Australian humanities guru Graeme Turner has died just months after publishing a seminal book on the precarious state of the country’s universities.

Turner, a former president of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, died on 25 November after a short illness. John Byron, who was executive director of the academy during Turner’s presidency, said the loss was “hard to accept for such a vital man”.

“I was lucky to work with him and stay close mates. He had that recent burst of engagement with his book on the state of the sector – his last one as it turns out. It’s just so sad.”

In a posted on the academy’s website, current president Stephen Garton said Turner had combined scholarly distinction with unwavering commitment to the humanities and higher education.

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Garton said Turner’s scholarship had shaped cultural and media studies nationally and internationally in fields spanning literature, film, television, radio, new media, journalism, celebrity, popular culture and Australian identity. He had helped train a generation of scholars by establishing the at The University of Queensland, and leading the Australian Research Council’s .

Turner was the only Australian to serve on the committee which chooses winners of the Holberg Prize, considered among the world’s most prestigious social sciences awards. His catalogue of over 30 books has been widely translated.

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Meanwhile, his advocacy helped elevate the humanities in policy discussions. He served on the Prime Minister’s Science, Engineering and Innovation Council, chaired expert working groups for Australia’s chief scientist and co-authored a landmark study in 2014.

Byron said Turner had treated his advocacy and policy work as an extension of his cultural studies scholarship – a “theoretically informed” brand of “politically engaged cultural practice” which had proven very effective. In a 2015 , Byron related how the beginning of Turner’s presidency had coincided with education minister Brendan Nelson’s 2004 vetoing of humanities research grants.

“He read the complex situation as though it were a controversial box office smash film, circulating in culture and generating meaning as it goes. Without appearing to theorise it consciously, Graeme applied a sophisticated field analysis to this profusion of starkly contradictory signals. It was as though Graeme had been made for this moment.”

Turner was a “forceful” critic of attempts to ridicule or discredit the humanities, considering them as relevant to modern society as science and technology, Byron told ����Vlog. “He deplored the decline of government and institutional support for the humanities, urging scholars to stand up for their disciplines and students rather than succumb to despair.” 

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Turner resumed the struggle in his final book, arguing that graduates needed intellectual sophistication, “a broad knowledge and values base” and “an understanding of what it takes to learn” to get by in an “unpredictable” world. “An educated civil society has to be more than an aggregation of well-trained employees,” he wrote.

“That’s not the prevailing view at the moment, however. Humanities disciplines such as history, philosophy, linguistics, literary studies and foreign languages…are among the growing list of casualties as the choice to undertake a BA runs against the grain of the instrumentalism that now structures higher education.”

john.ross@timeshighereducation.com