Rate My Professor Thor Kerr

Dr Thor Kerr is a Senior Lecturer in English and Cultural Studies in the School of Media, Creative Arts and Social Inquiry, Faculty of Humanities, Curtin University, Perth, Australia. He concurrently serves as Director International for the school and has been seconded part-time to an Associate Professor position as Dean Global, ASEAN, leading Curtin University's strategic engagements across Southeast Asia. Kerr completed his PhD at Curtin University in 2012. Prior to academia, he worked as a journalist and editor in The Hague and Jakarta and led a media startup in Southeast Asia. He joined Curtin as Lecturer from 2012 to 2019 before being promoted to Senior Lecturer in 2019.

Kerr's academic interests include ecological threat representation, green built environment, cultural studies, discourse analysis, and media studies, focusing on confluences of discourses, spaces, and media practices on the eastern rim of the Indian Ocean. He received the Faculty of Humanities Research Award for Minor Creative Work of the Year in 2014. Key publications encompass the book 'To the Beach: Community Conservation and its Role in "Sustainable Development"' (UWA Publishing, 2015), co-authored 'Setting up the Nyoongar Tent Embassy: A Report on Perth Media' (Ctrl-Z Press, 2013), edited 'Urban Studies: Border and Mobility' (Routledge, 2018), 'Indian Ocean Futures: Communities, Sustainability and Security' (2016), and guest editorships for Coolabah journal's 'Reimagining Australia' editions (2018). Prominent articles include 'Indigenous persistence and entitlement: Noongar occupations in central Perth, 1988–1989 and 2012' (Journal of Historical Geography, 2016), 'Media, Machines and Might: Reproducing Western Australia's Violent State of Aboriginal Protection' (Somatechnics, 2016), 'Utopian resort living: islands of reclamation and environmental resistance in Bali and Western Australia' (Journal of Tourism and Cultural Change, 2020), 'Reproducing temples in Fremantle' (International Journal of Heritage Studies, 2012), and 'Social imaginaries of subsea cables: recovering connections between Broome and Banyuwangi' (Media International Australia, 2021). His scholarship addresses environmental activism, indigenous issues, tourism, and cultural connectivity.