Stephen Muecke

Biography

Stephen Muecke is a Senior Research Fellow in the Nulungu Research Institute of the University of Notre Dame Australia, Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, and Emeritus Professor at the University of New South Wales. He is a cultural theorist and has worked at the University of Technology Sydney, the University of Western Australia, the University of Adelaide and Flinders University. He has collaborated for many years with the Goolarabooloo people of the Kimberley region in Western Australia. An early result of that collaborative work was the book Reading the Country: Introduction to Nomadology (1984), co-authored with Krim Benterrak and Paddy Roe, which explored the meaning and politics of place through Aboriginal narratives, songs and paintings. More recently, again with Paddy Roe, he published The Children’s Country: Creation of a Goolarabooloo Future in North-West Australia (2021) and with Jennifer Eadie (eds., 2025) Living in Critical Zones: Environmental Humanities in South Asia. He is also a creative writer (The Mother’s Day Protest and Other Fictocritical Essays was published in 2016) and has translated fourteen books from French into English, notably Another Science is Possible (2018), by Belgian philosopher Isabelle Stengers, The Wandering Souls (2019), by French ethnopsychiatrist Tobie Nathan, and Our Grateful Dead: Stories of Those Left behind, (2021) by Belgian ethologist Vinciane Despret.

A number of his books have won prizes or been shortlisted. In 2025 he was awarded the UNESCO Clubs Adelaide Chapter Achievement Award.