Dion Kagan is a Research Officer at the Australian Research Centre in Sex, Health and Society (ARCSHS), La Trobe University. 

Previously, he collaborated on a range of interdisciplinary social research projects addressing sexuality, community health, media practices and technology with researchers at the University of Melbourne, the University of Sydney, the Victorian College of the Arts, La Trobe University and Monash University.

Dion completed a PhD in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne, where he also held numerous appointments as a lecturer in Gender Studies, Cultural Studies and Screen Studies, and as a supervisor of Honours students across those programs. His doctoral research examined the cultural politics of representations of gay men and HIV/AIDS in the landscape of ‘post-crisis’, since the advent of antiretroviral therapies in 1996. The project was developed into a scholarly monograph, Positive Images: Gay Men and HIV/AIDS in the Culture of ‘Post-Crisis’, published in 2018. Positive Images is coming out in paperback in early 2022.

In addition to his work as an academic, Dion has an extensive body of publications as an essayist, reviewer and regular commentator on arts and popular culture. He was the author of Australia’s longest running long-form queer column for literary magazine The Lifted Brow, and a co-host of fortnightly literary and culture podcast The Rereaders. Dion is an IPED-certified editor and has held publishing and editorial appointments at Palgrave/Springer, Wiley Blackwell and most recently at Black Inc., where he managed titles in the La Trobe University Press imprint.

In the Gender, Law and Drugs (GLaD) program, Dion is currently working on an ARC-funded project addressing hepatitis C–related legal, policy and practice discrimination in a ‘post-cure’ world, an interdisciplinary project seeking to better understand hepatitis C–related stigma and discrimination in the context of new treatments and to identify opportunities for reform.

Supervision

Dion has wide-ranging knowledge in social and cultural studies of health, disease, consumption and representation, and has specialised expertise in queer screen and cultural studies and AIDS cultural criticism. His theoretical interests encompass feminist and queer theory, masculinity studies, critical sexualities studies and cultural studies of media, identity, consumption and popular culture. He welcomes higher research degree supervision opportunities in a range of interdisciplinary, theoretically and empirically informed projects in the areas of sexuality, gender, media, health, drug use, consumption and biopolitics.