Graeme Turner


Graeme Turner was an Australian professor of cultural studies and an Emeritus Professor at the University of Queensland. During his institutional academic career, he was a Federation Fellow, a president of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, a founding director of the Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies at the University of Queensland, and convenor of the Australian Reseach Council Cultural Research Network. Turner was appointed an Officer of the Order of Australia in the 2019 [Queen's Birthday Honours (Australia)|2019 Queen's Birthday Honours] for services to education.

Biography

Turner gained a master's degree from Queen's University, Canada, and his doctorate from the University of East Anglia, in the UK. Turner taught at the Queensland Institute of Technology, the West Australian Institute of Technology, and was Professor of Cultural Studies in the English Department at the University of Queensland before becoming the founding Director of the Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies in 1999. He was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities in 1997 and was elected president in 2004. From 2001 until 2004, he was a member of the Expert Advisory Panel for Creative Arts and Humanities of the Australian Research Council.
In 2004, Turner was successful in his application for the ARC Cultural Research Network, one of only 24 Research Networks funded by the ARC, while in 2006 he was awarded a Federation Fellowship by the ARC to study "Television in the post-broadcast era: The role of old and new media in the formation of national communities".
In his speech to the National Press Club (Australia) on 3 September 2008, the Minister for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research, Senator the Hon. Kim Carr announced that Professor Turner, had been appointed to the Prime Minister's Science, Engineering and Innovation Council. This makes Turner the only Humanities scholar on the Council, and only the second since the Council's inception in 1989.
Turner was one of the key figures in the development of cultural and media studies in Australia. His work is used in many disciplines: cultural and media studies, communications, history, literary studies, and film and television studies. His over-arching research interests included Australian film and media, issues in Australian nationalism, popular culture, celebrity, talkback radio, audience studies, and the role of television in a post-broadcast era increasingly dominated by new media formats such as the Internet. His later research focuses on the transformation of "cultural fields".
In 2015, the journal Cultural Studies published a special issue "commemorating and evaluating the contribution of Graeme Turner to the field". Edited by Gerard Goggin, Anna Pertierra and Mark Andrejevic, this issue included contributions by Meaghan Morris, Toby Miller, Frances Bonner, Tony Bennett, John Byron, and Melissa Gregg.
Turner was appointed an Officer of the Order of Australia in the 2019 Queen's Birthday Honours for "distinguished service to higher education through pioneering work in the field of cultural studies and the humanities". Turner died on 25 November 2025.

Selected bibliography

  • Broken: Universities, Politics and the Public Good. Monash University Publishing, 2025.
  • The Shrinking Nation. Queensland University Press, 2023.
  • John Farnham's Whispering Jack. Bloomsbury, 2022.
  • Australian Television: Programs, pleasures and politics. Routledge, 2021.
  • Making Culture: Commercialisation, Transnationalism, and the State of 'Nationing' in Contemporary Australia. Eds. D. Rowe, G. Turner & E. Waterton. Routledge.
  • Mapping the Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences in Australia, Australian Academy of the Humanities, 2014.
  • Locating Television: Zones of Consumption, Routledge, 2013.
  • What’s Become of Cultural Studies?, Sage, 2012.
  • Ordinary people and the media: The demotic turn, Theory, Culture and Society series, Sage, 2010.
  • Television Studies After TV: Understanding television in the post-broadcast era, Routledge, 2009.
  • The Media and Communications in Australia, third edition, Allen & Unwin, 2010. Previous editions 2002, 2006.
  • Film as Social Practice, fourth edition, Routledge, 2006
  • Ending the Affair: The decline of television current affairs in Australia, UNSW Press, 2005
  • Understanding Celebrity, Sage, 2004
  • The Film Cultures Reader, Routledge, 2002
  • British Cultural Studies: An Introduction, third edition, Routledge 2002
  • Fame games: The production of Celebrity in Australia, Cambridge, 2000.
  • National Fictions: Literature, Film, and the Construction of Australian Narrative, Allen and Unwin, 1986