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ACU experts elected to Australian Academy of Humanities

Australian Catholic University academics Professor Matthew Crawford and Professor Debjani Ganguly have been elected fellows of the Australian Academy of Humanities.

Professor Crawford and Professor Ganguly are among 30 new Fellows announced by the academy in fields including religion, English, philosophy and history of ideas, Indigenous studies, archaeology, and linguistics.

Professor Crawford is director of the Program in Biblical and Early Christian Studies within ACU’s Institute for Religion and Critical Inquiry.

A historian of Christianity in late antiquity, he has published extensively on Cyril of Alexandria and Christianity's engagement with ancient philosophy and paganism.

Professor Crawford’s expertise and insights have been highly valued during this year’s commemoration of the 1700^th anniversary of the First Ecumenical Council of Nicaea, an historic meeting that produced the Nicene Creed statement of faith used by virtually all major Christian denominations.

In addition to the recognition by the Academy, Professor Crawford was awarded a fellowship from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation earlier this year to carry out research on the remaining fragments of the famous anti-Christian polemic by Julian the Apostate, the last pagan Roman Emperor.

Professor Crawford will be conducting the research into Julain’s ‘Against the Galileans’ at the University of Tübingen until the end of February 2026.

“For nearly three decades, ACU has been the leading university in Australia for early Christian studies and has had distinguished scholars in the Academy. It is an immense privilege and honour to stand in that tradition and advocate for the importance of the humanities, and specifically the study of theological and religious history, for the modern world,” Professor Crawford said.

Professor Ganguly is a literary academic with ACU’s Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences, specialising in world literature.

She is the author of This Thing Called the World: The Contemporary Novel as Global Form (2016) and Caste, Colonialism and Counter-Modernity (2005), and the editor of the two-volume The Cambridge History of World Literature (2021).

In mid-2025 she was appointed director of Harvard’s Institute for World Literature, becoming the first Australian-based academic to take up the role.

Professor Ganguly said it was an “immense honour” to be elected fellow of the Academy.

“I am pleased that the Academy has recognised the value of the fields I work in, global Anglophone and world literatures,” Professor Ganguly said. 

“These advance comparative models of study and help us visualise the place of Australian Literature in a vast global and multimedia network of writers, poets, critics, scholars, and publishers.

“In an age when AI and Large Language Models are on the cusp of revolutionising creative and textual production, it’s important to have the Academy recognise the work that literary scholars do in sensitising publics around the world to the timeless value of aesthetic labour.”