CNTA Announces Co-Director, Ms Petronella Vaarzon-Morel

CNTA Announces Co-Director, Ms Petronella Vaarzon-Morel
Tuesday 18 January 2022

CNTA would like to welcome Ms Petronella Vaarzon-Morel as CNTA co-director with Professor Emeritus David Trigger.

Petronella’s anthropological experience as a teacher, fieldworker and academic, will make a positive contribution to CNTA’s capacity to support anthropologists in meeting emerging challenges in native title research environments.

Petronella will be actively engaged as a co-director in the forthcoming annual conference and other scheduled CNTA activities.

Anthropological background history

Petronella Vaarzon-Morel (MA Indiana University) is Global Lecturer in Anthropology New York University, where she has lectured since 2013. She is also Adjunct Visiting Fellow, College of Indigenous Futures Education and the Arts, Charles Darwin University, and Honorary Research Associate at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, The University of Sydney. She also practices as an independent anthropologist and has worked for more than forty years with Aboriginal peoples, mainly in Central Australia (Western Australia, South Australia and the Northern Territory) but also in Queensland.

Petronella has authored or co-authored anthropological reports for 16 Aboriginal land and native title claims across Australia. In addition to land claim and native title claim research, she has undertaken anthropological research for cross-disciplinary projects concerning Indigenous burning practices, introduced animals, health, housing, and oral history.

Her research interests include Indigenous relations to land, ethnographic mapping, personhood, multispecies ethnography, Indigenous ecological knowledge, new media, material culture, and issues of colonization and change. She has presented numerous papers on these topics at anthropological conferences nationally and internationally and has edited or co-edited two books, and been an author or co-author of over forty published book chapters, journal articles, reviews and reports plus numerous unpublished reports.

In 2021 Petronella’s book (co-edited with Linda Barwick & Jennifer Green) Archival Returns: Central Australia and Beyond, Sydney University Press, received the Mander Jones Award from the Australian Society of Archivists for the 2020 “publication making the greatest contribution to the archives profession in Australia, written or edited by a person in their own right, Category 1B.”.

University Affiliations

2021- Present. Adjunct Visiting Fellow, College of Indigenous Futures Education and the Arts, Charles Darwin University.

2019- Present. Honorary Research Associate, Sydney Conservatorium of Music, The University of Sydney.

2013- Present. New York University Sydney, Global Lecturer Anthropology.

 

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Updated:  18 January 2022/Responsible Officer:  Head of School/Page Contact:  CASS Marketing & Communications