Editors’ Introduction to Special Postgraduate Issue: Rethinking Religion and the Non/Human

Author Biographies

• George Ioannides, University of Sydney
  George Ioannides is a PhD Candidate, tutor, casual lecturer, and research assistant in the Department of Studies in Religion at the University of Sydney. His doctoral research aims to rethink the points of correlation between the academic study of religion and that of materiality, new materialism, and the nonhuman, by placing itself at the broad nexus of religious studies, continental philosophy, and human-animal studies. He is currently interested in thinking through how particular theories of matter and mattering might animate certain conceptualisations of religiosity, including that of material religion, trans-species religion, and the materiality of religious ‘things.’ As well as publishing on the subjects of animals in film, religio-sexual aesthetics in film, and the intersections of the study of Islam and queer theory, George was also guest co-editor of an issue of Literature and Aesthetics on ‘the limits of representation and the aesthetics of excess’. His broader research interests include the study of religion and material and visual culture, human-animal studies and ecocriticism, cultural studies and Continental philosophy, and the intersections surrounding religion, gender, and sexuality.
• Venetia Laura Delano Robertson, University of Sydney
  Venetia is a doctoral candidate, tutor, casual lecturer, and research assistant in the department of Studies in Religion at the University of Sydney, Australia. Her thesis follows her interest in the junctures between digital culture, fandoms, identity politics, and contemporary spirituality by looking at ways in which individuals look to the other-than-human to construct a spiritual ontology. She has published on this area for the International Journal of Cultural Studies, Nova Religio, and The Pomegranate (forthcoming). In this special issue of the Journal for the Academic Study of Religion, which she has co-edited, her paper discusses mermaids and the mermaiding subculture as an example of this phenomenon.