Jeanne-Marie Viljoen is a Senior Lecturer in literary and cultural studies, whose research coalesces around literary trauma studies, specifically using decolonial comics in contexts of violence as primary data. She has worked at UniSA for the last ten years and before that worked at universities in North Cyprus and South Africa, where she developed lived experience of living in contested colonial contexts.  In the Creative Academic Unit she teaches visual storytelling across media as a way of solving social problems and imagining new futures for diverse, cohesive societies.
As an advocate for art to facilitate communication in contexts where language cannot capture all we want to say, she also supervises interdisciplinary research theses and works on creative practice and co-design research projects such as supporting neurodiverse comics creators and using creative methods to help prevent suicide in culturally and linguistically diverse men in farming occupations.
In addition, her work on mobile learning has lead to research projects and teaching tools designed to bridge the gap between the physical and the digital in the design of learning environments. And her work on communicating wellbeing and belonging in situations of high cultural and linguistic diversity has lead to successful research collaborations and grants.
She is a member of the ‘Creative People, Products and Places (CP3’) research concentration at the University of South Australia. She is an Australian Research Council expert peer reviewer for grant applications, an international research associate and external examiner for international universities and a regular reviewer for international publications focusing on comics in decolonial contexts. She is also a member of the following professional organisations: The Australian Literary Studies Association; The Memory Studies Association and The Cultural Studies Association of Australasia.
Her education includes:
University of South Australia, PhD (2016): 'The ineffable, violence and trauma in graphic narratives of war', which theorizes post-colonial ways of representing violence and trauma in situations of ongoing violence by examining the literary representations of massacres in the middle east. Examined by Prof of Literature at Duke University, Negar Mottahedeh (Iranian film) & Assoc Prof Magdalena Zolkos Jyväskylä University Department of Social Sciences and Philosophy (critical and cultural theory), with examiners describing it as  “an excellent work, inspiring, and demonstrating extensive expertise in the interdisciplinary fields of literary trauma criticism, aesthetic theory, affect theory, theory of representation, theory of violence, testimonial theory, graphic literature as well as contemporary politics and history of the middle east… an important contribution to the field”.
Cambridge University and International House (2010): CELTA graduate certificate in teaching English to adults.
The University of Pretoria, Master of Philosophy (2009): 'Playing with the Subject, Derridaen Writing in Greenaway's film "The Pillow Book" & Kafka's short story "In the Penal Colony"'.
The University of South Africa (1999), Honours in English Literature (cum laude): with specialisations in literary theory, American literature, the Romantic iconoclast, Shakespeare & co, and middle English.
The University of the Witwatersrand (1996), BA (English literature & philosophy).