Professor Nikos Papastergiadis, was educated at the University of Melbourne and the University of Cambridge. Prior to joining the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne, he was Deputy Director of the Australia Centre at the University of Melbourne; Head of the Centre for Ideas at the Victorian College of Arts; lecturer in Sociology and recipient of the Simon Fellowship at the University of Manchester. He is now Deputy Head, School of Culture and Communication.

Throughout his career, Nikos has provided strategic consultancies for government agencies on issues relating to cultural identity and has worked in collaborative projects with artists and theorists of international repute such as John Berger, Jimmie Durham and Sonya Boyce. At the Australian Centre he teaches on a range of subjects in relation to contemporary Australian culture as well as specializing on the role artists have played in transforming urban spaces. He supervises doctoral students who are investigating issues relating to cultural identity, whiteness, Aboriginal politics and contemporary art practices. His major publications include, Modernity as Exile (1992), Dialogues in the Diaspora (1998), The Turbulence of Migration (2000), Complex Entanglements (2003), Metaphor and Tension (2004). His long involvement with the ground breaking international journal Third Text , as both co-editor and author, was a formative experience in the development of an interdisciplinary and cross cultural research model. His current research focuses on the investigation of the historical transformation of contemporary art and cultural institutions by digital technology. This has led to the convening of a major international conference Empires, Ruins and Networks: Art in Real Time Culture hosted at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image in Melbourne 2-4 April 2004, the proceedings of which were published as Empires, Ruins and Networks: The Transnational Agenda in Art (2005).

Nikos has recently published Spatial Aesthetics: Art, Place and the Everyday (2006), which explores the new processes, contexts and relations through which contemporary art is produced. The aim of the book is not only to map out the interventions that artists have made in specific places, or to account for the political consequences of their gestures, but to see how the interconnection of these actions is part of an ongoing attempt to grasp the emerging senses of identity and the complex forms of relations with others that occur in everyday life. Structured around the themes of the everyday, cultural identity and place, Spatial Aesthetics traces the complex patterns of cultural exchange and the diverse forms of social interaction that inspire artists.

View ePrints Repository for Nikos Papastergiadis