Catherine Simpson

Before joining Macquarie in 2002, Catherine taught media, film and cultural studies at a number of institutions around Australia including University of New South Wales, University of Western Sydney and Murdoch. She completed her PhD thesis, “Imagined Geographies: women’s negotiation of space in contemporary Australian cinema” at Murdoch University, Perth in 2001 and has since fantasised about becoming a cultural geographer. With her partner Bruce Jeffreys, she narrowly survived co-directing an Australian film festival in Istanbul in 1994 and a reciprocal Turkish film festival that toured Sydney, Melbourne and Perth in 1998. While living in Istanbul in the mid 90s, Catherine taught English to university students.

Catherine has a first class Honours degree in English from the University of Western Australia, and an RSA TESL (Teaching English as a Second Language) qualification from Edith Cowan University in Perth. In 2000 she completed IFU's (International Women's University) postgraduate cert. at Hanover & Bremen Universities in Germany.

With a Macquarie Teaching and Learning grant in 2008, Catherine set up a new Honours seminar unit in the Department of Media, Music, Culture & Communication called ‘Eco-interventions: Cultures of Climate change’. Since then she has become fascinated with the ecological humanities and is also pursuing research in car cultures.

Her established research, teaching and publications are primarily in the areas of: Australian and Turkish cinema; construction of identity and space on screen especially in relation to nationhood, gender and the body; screen automobile cultures; film festivals; transnational, diasporic and small national cinemas; the work of Australian female filmmakers. She welcomes graduate students in any of these areas and any of the emerging areas above.

Since joining Macquarie University she has convened, designed, lectured and tutored across a broad range of units from first year to Honours within the disciplines of media, gender and cultural studies, film studies and now science communication.