Biography
Dr Sue Ballyn is the Founder of the Centre for Australian and Transnational Studies Centre at the University of Barcelona from where she graduated with a BA in 1982. Her MA thesis on the writings of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes won the Faculty prize in 1983. In 1986 she won the Faculty prize again, this time for her PhD thesis on Australian Poetry, the first PhD on Australian Literature in Spain.
She joined the English and German Philology Department upon graduation 1982 and has remained at the university ever since. In 1987 she was awarded an ASAL Familiarisation Grant and spent six weeks in Australia. In 1990 she founded the Australian Studies Program, recognised as an official University of Barcelona Observatory - Studies Centre in 2000, known as CEA, Observatorio Centre d’Estudis Australians, now the Australian and Transnational Studies Centre (CEAT). It is the only Australian Studies Centre in Spain and one of the most active in Europe.
Over the last twenty-five years, Sue Ballyn’s research has focused on foreign convicts transported to Australia, particularly Spanish, Portuguese, Hispanics and Sephardim. She works closely with the Female Convicts Research Centre, Tasmania. She has published and lectured widely in the area, very often in collaboration with Professor Lucy Frost, including a book on Adelaide de la Thoreza, a Spanish convict, which was published in 2018.
More recently she has been involved in a project on ageing in literature DEDAL-LIT at Lleida University which in turn formed part of a European project on ageing: SIforAge. As part of this project she is working on Human Rights and the Elderly, an area she started to research in 1992. A book of interviews with elderly women, with the working title Stories of Experience, will be published as a result of this project. These oral stories are drawn from field work she has carried out in Barcelona.
She was recently involved in a ministry funded Project, run out of the Australian Studies Centre and headed by Dr Bill Phillips, on Postcolonial Crime Fiction (POCRIF). This last project has inevitably intertwined itself with her work on convicts and Australia. Her present work focuses on Sephardi Jews in the Asian diaspora, and the construction of ageing.