Ambition and the Aftermath

Professor Glyn Davis AC is a public policy specialist and interim Vice-Chancellor of the University of Melbourne. He served previously in the role from January 2005 to September 2018, and has returned at the request of the University’s Council following the tragic death of Vice-Chancellor Emma Johnston AO.

Prior to his current role Professor Davis served as Secretary of the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, and Head of the Australian Public service from June 2022 until June 2025. From 2019 Professor Davis served as Chief Executive Officer of the Paul Ramsay Foundation, then Australia's largest charitable foundation, with a mission to break the cycle of disadvantage. In this role he published On Life's Lottery (Hachette, 2021), an essay on our moral responsibility toward those less fortunate.

Professor Davis holds a first-class honours degree in Political Science from the University of New South Wales (UNSW) and a PhD from the Australian National University (ANU). In 1988, Professor Davis undertook post-doctoral studies as a Harkness Fellow, with appointments at the University of California, Berkeley, the Brookings Institution in Washington DC and the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. His academic career began at Griffith University, which he joined as a lecturer in public policy, holding various teaching and research roles until appointed a professor in 1998 and Vice-Chancellor in 2002.  

Professor Davis is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia and was appointed a Companion of the Order of Australia in 2002 for service to public administration and governance and to education. He is a visiting Professor at the Blavatnik School of Government at the University of Oxford, and the Policy Institute at Kings College London.

Alongside his work in universities and government Professor Davis has long been involved in music and theatre. He is currently Chair of Opera Australia, the nation’s largest performing arts company. 

Joanna Erskine (she/her) is the Head of Education at Bell Shakespeare, Australia’s national theatre company specialising in Shakespeare. She is an award-winning playwright, producer, speaker, teacher and arts education specialist, working with the company for 17+ years overseeing artistic direction and delivery of its renowned national education program. A graduate of NIDA, Joanna is a two-time winner of the Silver Gull Play Award, winner of Sydney Theatre Company Young Playwrights Award and Lysicrates Prize finalist. In 2023 Joanna was awarded the Lloyd Martin Travelling Scholarship for Emerging Arts Leaders, administered by Sydney Opera House. In addition to her work with Shakespeare, Joanna is a champion of new Australian writing and is the founder and director of Storytellers Festival at KXT on Broadway. In 2025, Joanna will be a resident writer at Griffin Theatre Company through Griffin Studio. 

Marieke Hardy is a screenwriter, playwright, radio broadcaster, producer and author. She has penned regular columns for The Age, The Monthly, and Frankie magazine, and written for many television shows, including The Family Law, Seven Types of Ambiguity, Heartbreak High, and Sunny Nights. Her six-part award-winning black comedy series, Laid, premiered on the ABC and was adapted for the US in 2025. She was co-curator of international literary phenomenon Women of Letters, a regular panelist on The First Tuesday Book Club, and a recipient of the 2015 Sidney Myer Fellowship. Her adaptation of Dario Fo’s No Pay? No Way! premiered at the Sydney Opera House in 2020 and has since toured to Manchester, UK. She currently curates spoken word salon Better Off Said and her new original play, Losing Face, debuts at Melbourne Theatre Company in June. 

David McInnis is Professor of Shakespeare and Early Modern Drama at the University of Melbourne. His major scholarly books include Shakespeare and Lost Plays (Cambridge UP, 2021; paperback 2023), Mind-Travelling and Voyage Drama in Early Modern England (Palgrave, 2013), and the Revels Plays edition of Dekker's Old Fortunatus (Manchester UP, 2020).

Since 2009, he has co-edited the Lost Plays Database, which he founded with Roslyn L. Knutson. He has also edited a number of books, including Lost Plays in Shakespeare's England (Palgrave, 2014; co-edited with Matthew Steggle) and a sequel volume, Loss and the Literary Culture of Shakespeare's Time (Palgrave 2020; co-edited with Knutson and Steggle); Travel and Drama in Early Modern England: The Journeying Play (Cambridge UP, 2018; co-edited with Claire Jowitt); Tamburlaine: A Critical Reader (Arden Early Modern Drama Guides, 2020); and Shakespeare and Virtual Reality (Cambridge 2021, with Stephen Wittek). In 2016 he was jointly awarded the Australian Academy of the Humanities' Max Crawford Medal (Australia's most prestigious award for achievement and promise in the humanities). His work has been featured in the New York Times, the Guardian, the BBC, and elsewhere. He was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society (UK) in 2022 for his research in theatre history. In 2023 he was elected as a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, elected as President of the Australian and New Zealand Shakespeare Association (ANZSA), and appointed to the Board of Bell Shakespeare, Australia's national theatre company specialising in the works of Shakespeare and his contemporaries.

He is currently editing Abdelazer for the Cambridge Behn; Timon of Athens for the Arden Shakespeare 4th series; and (with Claire Bourne) the Tamburlaine plays for the Oxford Marlowe. With Vanessa I. Corredera and Arthur L. Little, Jr., he is Editor of Shakespeare Quarterly.