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The Western Civilisation program is home to a team of world-class scholars who share a passion for teaching and learning. Our team is dedicated to pursuing and sharing knowledge through cutting-edge research and public engagement.
Deputy Dean of Education and Arts, Acting Director Western Civilisation Program
Professor Seruga is Fellow of the Australian Computer Society, a member of Australian Mathematical Society and a member of the Community of Associate Deans Research in Education. Prior to his current roles, he had made a significant contribution to leadership at ACU as Deputy Head, National School of Arts and Humanities and Associate Dean Research. His research interests are information systems in education and computer security.
Dr Harris is Associate Professor in the Western Civilisation Program at ACU. Her main teaching and research interests lie in early modern literature, religion, and politics, with a particular interest in non-fictional prose, especially letters.
Dr Harris holds a DPhil and MSt. from the University of Oxford, and a BA (Hons) from the University of Sydney. She was a postdoctoral assistant at the University of Geneva, Stipendiary Lecturer at Lincoln College, Oxford, and has held research fellowships at the Beinecke Library, Yale University, and the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington D.C. She spent twelve years as Lecturer and then Senior Lecturer at the University of Exeter, UK.
She has published widely on early modern letters, puritanism and nonconformist writing, literature of the Reformation and English Civil War, and women's writing, and she also has interests in the ethical value of literature, bibliotherapy, and the medical humanities. She is currently working on two major editing projects for Oxford University Press: the correspondence of Richard Baxter (1615-1691), and a volume of the meditational prose and poetry of Thomas Traherne for The Oxford Traherne. Both projects involve extensive work with manuscripts and early modern printed books. Her book on puritan letter writing, Godly Letters, will be published soon.
In 2011 Dr Harris pioneered the Exeter Care Homes Reading Project, a volunteer initiative that trained and sent English students into local care homes to read with residents. In 2015 she was awarded the 350th 'Points of Light' by Prime Minister David Cameron.
Associate Professor Irving-Stonebraker is an intellectual historian. Her research and teaching focus on the history of religion (especially the history of Christianity and Christian thought), the history of political thought, and the relationships between theological, political, and scientific ideas, particularly in the early-modern and modern periods.
After taking her BA with First Class Honours and the University Medal from the University of Sydney, she was awarded her PhD in History from Cambridge University where she was a Commonwealth Scholar at King's College. She then held a Junior Research Fellowship at Wolfson College, Oxford University.
Associate Professor Irving-Stonebraker's first book, Natural Science and the Origins of the British Empire (London: Routledge: 2008), investigates the way that England's colonial empire became tied to the redemptive project of restoring man's original dominion over nature. The book was awarded The Royal Society of Literature and Jerwood Foundation Prize for Non-fiction. She has published over two dozen peer-reviewed journal articles in intellectual history and is currently co-editor of The Journal of Religious History (Wiley-Blackwell).
Her current research projects are a History of the Idea of Religious Freedom in Australia, from 1788; and Priests of History: Engaging with the Past in an Ahistoric Age (forthcoming, 2024).
Professor Carver's main teaching and research interests lie in Renaissance literature, Renaissance Humanism, the influence of classical texts and ideas on Western culture, and the origins and development of the novel - from ancient prose fiction to contemporary Australian writing.
Professor Carver was born and raised in Adelaide. Graduating from ANU with a University Medal in English and Latin, he won a Commonwealth Scholarship to Magdalen College, Oxford, where he was awarded his doctorate (DPhil) in 1992. Following stints as Junior Research Fellow (and College Lecturer) at Trinity College, Oxford, and British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow, he taught at Oriel College, Oxford, before moving to the University of Durham in 1997. At Durham, he served as Lecturer, Senior Lecturer, and Associate Professor of Renaissance Literature in the Department of English Studies, taking on the role of Deputy Head of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities between 2007 and 2010.
His publications include an Oxford Classical Monograph, The Protean Ass: The Metamorphoses of Apuleius from Antiquity to the Renaissance (OUP, 2007), translations from the Latin writings of the twelfth-century mystic Hildegard of Bingen, and numerous scholarly articles on ancient, medieval, and Renaissance literature.
Current projects include a critical edition of William Adlington's translation of The Golden Asse of Lucius Apuleius (1566), and an extended study of the relationship between ancient prose fiction and the so-called 'Rise of the Novel'. In the field of creative writing, Professor Carver has published poems and short stories in Australia, the UK, and the US. He won the under-26 section of the Mattara Bicentennial Poetry Prize (1988) and was a finalist in the Newcastle Poetry Prize (2018). His poem 'Convocation' was Highly Commended in the Manchester Cathedral Poetry Competition (2020).
Dr Paytas' primary teaching and research interests are in ethics and the history of philosophy. He is especially interested in virtue theory and the emotions. The historical figures he focuses on primarily are Plato, Epictetus, Kant, and Sidgwick.
