Professor John Sinclair

Biography

Professor John Sinclair is Australian Research Council Professorial Fellow in the Australian Centre for 2005-9. He completed his undergraduate studies at Monash University, and his postgraduate degrees, including a PhD in Sociology, at La Trobe University. Before coming to the Centre, he was Professor in the School of Communication, Culture, and Languages at Victoria University of Technology, where he taught Sociology, Cultural Studies, and International Communication. Former students whom he supervised there to successful PhD completion are now pursuing academic careers in Europe and the United States, as well as in Australia. He has held visiting professorships at the University of California, San Diego, the University of Texas at Austin, and the Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona, where he was UNESCO Professor of Communication.

In 2001 he was elected as a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, and in 2003, he was awarded a Centenary of Federation Medal for service to Australian society and the humanities in the study of cultural and media studies.

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Research

John's program of research at the Australian Centre concerns the globalisation of the media in Australia, with particular reference to the advertising industry, taken in its broadest political, economic and cultural aspects. His record of internationally published research covers various aspects of the globalisation of the media and communication industries, with a special emphasis on the role of cultural factors in the development of these industries, and has a regional focus on Latin America and Asia, notably India. As well as such work on cultural industries, he has experience in content analysis and audience research methodologies.

His research has been published in journals such as Media, Culture and Society, Television and New Media, the Asian Journal of Communication, the Asian Studies Review, the Australian Journal of Communication, and the Journal of Australian Studies. He is on the editorial advisory boards of several journals, both Australian and overseas based, and has for many years been an active member of the International Association for Media and Communication Research (IAMCR). Apart from the current Professorial Fellowship, he has held a number of grants from the Australian Research Council, most notably in support of his work on India.

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Publications

John is author of Images Incorporated: Advertising as Industry and Ideology (Croom Helm, 1987), and Latin American Television: A Global View (Oxford University Press, 1999), as well as a book in Spanish, Televisión: Comunicación Global y Regionalización (Gedisa, 2000). He is co-editor/contributor, with Stuart Cunningham and Elizabeth Jacka, of New Patterns in Global Television: Peripheral Vision (Oxford University Press, 1996), and, with Stuart Cunningham, Floating Lives: The Media of Asian Diasporas (Rowman & Littlefield, 2001).

More recently, he has edited, and contributed to, Contemporary World Television (British Film Institute, 2004), with associate editor Graeme Turner. He also has current chapters appearing in The Television Studies Reader, The Sage Handbook of Media Studies, The Blackwell Companion for Television, The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology, The International Encyclopaedia of the Social and Behavioural Sciences, and Media and Communications in Australia.

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Teaching

The ARC Professorial Fellowship is a full-time research position, but John Sinclair regularly contributes guest lectures in his areas of specialisation to the MA in International Studies, the Media and Communications Program, and visiting groups at the Australian Centre.

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Supervision

Professor Sinclair is currently supervising PhD students working in the areas of cross-cultural visual communication; interactive television; lifestyle television and popular culture; and audience reception of soap operas in India.

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