About the Australian Branch Committee

The Australian Branch formed largely out of what was the Contemporary European Studies Association of Australia and is currently the largest branch committee. The branch seeks to further the works of ESAANZ while also spearheading a number of new initiatives including the ESAANZ Blog Series and seminars on European Studies.

Members of the Committee

Gosia Klatt

President

Associate Professor at the Melbourne Graduate School of Education, at the University of Melbourne. Graduated with a political science degree in European Studies. Her current academic and practical interests lie in the field of education policy in Australia and Europe. Her latest book with M. Milana and S. Vatrella published in 2020 by Palgrave Macmillan is titled: Europe’s Lifelong Learning Markets, Governance and Policy. Using an Instruments Approach. She is currently leading a Jean Monnet Module “Education Policy in Practice (EPP) – European education policy and national systems” co-funded by the Erasmus+ programme of the European Union (2020-2023).

Matt Harvey

Secretary, Australian Delegate

Dr Matt Harvey is a Senior Lecturer in Law at Victoria University Melbourne. His PhD (Monash) was on the constitutional development of the European Union. He was a Robert Schuman Scholar at the European Parliament and has taught EU Law and Comparative Law for many years. His research interests are principally in Constitutional Law and wine law in Europe and Australia.

Perparim Xhaferi

Committee Member

Dr Perparim (Rimi) Xhaferi has completed his PhD from The University of Sydney in 2019. His thesis explored Albanian identity and the tendency of escaping the Ottoman heritage in the twenty-first century. His areas of interest are EU enlargement in Western Balkans, nation-building theories, language and culture. He is an active member of ESAANZ and currently works for both RMIT and as a casual lecturer at Melbourne University. 

Bruce Wilson

Committee Member

Professor Bruce Wilson is Director of the European Union Centre at RMIT University, and Co-Director of the PASCAL International. In these roles, Bruce helps to build linkages between Australia and Europe, and to link an international network of researchers and policy makers with city and regional governments in policy formation related to social and economic policy, lifelong learning and environment.

Gorana Grgic

Committee Member

Gorana Grgic is a jointly appointed Lecturer at the Department of Government and International Relations and the United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney. She is also an Adjunct Lecturer at the Faculty of Arts, Business, Law and Education – School of Social Sciences at the University of Western Australia. Gorana was a Visiting Fellow at the Harvard Center for European Studies in 2018-2019. Gorana’s research interests include US politics and foreign policy, transatlantic relations, conflict resolution and democratisation. She has been a regular political analyst for the ABC News Australia and has contributed to a number of Australian and international media outlets and policy institutes.

Stephen Alomes

Committee Member

Adjunct Professor Stephen Alomes of the Centre for Global Research at RMIT University is a contemporary historian of nationalism and populism and has also published books on Australian expatriates in the arts and on sport and global and commercial culture. Co-author of a study of Silvio Berlusconi and Nicolas Sarkozy as mainstream celebrity populists, his books include two edited works, French Worlds Pacific Worlds (on French nuclear testing and the Pacific responses) and A Changing France in a Changing World. He is also a former vice president of the Institute for the Study of French Australian Relations (ISFAR) and a former chair of the editorial board of its journal, the French Australian Review

Maren Klein

Committee Member

Maren Klein originally trained as a secondary teacher in Germany, she has worked as a teacher and lecturer, in education policy development, and a in higher education regulation. Her PhD explored mobility in the Global North. Her current research interests include the European Union as a global actor, the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals, governance, and transnational education.

Peter Morgan

Committee Member

Professor Peter Morgan is Director of the European Studies Program at the University of Sydney, and has written widely in the areas of German Studies, comparative literary studies, and European Studies. Peter Morgan is currently Vice President of the Contemporary European Studies Association of Australia (CESAA), and is an editor of Australian and New Zealand Journal of European Studies, and member of the Editorial Boards of Oxford German Studies, Journal of European Studies, EFLaC: Essays in French Literature and Culture, Transpositionen, and LIMBUS.