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Killian Quigley

Killian Quigley

Killian Quigley is a research fellow at the Australian Catholic University’s Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences and an honorary postdoctoral fellow with the Sydney Environment Institute, University of Sydney. His first monograph, an ecocritical theory of shipwrecks, is forthcoming from Bloomsbury. He lives along the eastern edge of the Bellarine Peninsula, on Wadawurrung country.

Killian Quigley reviews 'The Bathysphere Book: Effects of the luminous ocean depths' by Brad Fox

January-February 2024, no. 461 19 December 2023
In 2019, Smithsonian magazine published a profile of an American inventor, entrepreneur, and undersea explorer named Stockton Rush. Rush and his company, OceanGate, had recently celebrated the successful descent of their experimental manned submersible Titan to the extraordinary depth of 4,000 metres. Titan’s design was innovative in two important ways: its body was composed centrally of carbon ... (read more)

Killian Quigley reviews 'Seduced by Story: The use and abuse of narrative' by Peter Brooks

March 2023, no. 451 23 February 2023
One of the more addictive podcasts I heard in 2022 was BBC Radio 4’s The Coming Storm, a history of the QAnon conspiracy theory and its connection to the attack on the US Capitol in January 2021. In a late episode, host Gabriel Gatehouse ponders the disturbing implications of his topic for how we think about narratives, and about the role narratives play in all our lives. ‘In a democracy,’ h ... (read more)

Killian Quigley reviews 'The Poseidon Project: The struggle to govern the world’s oceans' by David Bosco

September 2022, no. 446 27 August 2022
In early 2020, as the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic took hold, a special kind of viral hazard appeared upon the surface of the sea. Offshore from Sydney, Yokohama, San Francisco, and elsewhere loitered cruise liners turned floating hot spots. As they awaited permission to dock and disembark their passengers, the boats became an inadvertent exhibition of cruising-industry foibles. Behind sluggish and patchy ... (read more)

Killian Quigley reviews 'The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a planet in crisis' by Amitav Ghosh

May 2022, no. 442 24 April 2022
Approximately 37,000 years ago, a volcano erupted in the south-east corner of the continent now known, in settler-colonial parlance, as Australia. His name is Budj Bim. As his lava spread and cooled, Budj Bim’s local relations, the Gunditjmara people, set about developing new ways of managing the changing landscape. They would engineer, most famously, a large and sophisticated aquaculture system ... (read more)