Vicky Kirby

Vicki Kirby is a Professor Emerita in the Social Sciences at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, and a Visiting Professorial Fellow at the Institute of Art and Architecture, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. The motivating question behind her research is the puzzle of the nature/culture division because so many political and ethical decisions are configured in terms of this opposition. She is also interested in “the language question” – what is language, and how does the way we answer that question define the human and inaugurate the political? Books include What If Culture Was Nature All Along? (Edinburgh); Quantum Anthropologies: Life at Large (Duke); Judith Butler: Live Theory (Bloomsbury) and Telling Flesh: The Substance of the Corporeal (Routledge). She is a member of the Terra Critica international think tank and currently holds a Peek Grant through the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna that will bring research in human cognition into conversation with plant sciences.

Professor Emerita of Sociology and Anthropology in the School of Social Sciences University of New South Wales

︎ v.kirby@unsw.edu.au