Plenary Speakers

Sharyn Graham Davies is Director of the Herb Feith Indonesia Engagement Centre and Associate Professor in the School of Languages, Literatures, Cultures and Linguistics at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. She received her PhD from the University of Western Australia (Anthropology and Asian Studies) and prior to her appointment at Monash was at Auckland University of Technology (AUT) in New Zealand. Sharyn has held visiting fellowships at Cambridge, Yale, Sydney, Peking and Airlangga universities, and has been awarded Fulbright, Marsden and Leverhulme funding. Sharyn’s research and publications focus primarily on gender, sexuality and moral surveillance in Indonesia.

Her contributions to education and research have earned her acclaim, including for her co-edited book with Linda Bennett, Sex and Sexualities in Contemporary Indonesia, which won the Ruth Benedict Prize for outstanding edited collection awarded by the American Anthropology Association (2015) and the International Convention of Asian Scholars award (2017). Sharyn is recipient of the AUT Vice-Chancellor Award for Research Impact (2018) Research Excellence (2015), and Excellence in Teaching (2011).

Dr Massafumi Monden is a fashion and cultural studies scholar at the University of Western Australia specializing in Japanese culture. He writes and teaches on modern Japanese cultural history, art and popular culture, gender studies, literature, and international relations focusing on socio-political and cultural history between Australia and Asia. His first book, Japanese Fashion Cultures: Dress and Gender in Contemporary Japan (2015, Bloomsbury Academic) was an interdisciplinary study of the relationship between clothing, gender and identity in modern Japan and the West, and how history framed the development of aesthetics and gender perception.

His current book-length projects include: Maidens sans Frontiers, a study of shōjo (girl) cultures in Japan and beyond with Lucy Fraser and Emerald L. King; and Salaryman to Shōnen: Male Models and Consumer Culture in Post-War Japan, which uses the cultural history of male modelling in Japan as a means to engage with visual and consumer culture, the interlinked history of race, aging, technology, fashion and consumption, and the dissemination of bodily aesthetics and gender ideals within the modern Japanese imagination.