Astrid Lorange is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Art & Design. She is a writer, researcher, editor, and artist. She studied writing and cultural studies at the University of Technology Sydney, where she completed her doctoral thesis on Gertrude Stein and contemporary poetics in 2013. How Reading is Written: A Brief Index to Gertrude Stein, a scholarly monograph based on the thesis, was published by Wesleyan University Press in 2014.

A cultural studies scholar by training, she analyses modern and contemporary art, literature and media with a focus on policing and incarceration, gender and sexuality, and political economy. Her research has been published in high-profile journals such as Crime, Media, Culture, Race & Class, Angelaki, and Australian Feminist Studies. Her literary criticism and art writing has been commissioned by the Sydney Review of Books, the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Gertrude Contemporary, the Museum of Contemporary Art, the National Gallery of Victoria, and more.

Her current projects include: 

• The Art of Unmaking: Abolition and Aesthetics in Australia, a book co-written with Dr Andrew Brooks and forthcoming with Power Publications. The Art of Unmaking examines the relationship between contemporary Australian art and abolition. It proposes that art is one site for scoring the collective struggles to dismantle not only the police and prisons but the interlocking systems of colonialism and capitalism that naturalise these coercive arms of the state. Inversely, it argues that the abolitionist project of remaking the world depends upon the cultivation of a material imagination grounded in the dialectical unfolding of history while reaching for horizon beyond the given and the received. The book constructs a genealogy of police power and carceral infrastructures across the life of the Australian settler colony: from the informal and violent policing of the frontier in the early days of New South Wales, to the distributed forms of policing via policy, paternalism, and welfare in the assimilation era, to the entrenchment of law and order politics and rapid expansion of the prison in the contemporary era of economic downturn and austerity. In this account, police power is figured not as a reactive force tasked with upholding colonial law but as an exceptional and discretionary form of power productive of colonial social order. One of the contributions the book makes is to advance an argument about the centrality of policing to the formation of settler-colonial rule and its racial regimes in Australia. It prosecutes this argument through close readings of contemporary Australia art.
   
• A book, co-written with Professor Sarah Brouillette (Carleton University), tentatively titled Family Fortress, forthcoming with Common Notions. This book is about contemporary popular right-wing social media content that is invested in a rigid sex/gender binary, heterosexuality, marriage, fertility, and the protected homestead. We call this content counterrevolutionary: it reacts against new possibilities for non-traditional family, identity, and community, instead romanticising small family units securing their private estates and warding off ostensible threats (from public schooling, taxation, queer and trans people, migrants, feminists, and so on). As with our previous writing on the tradwife media system, this book sits at the nexus of (1) Marxist-feminist research historicising formations of gender, family, and sexuality and (2) critical platform studies. We focus on the production of social media content, from tradwives to men’s rights activists to homesteaders. This content exhibits new political identities and advances new rhetoric in the cultural war. We draw on critiques of platform capitalism, crisis theory, and Marxist-feminist political economy of the family to argue that counterrevolutionary social media content has emerged as the latest expression of a long-term crisis of the social.
   

• A book project tentatively titled A Literary Theory of Headaches. This book argues that the headache is a form of suffering that indexes the uneven experience of world-systemic crisis, and that the literary headache offers an archive across which we can link moments in the long durée of capitalist crisis and theorise this ordinary yet existential pain. The book will focus specifically on what Giovanni Arrighi calls 'the long twentieth century' of American hegemony. With this schema in view the book theorises the ‘American’ headache as a historically contingent malady through close readings of key novels. Settler-colonial dispossession, vertically integrated corporatism, petrocapitalist expansion, racial supremacy, infrastructural and logistical revolution, mass media, imperial domination: such features of the American century can be read as the historical conditions in which literary headaches emerge, symptomatic of the crisis that is both individual (felt by a character) and collective (symbolic of the social as such). 

Astrid is a founding member of the Infrastructural Inequalities research network, and a member of the Media Futures Hub (UNSW), the Literary Provocations Hub (UNSW), the Centre for Criminology, Law & Justice (UNSW) and the Capitalism Studies Network (ANU). She is on the editorial committee for the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art and  

Astrid is author of several books of poetry, including, most recently, Raw Materials (Atelos Press, 2024), Case Notes (Spiral Editions, 2024), and Labour and Other Poems (Cordite Books, 2020). 

With Dr Andrew Brooks, she is one half of the critical art collective Snack Syndicate, who make exhibitions, publications, and public programs. Snack Syndicate's book of essays Homework was published by Discipline in 2021. She is a co-editor at Rosa Press. 

In the School of Art & Design, Astrid convenes the undergraduate/postgraduate courses Writing as Practice (DART3341) and Art Writing and Publishing (SAHT9112), and co-convenes Art, Gender and Sexuality (DART3320) with Dr Tim Gregory. She supervises Honours projects from Art Theory and English/Creative Writing, and supervises HDR projects (see supervision tab for more information). She is an elected staff representative on the Arts, Design & Architecture Faculty Board.