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The Western Civilisation program is home to a team of world-class scholars who share a passion for teaching and learning. Our team is dedicated to pursuing and sharing knowledge through cutting-edge research and public engagement.
Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Education), Acting Director Western Civilisation Program
Professor Ramsay began his role at ACU in 2017 as Pro Vice-Chancellor, Assisting the Vice-Chancellor and President. He accepted the position of Deputy Vice-Chancellor Coordination in March 2019, which evolved into the Ethics Portfolio in October 2021. In September 2023, Professor Ramsay was appointed Deputy Vice-Chancellor Education. Prior to his appointments at ACU, Professor Ramsay served as the Senior Deputy Vice-Chancellor and Professor of Philosophy and Ethics at The University of Notre Dame Australia. He has taught philosophy at the University of Edinburgh, Stirling University in Scotland, the University of Melbourne, La Trobe University, the Catholic Theological College and the John Paul II Institute for Marriage and Family. He has also held teaching roles at the Catholic Institute of Sydney, Seminary of the Good Shepherd Sydney and Corpus Christi Seminary Melbourne. He is a committee member of the Catholic Institute of Sydney Senate and the Sydney Catholic Schools Board. He holds a PhD in philosophy from The University of Edinburgh (1991) and a Masters in Mental Philosophy also from the University of Edinburgh (1986). Professor Ramsay has published several books and many articles in philosophy, mainly in religion and ethics.
Dr Johanna Harris is Associate Professor in the Western Civilisation Program at ACU. Her main teaching and research interests lie in early modern literature, religion, and politics, with a particular interest in non-fictional prose, especially letters.
Dr Harris holds a DPhil and MSt. from the University of Oxford, and a BA (Hons) from the University of Sydney. She was a postdoctoral assistant at the University of Geneva, Stipendiary Lecturer at Lincoln College, Oxford, and has held research fellowships at the Beinecke Library, Yale University, and the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington D.C. She spent twelve years as Lecturer and then Senior Lecturer at the University of Exeter, UK.
She has published widely on early modern letters, puritanism and nonconformist writing, literature of the Reformation and English Civil War, and women's writing, and she also has interests in the ethical value of literature, bibliotherapy, and the medical humanities. She is currently working on two major editing projects for Oxford University Press: the correspondence of Richard Baxter (1615-1691), and a volume of the meditational prose and poetry of Thomas Traherne for The Oxford Traherne. Both projects involve extensive work with manuscripts and early modern printed books. Her book on puritan letter writing, Godly Letters, will be published soon.
In 2011 Dr Harris pioneered the Exeter Care Homes Reading Project, a volunteer initiative that trained and sent English students into local care homes to read with residents. In 2015 she was awarded the 350th 'Points of Light' by Prime Minister David Cameron.
Associate Professor Sarah Irving-Stonebraker is an intellectual historian. Her research and teaching focus on the history of religion (especially the history of Christianity and Christian thought), the history of political thought, and the relationships between theological, political, and scientific ideas, particularly in the early-modern and modern periods.
After taking her BA with First Class Honours and the University Medal from the University of Sydney, she was awarded her PhD in History from Cambridge University where she was a Commonwealth Scholar at King's College. She then held a Junior Research Fellowship at Wolfson College, Oxford University.
Associate Professor Irving-Stonebraker's first book, Natural Science and the Origins of the British Empire (London: Routledge: 2008), investigates the way that England's colonial empire became tied to the redemptive project of restoring man's original dominion over nature. The book was awarded The Royal Society of Literature and Jerwood Foundation Prize for Non-fiction. She has published over two dozen peer-reviewed journal articles in intellectual history and is currently co-editor of The Journal of Religious History (Wiley-Blackwell).
Her current research projects are a History of the Idea of Religious Freedom in Australia, from 1788; and Priests of History: Engaging with the Past in an Ahistoric Age (forthcoming, 2024).
Professor Robert Carver's main teaching and research interests lie in Renaissance literature, Renaissance Humanism, the influence of classical texts and ideas on Western culture, and the origins and development of the novel - from ancient prose fiction to contemporary Australian writing.
