Vicki Kirby is Emeritus Professor of Social Sciences, The University of New South Wales, and Visiting Professorial Fellow, Institute of Art and Architecture, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Her research explores the nature/culture division because so many political and ethical decisions are configured in terms of this opposition. She brings a Derridean approach to the language question, disputing its routine conflation with culture and human exceptionalism. Books include What if Culture was Nature All Along? (Edinburgh); Quantum Anthropologies: life at large (Duke); Judith Butler: Live Theory (Bloomsbury) and Telling Flesh: the substance of the corporeal (Routledge). Recent and forthcoming publications appear in National Gallery of Victoria Triennial; Towards an INTRA-SPACE (Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, Sternberg Press); Reimagining Science Education in the Anthropocene (Palgrave).
She is a member of the Terra Critica international think-tank and currently holds a Peek Grant through the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna that will bring research in human neurology into conversation with botanists working on the question of cognition.