Professor Adam Shoemaker
Professor Adam Shoemaker commenced as the Vice-Chancellor and President of Victoria University in December 2020 after four years as Vice-Chancellor of Southern Cross University.
Before these roles, Professor Shoemaker was a senior leader at a number of other Australian universities, including Academic Provost at Griffith University, Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Education) at Monash University and Dean of Arts at the Australian National University.
He spent his formative years in a diverse range of fields, such as reviewer and columnist for The Australian, an ABC Canberra Radio programmer, serving as chair of the Brisbane Writers Festival in the mid-1990s and spending three years with the Delegation of the Commission of the European Committees.
Professor Shoemaker also had positions on the advisory board of Monash University Publishing and the Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority (VCAA), and Director of Open Universities Australia.
He is currently a Universities Australia board member.
Canadian by birth, Professor Shoemaker holds a Bachelor of Arts (Honours) from Queen's University and a PhD from the Australian National University.
Award-winning author
Publications
Professor Shoemaker is the author or editor of nine books focused on Indigenous Australian Literature and Culture, including:
- Aboriginal Australians: First Nations of an Ancient Continent(2004)
Authors Professor Adam Shoemaker and Stephen Muecke trace the richly diverse and longstanding origins of Australia’s First Nations people through to the present day.
- Black Words, White Page (2004)
This award-winning study – the first comprehensive treatment of the nature and significance of Indigenous Australian literature – was based upon Professor Shoemaker's doctoral research at The Australian National University and was first published by UQP in 1989.
- A Sea Change: Australian Writing and Photography (Editor, 1998)
Commissioned by the Olympic Arts Festivals of the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games, this anthology brought together 25 of Australia's finest writers and photographers to explore the transformation that took place two years before the Games.
- Mudrooroo: A Critical Study (1993)
A study of all of Mudrooroo's (Colin Jackson's) books up to "The Kwinkan" - his poetry, criticism and unpublished novels.
Awards
- Arrived in Australia as a Commonwealth Scholar
- Winner of the Walter McRae Russell Award 1990 – Association for the Study of Australian Literature
- Highly commended in the Human Rights Awards - Australian Human Rights Commission for Paperbark: A Collection of Black Australian Writings (1990) and Black Words, White Page (1989)