Dr Paytas was born and raised in Scottsdale, Arizona, and he began his undergraduate education at Scottsdale Community College. After completing his associate's degree, he transferred to Truman State University where he majored in Philosophy and Religion and English. After graduating from Truman, he earned an MA in philosophy from UM-St. Louis and subsequently a PhD in philosophy from Washington University in St. Louis. Prior to joining the Western Civilisation program, Dr Paytas was VolkswagenStiftung Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Stuttgart and Postdoctoral Research Fellow at ACU's Dianoia Institute of Philosophy.
He is co-author of Plato's Pragmatism: Rethinking the Relationship between Ethics and Epistemology (Routledge, 2021) and co-editor of Kantian and Sidgwickian Ethics: The Cosmos of Duty Above and the Moral Law Within (Routledge, 2020). Current projects include editing a special issue of Ethical Theory and Moral Practice on the topic of 'De-Moralizing Ethical Theory'. This special issue is based on a workshop on the same theme held at ACU's Rome campus in 2019.
Associate Professor Poe is a social and political theorist, with specialized interests in democratic theory, emotion and affect, modes of resistance, and political violence. His scholarship draws influence from a variety of sources, including continental philosophy, the history of modern and contemporary political thought, religion and politics, studies of new materialism, and abolitionist social movements. Prior to his appointment at ACU, Poe has taught at the University of Copenhagen, Amherst College, and the University of California. He has been a visiting research fellow at the Centre for Anthropological, Political, and Social Theory at the University of Copenhagen, the Institut für Sozialforschung in Frankfurt, the Divinity School at Harvard University, and the UCLA Center for 17th & 18th Century Studies. His most recent work, Political Enthusiasm: Partisan Feeling and Democracy's Enchantments, published by Manchester University Press in 2022, explores the changing role of enthusiasm in democratic politics. Poe is also the co-editor of The Time of Catastrophe (Routledge, 2015), as well as The Lives of Guns (Oxford University Press, 2018). His current research project explores the promise and complexity of democracy without police.
Dr P. Kishore Saval is Senior Lecturer for the Bachelor of Arts (Western Civilisation) at ACU. He has a PhD from Harvard University and a J.D. from the University of California at Berkeley School of Law.
Among other appointments, Dr Saval was an assistant professor of Comparative Literature at Brown University, where he taught many of the great tragic, lyric, epic, and prose works of European culture in the Greek, Latin, Italian, French, Spanish, and English traditions.
His principal areas of research include the relationship between literature and philosophy, and the multidisciplinary contexts of Renaissance literature.
Dr Saval has published widely on literature from Aeschylus to the present day. He is the author of two books, Reading Shakespeare through Philosophy (Routledge, 2014), and Shakespeare in Hate (Routledge, 2016). He has also published several articles, including 'Shakespeare and Leibniz: Julius Caesar and the Baroque' (Arcadia, 46.1), and 'Hatred and Civilisation in the Oresteia' (Social Research, February 2018). Among other projects, his current research studies the relationship between Shakespeare and metaphysics.
Dr Knowles is lecturer in the Western Civilisation Program at ACU. Her main research and teaching interests lie in medieval literature, particularly Old and Middle English poetry.
Dr Knowles holds a PhD and MPhil from University of Cambridge, where she was a Gates Scholar from 2015-19, as well as a BA(Hons) from the University of Sydney. After finishing her PhD she was Associate Lecturer and then Lecturer at the University of Sydney, teaching mainly in the Discipline of English and Writing Studies. She held a Senior Research Fellowship with Anglican Deaconess Ministries from 2021-22.
She has published on areas related to early medieval literature, most recently on the Old English poem Exodus in English Studies and is also the current Years Work in English Studies contributor for Old English biblical poetry. She is currently in the final stages of completing a monograph on the collection of Old English poetry found in the Junius 11 manuscript.
Dr Morag (Bsc Physics, Tel-Aviv; MA Paris 8; PhD, University of Sydney) is a lecturer of philosophy within the Western Civilisation program at ACU. Dr Morag's area of research expertise focuses on ethics in philosophical psychology, especially liberal naturalism, psychoanalysis, emotion, social psychology, and the philosophy of TV. Dr Morag is the author of Emotion, Imagination, and the Limits of Reason (Routledge, 2016), and received the Annette Baier Prize (2020) for her paper: "Comparison or seeing as? The Holocaust and Factory Farming," in the collection Morality in a Realistic Spirit: Essays for Cora Dimond, edited by Gleeson and Taylor. "
Dr Currell holds BSc, BA (Hons), and MA degrees from the University of Melbourne and a PhD in English from Yale. He is a literary historian absorbed by the unfolding of literary traditions through time and space and the afterlives of great works across borders and between media.
While his research and teaching interests range from classical antiquity to contemporary world literature, they centre on early modernity and much of his scholarly attention has been devoted to John Milton. Among his publications are the handbook Reading John Milton: An Introduction (2024) and the coedited collections Reading Milton through Islam (2015) and Digital Milton (2018). His essay "Milton among the Satirists" received the 2023 James Holly Hanford award from the Milton Society of America. Dr Currell joined ACU from the American University of Beirut, where he received the university's Teaching Excellence Award (2020) and served as Chair of the Department of English (2021-24).
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