Anne Pender holds the Kidman Chair in Australian Studies and is Director of the J.M. Coetzee Centre for Creative Practice at the University of Adelaide. Anne is currently a CI on a large ARC Linkage project entitled ‘Comedy Country: Australian Performance Comedy as an Agent of Change’. Anne was National Library of Australia Fellow, 2021, Fulbright Senior Fellow at Harvard University in 2018, and is a former Australian Research Council Future Fellow 2012-2016. A Menzies Scholar to Harvard and graduate of the Australian National University, the University of New South Wales and Harvard University, Anne was Visiting Distinguished Professor in Australian Studies at the University of Copenhagen in 2011-2012 and taught Australian Literature at King’s College London in 2002-2003. Anne’s books include Seven Big Australians: Adventures with Comic Actors (2019), Players: Australian Actors on Stage, Television and Film (2016), From a Distant Shore: Australian Writers in Britain 1820-2012 (2013), One Man Show: The Stages of Barry Humphries (2010), Nick Enright: An Actor’s Playwright (2008) and Christina Stead: Satirist (2002).