Professor Carver was born and raised in Adelaide. Graduating from ANU with a University Medal in English and Latin, he won a Commonwealth Scholarship to Magdalen College, Oxford, where he was awarded his doctorate (DPhil) in 1992. Following stints as Junior Research Fellow (and College Lecturer) at Trinity College, Oxford, and British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow, he taught at Oriel College, Oxford, before moving to the University of Durham in 1997. At Durham, he served as Lecturer, Senior Lecturer, and Associate Professor of Renaissance Literature in the Department of English Studies, taking on the role of Deputy Head of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities between 2007 and 2010.
His publications include an Oxford Classical Monograph, The Protean Ass: The Metamorphoses of Apuleius from Antiquity to the Renaissance (OUP, 2007), translations from the Latin writings of the twelfth-century mystic Hildegard of Bingen, and numerous scholarly articles on ancient, medieval, and Renaissance literature.
Current projects include a critical edition of William Adlington's translation of The Golden Asse of Lucius Apuleius (1566), and an extended study of the relationship between ancient prose fiction and the so-called 'Rise of the Novel'. In the field of creative writing, Professor Carver has published poems and short stories in Australia, the UK, and the US. He won the under-26 section of the Mattara Bicentennial Poetry Prize (1988) and was a finalist in the Newcastle Poetry Prize (2018). His poem 'Convocation' was Highly Commended in the Manchester Cathedral Poetry Competition (2020).
Dr Paytas' primary teaching and research interests are in ethics and the history of philosophy. He is especially interested in virtue theory and the emotions. The historical figures he focuses on primarily are Plato, Epictetus, Kant, and Sidgwick.
Dr Paytas was born and raised in Scottsdale, Arizona, and he began his undergraduate education at Scottsdale Community College. After completing his associate's degree, he transferred to Truman State University where he majored in Philosophy and Religion and English. After graduating from Truman, he earned an MA in philosophy from UM-St. Louis and subsequently a PhD in philosophy from Washington University in St. Louis. Prior to joining the Western Civilisation program, Dr Paytas was VolkswagenStiftung Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Stuttgart and Postdoctoral Research Fellow at ACU's Dianoia Institute of Philosophy.
He is co-author of Plato's Pragmatism: Rethinking the Relationship between Ethics and Epistemology (Routledge, 2021) and co-editor of Kantian and Sidgwickian Ethics: The Cosmos of Duty Above and the Moral Law Within (Routledge, 2020). Current projects include editing a special issue of Ethical Theory and Moral Practice on the topic of 'De-Moralizing Ethical Theory'. This special issue is based on a workshop on the same theme held at ACU's Rome campus in 2019.
Associate Professor Andrew Poe is a social and political theorist, with specialized interests in democratic theory, emotion and affect, modes of resistance, and political violence. His scholarship draws influence from a variety of sources, including continental philosophy, the history of modern and contemporary political thought, religion and politics, studies of new materialism, and abolitionist social movements. Prior to his appointment at ACU, Poe has taught at the University of Copenhagen, Amherst College, and the University of California. He has been a visiting research fellow at the Centre for Anthropological, Political, and Social Theory at the University of Copenhagen, the Institut für Sozialforschung in Frankfurt, the Divinity School at Harvard University, and the UCLA Center for 17th & 18th Century Studies. His most recent work, Political Enthusiasm: Partisan Feeling and Democracy's Enchantments, published by Manchester University Press in 2022, explores the changing role of enthusiasm in democratic politics. Poe is also the co-editor of The Time of Catastrophe (Routledge, 2015), as well as The Lives of Guns (Oxford University Press, 2018). His current research project explores the promise and complexity of democracy without police.
Dr P. Kishore Saval is Senior Lecturer for the Bachelor of Arts (Western Civilisation) at ACU. He has a PhD from Harvard University and a J.D. from the University of California at Berkeley School of Law.
Among other appointments, Dr Saval was an assistant professor of Comparative Literature at Brown University, where he taught many of the great tragic, lyric, epic, and prose works of European culture in the Greek, Latin, Italian, French, Spanish, and English traditions.
His principal areas of research include the relationship between literature and philosophy, and the multidisciplinary contexts of Renaissance literature.
Dr Saval has published widely on literature from Aeschylus to the present day. He is the author of two books, Reading Shakespeare through Philosophy (Routledge, 2014), and Shakespeare in Hate (Routledge, 2016). He has also published several articles, including 'Shakespeare and Leibniz: Julius Caesar and the Baroque' (Arcadia, 46.1), and 'Hatred and Civilisation in the Oresteia' (Social Research, February 2018). Among other projects, his current research studies the relationship between Shakespeare and metaphysics.
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