Rob Cover


Rob Cover is a social theorist and media scholar, specialising in critical sexuality studies, digital media theory, minority stereotyping and media scandals, with work on LGBTIQ youth suicide, cultures of social networking and audience interactivity, as well as cultural and media representations of population. He is Professor of Digital Communication at RMIT University, Melbourne, and formerly an associate professor at The University of Western Australia, from 2013-2019 where he served as Deputy Head of the School of Social Sciences. Previously, he was senior lecturer in Media at The University of Adelaide and has held visiting research and teaching fellowships at The University of Queensland, Adelaide University, and the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur.
He received his PhD from Monash University, and is a frequent speaker and online commentator on contemporary media and minority issues.
He is a chief investigator on an Australian Research Council Discovery Project on belonging and sexual citizenship among gender and sexual minority youth, and on another on the representation of gender and sexual diversity in Australian screen media, its histories and its role in social change, and on an Australian Research Council Linkage Project with on LGBTQ Migration and Mobility with the History Trust of South Australia.
He was a founding member of the , which promotes the development of theoretical and practical tools for understanding suicide derived from the humanities and social sciences, and opposes the individual pathologisation of those who suicide as found in many dominant medico-psychiatric approaches to suicide prevention and research.

Works

The author of numerous academic journal articles and creative short fiction, his books include: