with his wife Julie and their three children. He has also written four books, The Little Way of Ruthie Leming, Crunchy Cons, How Dante Can Save Your Life, and The Benedict Option

Greg Sheridan

Greg Sheridan, The Australian’s foreign editor, is one of the nation’s most influential national security commentators, who is active across television and radio and also writes extensively on culture. He has written seven books. His latest, God is Good for You: A Defence of Christianity in Troubled Times, is a passionate defence of religious belief in a secular age. It is a bestseller with 7 reprints to date. Before that, When We Were Young and Foolish was an entertaining memoir of culture, politics and journalism. As foreign editor, he specialises in Asia. He has interviewed Presidents and Prime Ministers across the world.

‘In 2016 Greg was appointed an Officer in the Order of Australia for commentary on national security and contributions to Australia’s bilateral relations. He was a Visiting Fellow at CSIS in Washington in 2004 and 2005, then a Visiting Scholar at Woodrow Wilson International Centre for Scholars in Washington in 2010. As a journalist he has had articles published in Sunday Times, Wall St Journal, The Chesterton Review, The Hindu, The South China Morning Post and The Jakarta Post.

Professor Fiona Wood

Professor Fiona Wood’s journey of over 3 decades treating people with burn injuries is a story about her passion, dedication and belief in striving for excellence to improve the outcomes of patients by bringing science to the bedside.

Fiona Wood is a Plastic & Reconstructive Surgeon specialising in the field of burn care, trauma and scar reconstruction. As Director of the WA Burns Service of Western Australia she is consultant at Perth Children’s and Fiona Stanley Hospitals.

As Director of Burns Research, she leads an interdisciplinary team with broad collaboration focused on translation to improve clinical outcomes. She has been the recipient of the 2003 Australian Medical Association’ Contribution to Medicine’ Award and an Order of Australia Medal for work with Bali bombing victims. As a National Living Treasure and Australian Citizen of the Year in 2004, she received the honour of being named Australian of the Year in 2005.

Fiona and Marie Stoner, co-founders of Clinical Cell Culture, now Avitamedical, won the 2005 Clunies Ross Award for their contributions to Medical Science in Australia.

Henry Ergas

Henry Ergas is a consultant economist and weekly opinions columnist for ‘The Australian’ newspaper.  Prior to this Henry held concurrent roles as Professor of Infrastructure Economics at the SMART Infrastructure Facility, University of Wollongong and Deloitte Australia’s Senior Economic Adviser. From 1978 to 1993 Henry was at the OECD in Paris where amongst other roles he headed the Secretary-General’s Task Force on Structural Adjustment and was Counsellor for Structural Policy in the Economics Department. He has taught at a wide range of universities, including the École nationale de la statistique et de l’administration économique in Paris (1980-1990), the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard (1994-1995) and Monash University in Melbourne (1988-1990). He chaired the Intellectual Property and Competition Policy Review undertaken by the Howard government in 1999-2001, and was a member of the Export Infrastructure Review in 2005. In 2016 Henry was awarded an Order of Australia for distinguished service to infrastructure economics, higher education, public policy development and review, and as a supporter of emerging artists.

Panayiotis (Pano) Kanelos

Panayiotis (Pano) Kanelos was appointed President of St Johns College, Annapolis in July of 2017 and is responsible for strategic leadership and works collaboratively with academic and administrative colleagues to promote the value of the college’s distinctive interdisciplinary curriculum in the course of outreach, student recruitment, and fundraising, among other areas.

Previously Kanelos served as the dean of Christ College, the Honors College of Valparaiso University in Valparaiso, Indiana, where he was responsible for the strategic leadership, coordination, and guidance of Christ College. He also managed the recruitment and admissions process, which included initiatives to expand diversity that led the college to achieve its largest and most diverse enrolment to date. Concurrently, he oversaw the administration and finances of the Lilly Fellows Program in Humanities and the Arts, a network of 100 colleges and universities that advances liberal arts education through conferences, workshops, publications, and fellowships.

Kanelos has a distinguished background as an educator and administrator who has developed innovative programs. An ardent Shakespeare fan and scholar, he has authored and edited numerous books, articles, and essays on Shakespeare, including the “Shakespeare and the Stage” series, published by Rowman & Littlefield.

Kanelos holds a Ph.D. from the Committee on Social Thought at University of Chicago, a M.A. in Political Philosophy and Literature from the University Professors Program at Boston University, and a B.A. in English from Northwestern University.

John Carroll

John Carroll is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia. He has degrees in mathematics, economics and sociology from the universities of Melbourne and Cambridge. His work focuses on culture, and its crucial role in the human search for meaning, with particular reference to the modern Western society.

His recent books include The Western Dreaming, Terror—a Meditation on the Meaning of September 11, The Wreck of Western Culture—Humanism Revisited, The Existential Jesus, Ego and Soul—the Modern West in Search of Meaning,  Greek Pilgrimage—In Search of the Foundations of the West, and Land of the Golden Cities—Australia’s Exceptional Prosperity and the Culture that Made It. John Carroll is also a frequent writer of essays and newspaper articles. He has recently published articles in the Saturday Australian on Cultural Masochism in the West, The Sopranos and Deadwood, Essendon Drugs Saga, Patriotism, Paris Turns In on Itself, Anguish is Exquisite for Wielders of 18C,  Why We Still Love Getting Married, The Birth of Meaning, and Denial of the Best of the West.

He delivered one of the Alfred Deakin Federation Lectures in 2001—a reflection on Australian culture titled ‘The Blessed Country’. He chaired the Panel reviewing the National Museum of Australia in 2003. Metaphysical Sociology, a book on his work, edited by Sara James, was published in 2018.

David Malouf

David Malouf is an Australian writer. He is widely recognized as one of Australia’s greatest writers. He was awarded the Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 2000, his 1993 novel Remembering Babylon won the International Dublin Literary Award in 1996, he won the inaugural Australia-Asia Literary Award in 2008, and he was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. In 2016, he received the Australia Council Award for Lifetime Achievement in Literature.

Professor Geoffrey Blainey

Professor Geoffrey Blainey is one of Australia’s most prolific and popular historians. He has written more than forty books, including The Tyranny of Distance, Triumph of the Nomads, A Shorter History of Australia, The Rush That Never Ended, and the international bestseller A Short History of the World, which was published in a score of lands as far apart as Brazil, India, Spain and China. He has served the federal government as chairman of the Commonwealth Literary Fund, the Australia Council for the Arts, the National Council for the Centenary of Federation, and the Australia–China Council.

At the United Nations in New York, in 1988, Professor Blainey received the celebrated Britannica Prize ‘for excellence in the dissemination of knowledge for the benefit of mankind’. A recipient of Australia’s highest honour, Companion in the Order of Australia (AC), he has been officially listed for two decades by the National Trust as a ‘National Living Treasure’. He is married to the well-known biographer Ann Blainey.