Ethan Blue

is a lecturer in history at the University of Western Australia. He has published on the history of crime and punishment as well as race and ethnicity. Blue is co-editor (with Patrick Timmons) of Punishment and Death: Radical History Review, Issue 96 (Fall 2006). He is preparing a book-length manuscript on the cultures of punishment in the United States during the Depression. More recently his work has turned to the racial and gender politics of fear, on which he has published, ‘National Trauma, Church Drama: The Cultural Politics of Christian Fear’, February 2005. <http://www.bad.eserver.org>.

Debjani Ganguly

is head of the Humanities Research Centre at the Research School of Humanities, The Australian National University. A literary and cultural historian by training, she has published in the areas of postcolonial studies, global Anglophone writing, caste and dalit studies, cultural histories of mixed-race, and Gandhi and nonviolence. Her recent publications are Caste, Colonialism and Countermodernity (Routledge, 2005), Edward Said: The Legacy of a Public Intellectual, ed. (Melbourne University Press, 2007) and Rethinking Gandhi and Nonviolent Relationality: Global Perspectives, ed. (Routledge & Orient Longman, 2007).

Rosanne Kennedy

heads the Gender, Sexuality and Culture program at The Australian National University. She has published widely on trauma, testimony and witnessing in journals including Biography, Aboriginal History and Studies in the Novel (forthcoming), and has edited (with Jill Bennett, UNSW) a volume on trauma and memory, World Memory: Personal Trajectories in Global Time (London: Palgrave, 2003). She is currently completing a book on the Thompson-Bywaters case.

Carolyn Strange

is a senior fellow in the Research School of Humanities, The Australian National University, and adjunct professor of Criminology and History at the University of Toronto. She has written widely on the history of state-sanctioned punishment in Canada, the U.S. and Australia.  She has also published on prison-history tourism, as well as on representations of crime and authority in contemporary media. She convened the “Pain and Death: Politics, Aesthetics and Legalities” conference at the Centre for Cross-Cultural Resarch, The Australian National University, in December 2005. She is the co-editor (with Alison Bashford) of Isolation: Places and Practices of Exclusion (Routledge 2003).

Monique van Nieuwland

is a textile artist who has exhibited in public galleries and worked in community arts textile projects since the 1990s. She is currently a technical officer in the textile workshop of the School of Art at The Australian National University.  Her artistic practice uses weaving, print and mixed media to explore rites of passage, particularly birth and death, as well as the concepts of welcome and farewell.

Lycia Trouton

is currently a freelance artist and writer based in both Australia and Northern Ireland. Having developed The Linen Memorial since early 2001 with Canada Council funding, it was rewarding for her to return to Northern Ireland in 2007 to take up two residencies with The Hearth Revolving Fund (part of the Northern Ireland Committee of the National Trust and the Ulster Architectural Heritage Society), and with the Corrymeela Centre for Peace and Reconciliation, under the directorship of Ronnie Millar and David Stevens.