Rate My Professor Lesley Mclean

Dr. Lesley McLean is a Lecturer in Philosophy and Religion in the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences within the Faculty of Humanities, Arts, Social Sciences and Education at the University of New England. She holds a BA (Hons) in Studies in Religion and a PhD in Philosophy from the University of New England, which she completed in 2006 with a focus on Animal Ethics. Throughout her tenure at UNE, McLean has taught in a range of disciplines but primarily in Studies in Religion, emphasizing the broad intersections between religion and popular culture. She currently coordinates several units, including RELS184 Magic and the Supernatural in History and Culture, RELS380 Exploring the Sacred, RELS300/500 New Religions, Media and Popular Culture, and RELS385/585 Women, Gender and the World’s Religions.

McLean’s research specializations include Animal Ethics as well as the intersections between alternative and popular religions, media, popular culture, and dark travel. Her key publications, many co-authored with Jenny Wise, explore representations of crime, criminals, cults, and convict histories in popular culture and dark tourism sites. These include Wise and McLean’s ‘Crime Experiences at Dark or ‘Gothic’ Tourism Sites: Edutainment and Storytelling at the Melbourne Watch House (Australia)’ in Aeternum: The Journal of Contemporary Gothic Studies (2023), Nolan, Wise, and McLean’s ‘The Clothes Maketh the Cult’ in M/C Journal (2023), Wise and McLean’s ‘19 Crimes and Mugshot Branding: Reappropriating Convict Narratives to Sell Crime, Criminals and Experiences’ in Journal of Criminal Justice and Popular Culture (2022), McLean and Wise’s ‘Charles Manson and his Family: “Human monsters, human mutants”’ in Australasian Journal of Popular Culture (2022), and Wise and McLean’s ‘The Separate Prison at Port Arthur: Transforming a Convict Site into a Memorial Museum with Digital Technology’ in The Memorial Museum in the Digital Age (2022). Earlier contributions encompass ‘Making Light of Convicts Branding ‘Bubbly’ with Offender Images’ in M/C Journal (2021), ‘“Pack of Thieves?”: The Visual Representation of Prisoners and Convicts in Dark Tourist Sites’ in The Palgrave Handbook of Incarceration in Popular Culture (2020), Lynch and McLean’s ‘How to do Animal Ethics’ in Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics (2016), ‘Animals, Place, People and Story: Relational Identities in Sacred Australian Country’ in Australian Folklore (2013), articles on Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation in Between the Species (2009), Fox and McLean’s ‘Animals in Moral Space’ in Animal Subjects: An Ethical Reader in a Posthuman World (2008), and ‘On responsible knowledge making and the moral standing of animals’ in Between the Species (2007).