Ben Stubbs
Senior Lecturer
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Organisation unit

College of Creative Arts, Design and Humanities School of Communication, Media and Journalism
Profile of Ben Stubbs

My skills

Feature Writing
Immersive Storytelling
Travel Writing

About me

I am the inaugural Journalism Program Director for Adelaide University. My background is as a travel and features journalist for publications in Australia and overseas. I have written for The New York Times, The Guardian, The Toronto Star, The Sydney Morning Herald and Rough Guides among many others. My current academic research focuses on exploring the plurality of the travel writing form. I have published five books, including Ticket to Paradise: A Journey to Find the Australian Colony in Paraguay Among Nazis, Mennonites and Japanese Beekeepers about the search for the remnants of the Australian utopian colony in Paraguay (ABC Books  2012), After Dark: A Nocturnal Exploration of Madrid (2016) explores the nocturnal lives of the Madrileños, The Crow Eaters: a journey through South Australia (NewSouth 2019), Creative and non-fiction writing during isolation and confinement: imaginative travel, shipwrecks, pandemics and war (Routledge 2022) and Re-thinking travel writing: the journey of a genre (Palgrave 2024) with Dr Lee Mylne. I am also currently exploring immersive storytelling in journalism through VR, AR and games. I have worked on projects with the South Australian Museum, the History Trust, Moving Murals and the Adelaide Botanic Gardens. 

I won multiple awards during my time at the University of South Australia, including the UniSA Creative Innovation Teaching award (2024) for my Augmented Reality Creative Ventures course, the Innovation in Research award (2022), JERAA (Journalism Education and Research Association) Innovation in journalism award (2018) for my VR journalism pilot study, University of South Australia Creative Industries Teaching and Learning award (2018) and the University of South Australia Creative Industries Early Career Researcher award (2017). I have presented at numerous international and national literature festivals, including the Jaipur Literature Festival satellite events in 2018 and 2019, the Words on Water festival in Western Australia in 2019, Ubud Writers and Reader’s Festival in 2023, and Adelaide Writer’s Week in 2024. I feature regularly on national radio and screen as a non-fiction and travel literature expert. 

I engage with numerous professional bodies in my field as an active member of the writing community. These organisations include the Australasian Association of Writing Programs (AAWP) where I have been a member of the executive committee from 2022-2025, TEXT journal (Q1 Scimago) where I served as Special Issues editor from 2022-2025, the International Association of Literary Journalism Studies where I am a new member of their executive. I am also on the editorial board for Ethical Space: the international journal of communication ethics. In the South Australian community, I was a board member and mentor for the SA Writers’ Centre from 2020-2022. I was also the chair for the South Australian Literary Awards (non-fiction) in 2024 with a $25,000 prize attached.  
Last updated on 19/01/2026 by Ben Stubbs