Liana Christensen

Dr Liana Christensen
Murdoch University

Dr Liana Joy Christensen is a writer and academic with a longstanding interest in the interactions between natural history and social history, specifically animals and society.  She has published on this theme in both the popular and academic press.  She was editor of Landscope magazine for its first five years of publication, and her work has appeared regularly in Australasian GEO.  Among several related themes, this work has often focused on animal stories (for example, numbats, Gilbert’s potoroo, bilbies, pollen-eating and pollinating mammals) told with a view to the larger cultural and philosophical context.

After several years of writing, Liana decided to deepen her academic understanding of these contexts.  The resulting creative arts doctorate consisted of a series of natural history narratives about the south-west of Western Australia, accompanied by an exegesis that explores postcolonial and ecofeminist framing for such stories.

A chapter of both creative work and exegesis - “Spider Islands/Mud Mapping” - appear in the interdisciplinary journal Organization and Environment (Volume 17, Issue 1, March, 2004, http://www.coba.usf.edu/jermier/journal.html).  Subsequently, she was invited to be on the Editorial Review Board for this publication.

In December 2003 she was an invited speaker at the Second International Conference for Ecological Discourse at Tamkang University, in Tapei . Her paper “Nature Writers Need Big Ears” explores the dense and complex interactions among marketing, mythology, semiotics and science in the histories of the European rabbit and the bilby in Australia; as well as the responsibilities for writers navigating across such terrain.  This paper will be in the forthcoming issue of the Tamkang Review.