Cutting Edge

Episode hosts: Ben Nickl and Jessica Milner Davis About our guest on this episode: Ronald, an Australian, is a professor in the Sociology Department of Daito Bunka University. He has lived and worked in Japan since 1998, earning his MA and PhD at Nagoya University on a Japanese government scholarship. Ronald is currently researching the work of Japan’s first professional cartoonist Kitazawa Rakute...

Episode hosts: Ben Nickl and Rodney Taveira About our guest on this episode: Will is a lecturer in English studies and translation at the University of Burgundy, where he is assigned to the Interlanguage Centre - Text, Image, Language (UR 4812) laboratory. Originally from Australia, he began his research career by studying the relationship between Francophone and Anglophone humour before gradually...

Episode hosts: Ben Nickl and Matilda Knowles About our guest on this episode: Tony is the Lead Chief Investigator for the ARC Linkage Grant ‘Comedy Country’. Based at Monash University’s School of Media, Film and Journalism, he has a background in leading large-scale projects and is an experienced cultural and media historian focusing on the intersection of countercultures, popular culture and pol...

Episode hosts: Ben Nickl and Geoffrey Lee About our guest on this episode: John is a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Melbourne, researching climate misinformation. He wrote and drew the cartoons in the book Cranky Uncle vs. Climate Change, and developed the Cranky Uncle smartphone game, which combines cartoons and gamification to build resilience against misinformation. About the episo...

Episode hosts: Ben Nickl and Rodney Taveira About our guest on this episode: Ian’s research seeks to understand both how people use creative practices to make sense of their lives and experiences, particularly in the context of extreme circumstances, and how we might use the idea of performance, more generally, as a way of thinking about being human. His current projects are, first, a performance-...

Episode hosts: Ben Nickl and Anna-Sophie Jürgens About our guest on this episode: Tatiana is a Lecturer at ANU in Canberra and joined the university’s Centre for Classical Studies in 2023. Prior to this, she was the Moses and Mary Finley Research Fellow at Darwin College, University of Cambridge. Tatiana is a graduate of the University of Sydney where she completed her undergraduate studies and MP...

Episode hosts: Ben Nickl and Alberto Godioli About our guest on this episode: João Paulo Capelotti is a Brazilian legal scholar and humour studies researcher with a PhD and Master of Laws from the Federal University of Paraná (UFPR). João is a member of the International Society for Humor Studies (ISHS) and the International Society for Luso-Hispanic Humor Studies. His work explores humour and the...

Episode hosts: Ben Nickl and Suchi Chowdhury About our guest on this episode: Kerry is an Associate Professor at RMIT in Melbourne and teaches French language and culture at all proficiency levels, and sociolinguistics. Her main research interests are cross-cultural communication and differing interactional styles – particularly those of French and Australian English speakers. She also researches...

Episode hosts: Ben Nickl and Geoffrey Lee About our guest on this episode: Mark is an Honorary Lecturer with the School of Social Sciences at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, where he taught. He is keenly interested in Australian politics, rhetoric, propaganda, political satire, American politics, populism, and political leadership.  Some of his recent publications include: ‘The idea o...

Episode hosts: Ben Nickl and Jessica Milner Davis About our guest on this episode: Professor Goh Abe is a Lecturer at the Faculty of Engineering and Design at Kagawa University, Japan. He is a long-standing member of the Japan Society for Humour and Laughter Research and has presented at many conferences of the JSLHS as well as the International Society for Humor Studies (ISHS)as well as at the AH...

Episode hosts: Ben Nickl and Will Visconti About our guest on this episode: Anna-Sophie is a Senior Lecturer in Science Communication at the Australian National Centre for the Public Awareness of Science of the Australian National University, and the founder and head of the ‘Popsicule– ANU’s Science in Popular Culture and Entertainment Hub’. Her research explores the cultural meanings of science,...

Episode hosts: Ben Nickl and Will Visconti About our guest on this episode: Alan is Head of School of Art, Communication, and English at The University of Sydney and Professor in Media and Communication. He is an expert on entertainment and healthy sexual development. His most recent book reporting on sexually explicit material and its audiences is called What Do We Know About the Effects of Porno...