Dr Adam Casey
Higher Education Leader / Creative Industries / Creative Practice / Applied Research
Associate Professor Adam Casey received First Class Honours from Victoria University in 1999 and completed a PhD in Creative Writing at Deakin University in 2009. His doctoral research combined a critical exegesis examining representations of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder in the work of Toni Morrison and Margaret Atwood with a practice-based creative component, the novel The Silence of the Seventh Floor.
With more than twenty years’ experience in higher education, including over a decade in senior academic leadership, Associate Professor Casey specialises in learning and teaching transformation at an institutional scale. His work focuses on curriculum renewal, innovative pedagogy, academic governance and integrity, and digital learning strategy that supports diverse and flexible learner cohorts.
He is currently Associate Dean – Learning & Teaching at Polytechnic Institute Australia (PIA), where he leads whole-of-institution initiatives in quality assurance, policy development, and digital pedagogy. He chairs the Learning and Teaching Committee and serves on Academic Board, driving TEQSA-aligned, practice-oriented delivery models, including asynchronous and offshore education.
Previously, Associate Professor Casey held senior leadership roles at Melbourne Polytechnic, including Senior Manager, Product Portfolio, leading data-informed portfolio renewal across higher education and VET. Earlier appointments as Head of Program and Senior Lecturer in the creative industries underpin his expertise in curriculum design, staff development, research supervision, and industry engagement.
Click here to visit Dr Casey’s Public Academic record via his Orcid page.
Academic Leadership
As Associate Dean (Learning & Teaching) at Polytechnic Institute Australia, Associate Professor Adam Casey leads whole-of-institution learning and teaching strategy, shaping curriculum quality, academic governance, and digital delivery. His approach centres on student agency, authentic assessment, and flexible learning models that balance innovation with academic rigour across diverse delivery contexts.
Previously, Associate Professor Casey has led large academic teams in senior leadership roles, contributing to major portfolio renewal initiatives and substantial Commonwealth funding outcomes.
Curriculum Development
From the ground up, Adam has designed both Writing and Publishing and Creative Industries courses (both undergraduate and postgraduate levels) to address the void he perceived lay between the creative practitioner and (1) meaningful creative practice, (2) a sense of place and belonging within the Creative Industries and (3) the now necessary spirit of entrepreneurship required to make an impact in the Creative Industries.
Via the three streams—applied research, creative practice, and, entrepreneurship and creative enterprise—a holistic curriculum approach to addressing the common problems faced by mid-career creative practitioners was developed.
With a marked focus on project based curriculum and a rigorous application of practice-based research, Dr Casey has enabled his candidates to not only excel in developing significant, feasible, impactful art projects within the program, but, has seen many of its alumni continue this fine work in the industry.
Alumni in Dr Casey’s programs have gone on to develop socially aware practices, curatorships, businesses and enterprises that allow them to sustainably practice while simultaneously achieving strong cultural impacts across their communities.
Research & Academic Writing
PhD Thesis
The Silence of the Seventh Floor: Narratives of Traumatic Experience is a thesis comprising an original creative component and an accompanying exegesis that presents a framework of how traumatic experience and the narratives produced by its victims can be both written and understood.
The novel component explores traumatic experience, firstly, via the minor first-person perspective of the abuser (Part 1), Jon, a thirty year-old man who recently lost his wife while she gave birth to his daughter, and secondly, via the major first-person perspective of the victim (Part 2), Nahua, his daughter, now a nineteen year old woman.
The exegesis further analyses the traumatic themes explored in the creative component. In the first chapter, the key themes (present in the novel) are Sigmund Freud’s theory of repetition compulsion (wherein Nahua ‘remembers’ her experience via ‘acting out’ her past experience), Lenore Terr’s theory of contagion (wherein Nahua transfers her traumatic experience to those around her), and finally the theory of state-dependent learning and abreaction and how these phenomena split the traumatised protagonist’s life into two realities: the ‘trauma reality’ which consists of sublime experience often detailed and ‘documented’ with the use of tropical language and the ordinary experience that sits alongside ‘trauma reality’, and operates as a quasi-continuation of one’s previous life, post-trauma.
After the exegetical component of the thesis examines definitions of trauma, the second chapter examines the five features of the trauma narrative, as postulated by Rosemary Winslow, and positions them as narrative techniques under the headings of disruption, timelessness, speechless terror, animacy/inanimacy, and duality. The purpose and deployment of these techniques and features will be explained in relation to their use in two acclaimed contemporary trauma novels, ‘Beloved’ by Toni Morrison and ‘Cat’s Eye’ by Margaret Atwood, as well as my own employment of them within the creative component of this thesis.
Honours Thesis
Travellers of the Borges Realm: An Examination of the Metaphorical Journey to the Secret Centre in the Literature of Jorge Luis Borges
The ambiguous destination that the traveller within the Borges narrative seeks will be analysed. I will attempt to prove that this unknown destination is always some form of inner realisation or illumination. I will explain how Borges has given birth to this realisation in both his characters and readers. This journey to a truer understanding of one’s self will be related to the Jungian concept of the ‘archetype’ as will the characters, motifs and situations in Borges’s fiction and poetry. I will undertake an investigation of the relation these archetypes have to the Buddhist and Kabbalistic doctrines in an attempt to illustrate how Borges draws from them. This investigation, will establish the intellectual and emotional connection Borges has with his reader, and how this connection enables the reader to travel within the text.