In our March event, Professor Elizabeth (Elle) Leane (South Australia & Magdalen 1995) in conversation with Dr Charne Lavery (South Africa-at-Large & Balliol 2008) will discuss her book South Pole: Nature and Culture.
Elizabeth (Elle) Leane is Professor of Antarctic Studies in the School of Humanities, University of Tasmania. With degrees in physics and literary studies, she began her academic life working on topics related to science communication; her early research focussed on the popular science book market. Since moving to the polar ‘gateway’ of Hobart, she has used textual, archival and qualitative methods to examine how people form understandings of Antarctica through both cultural texts and lived experience of the environment, and how these two ways of knowing the region interact. Elle first travelled to Antarctica as a writer in residence with the Australian Antarctic program in 2004, and has returned five times, with the Chilean and New Zealand national programs and with tour operators. She is the author or co-editor of nine books, including South Pole: Nature and Culture (2016), which was shortlisted for two awards. Her current work focusses particularly on the Antarctic tourism industry.

Elle remains active in the Rhodes community and is a Deputy National Secretary for Australia.

Charne Lavery is an associate professor in the Department of English at the University of Pretoria (UP), South Africa. She is the author of Writing Ocean Worlds: Indian Ocean Fiction in English (Palgrave 2021), and co-founder, with Isabel Hofmeyr, of the Oceanic Humanities for the Global South research project and platform (www.oceanichumanities.com). She has also published three co-edited books: Maritime Mobilities in Anglophone Literature and Culture (Palgrave 2023), Reading from the South: African Print Cultures and Oceanic Turns in Isabel Hofmeyr’s Work (Wits University Press 2023), and Reading for Water: Materiality and Method (Routledge 2024).