Professor Camilla Nelson

Professor in Politics and Journalism
BA (Sydney) MA (Sydney) DCA (UTS)

Email: Camilla.Nelson@nd.edu.au

  • Biography

    Camilla Nelson is Professor of Politics and Journalism at the University of Notre Dame Australia. Her research sits at the intersection of media, politics, and feminist theory, with a particular focus on voice and representation, and how they shape political outcomes for marginalised people. She works on questions of consent, violence, law, and silencing, especially as they affect women and children.

    Her most recent books, Broken: Children, Parents and Family Courts and The Public Child: Media Power, Strategic Silencing and Children’s Rights, examine media power, legal authority, and the marginalisation of children and young people, particularly in the context of domestic, family and sexual violence.

    Camilla is an EG Whitlam Research Fellow at the Whitlam Institute. A former journalist, she has a Walkley Award for her work at the Sydney Morning Herald. She writes regularly for The Conversation and provides political and media commentary across a wide range of outlets, including ABC television and radio.

    Camilla’s work has been supported by the Australia Council, the Australian Film

    Commission, the Copyright Agency Cultural Fund, and other funding bodies. She has chaired the Douglas Stewart Prize for Non-Fiction in the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards on two occasions, has been short-listed for the Ned Kelly Awards, and selected as one of the Sydney Morning Herald’s best young novelists.

    She is currently writing an intellectual biography of the radical feminist Andrea Dworkin for Polity Press and is a visiting fellow at Oxford University’s Centre for Life Writing.

  • Teaching areas

    Politics and Journalism, Media Ethics and Law, Media Studies

  • Research expertise and supervision

    Expertise:

    Media, Ethics and Law/Media, Writing, Politics and Journalism Studies

    PhD Supervisions:

    • Criminalising Coercive Control in Australia
    • Lies we tell ourselves: designing the past, writing the future
    • Transgression and Its Practice: The Role of the Cultural Provocateur in the 21st Century
    • Nevertheless, she resisted: Negotiating otherness, longing and belonging in the young adult narratives of culturally and linguistically diverse Australian girls

  • Books

    Selected Recent Books

    • Nelson, Camilla with Denise Buiten and Jodi Death eds, The Public Child: Media Power, Strategic Silencing and Children’s Rights, Palgrave Macmillan, 2025
    • Nelson, Camilla with Catharine Lumby, Broken: Children, Parents and Family Courts, Black Inc/La Trobe University Press, Melbourne, 2021
    • Nelson, Camilla with Rachel Robertson eds, Dangerous Ideas About Mothers, University of Western Australia Press, Crawley, Western Australia, 2018
    • Nelson, Camilla, with Deborah Pike and Georgina Ledvinka eds, On Happiness: New Ideas for the Twenty-First Century, University of Western Australia Press, Crawley, Western Australia, 2015 [Reprinted in translation/Arabic, 2020]

  • Book chapters

    Selected Recent Book Chapters

    • Nelson, Camilla, with Denise Buiten and Jodi Death, ‘The Public Child’, in Nelson, Camilla with Denise Buiten and Jodi Death eds, The Public Child: Media Power, Strategic Silencing and Children’s Rights, Palgrave Macmillan, 2025
    • Nelson, Camilla, ‘Boys: Against the Cultural Construction of Boys as Problems’, Nelson, Camilla with Denise Buiten and Jodi Death eds, The Public Child: Media Power, Strategic Silencing and Children’s Rights, Palgrave Macmillan, 2025
    • Nelson, Camilla, ‘Every Difficult Female: Women and the Family Law Act, 1975’ in Michelle Arrow ed, Women and Whitlam: Revisiting the Revolution, NewSouth/UNSW University Press, 2023, pp. 96-112
    • Nelson, Camilla, 'The Mumpreneur: Raising Kids in Consumer Culture', in Camilla Nelson and Rachel Robertson eds, Dangerous Ideas About Mothers, University of Western Australia Press, Crawley, Western Australia, 2018, pp.59-74
    • Nelson, Camilla with Rachel Robertson, 'Scrutiny: What's Behind the Rise of the Mummy Bullies?' in in Camilla Nelson and Rachel Robertson eds, Dangerous Ideas About Mothers, University of Western Australia Press, Crawley, Western Australia, 2018, pp.1-16
    • Nelson, Camilla, 'Happy Housewives and Angry Feminists: The Myths of Modern Motherhood,' in Camilla, Nelson, Deborah Pike and Georgina Ledvinka eds, On Happiness: New Ideas for the Twenty-First Century, University of Western Australia Press, Crawley, Western Australia, pp.83-95
    • Nelson, Camilla, with Deborah Pike, 'This Book Won't Make You Happy,' in Camilla Nelson, Deborah Pike and Georgina Ledvinka eds, On Happiness: New Ideas for the Twenty-First Century, University of Western Australia Press, Crawley, Western Australia, 2015, pp.1-15

  • Journal articles and proceedings

    Selected Recent Journal Articles

    • Nelson, Camilla, ‘A public orgy of misogyny”: gender, power, media, and legal spectacle in Depp v Heard. Feminist Media Studies, 25(2), 2025, pp.233–249.
    • Nelson, Camilla, ‘The Most Maligned Witness and in Christopher Dawson Case: Gender, Power, Media and Legal Culture in the Digitally Distributed Live-Streamed Court, Crime, Media Culture, in press 2023.
    • Nelson, Camilla, ‘They Thought it was Safe – but it Wasn’t’: Recognising Children’s Rights as a Means of Ensuring Children’s Safety in Australia’s Family Law System, The Whitlam Institute, Sydney, 2022 https://apo.org.au/node/318020.

    Full list of journal publication and book chapters can be found here

  • In The Media

  • Community engagement

    • Judge: Sydney Morning Herald’s Best Young Australian Novelists of the Year, 2015
    • Judge: Kathleen Mitchell Award, 2008-2014
    • Judge: NSW Premier’s Literary Awards/Chair of Douglas Stewart Prize Panel for Non-Fiction Writing, 2011Governing Board: NSW Writers’ Centre, 2008-2010
    • Judge: NSW Premier’s Literary Awards/Douglas Stewart Prize Panel for Non-Fiction Writing, 2008