Denise Varney is Honorary Professor Emeritus in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne's Faculty of Arts, where she served as Professor of Theatre Studies. She has held leadership roles including Acting Head of School and Deputy Head (Academic) within the School of Culture and Communication. From 2013 to 2021, she was co-Director of the Australian Centre, with responsibility for its contemporary culture stream of research and engagement. Holding a Doctor of Philosophy, Varney supervises PhD students in Theatre Studies and English. Her career at the University of Melbourne spans extensive contributions to theatre scholarship, including oversight of major research initiatives.

Varney's research specializations center on modern and contemporary Australian theatre and performance, encompassing ecocriticism, politics, modernism, feminism, history, and the archive. She leads as Chief Investigator on the Australian Research Council Discovery Project 'Towards an Australian Ecological Theatre,' investigating ecological dimensions in performance practices. Her influence in the field is marked by election to the Australian Academy of the Humanities and the Australian University Heads of English Prize in Literary Scholarship for Patrick White’s Theatre: The Herons, Design for Living and Night on Bald Mountain (Sydney University Press, 2021). Prominent publications include Climate Theatre: Ecology and Performance in a Posthuman Age (Bloomsbury, forthcoming), Feminist Ecologies: Changing Environments in the Anthropocene (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018, co-edited with Lara Stevens and Peta Tait), and Ecology and Climate in Theatre and Australian Performance (Cambridge University Press, 2021, co-edited with Peta Tait and Lara Stevens). As editor of the Australasian Drama Studies journal, she shapes discourse in the discipline. Key contributions feature analyses of 'Climate Guardian Angels: Feminist Ecology and the Activist Tradition,' theatricality and embodied knowledge in performing The Secret River, indigenizing the colonial narrative in Leah Purcell’s The Drover’s Wife, and the performative power of affect in Julia Gillard’s 'Not Now, Not Ever' speech. Varney's scholarship advances critical understandings of climate theatre, feminist ecologies, Australian modernism, and performative politics, impacting academic and public conversations on performance and environment.