Research Clusters

The School of Humanities has established six cross-disciplinary research themes that are embedded in various forms of Creative and Critical Practice.

Through these themes, the School aims to extend cross-disciplinary engagement, enhance research performance, and improve research visibility.

  • Stories from the South

    This theme foregrounds our location in South Australia while engaging with various positions and perspectives in and from the south, including the hemispheric/geographical south, the global south, and the postcolonial or decolonial south.

    For more information or to participate in this research cluster, contact theme leader Meg Samuelson.

    Southern Waters Symposium

    Stories from the South Symposium

  • Translations, Trans/Nations, and Trans/Locations

    In this increasingly globalised world, the Translations, Trans/nations & Trans/locations research cluster brings together Humanities-based researchers from a variety of fields to explore the interactions and communications that impact on our abilities to understand each other. Our research spans many forms of human communication – spoken and written, visual, material and digital – across physical, personal and cultural boundaries. This research allows us to properly understand our past, articulate our present, and anticipate our future.

    For more information or to participate in this research cluster, contact theme leader Peter Pugsley

  • Emotions and the Healing Arts

    Emotions and the medical humanities are key areas of research interest in the School of Humanities. Home to one of the nodes of the ARC Centre of Excellence in the History of Emotions, current research interests include philosophical explorations of nature of emotion/affect/cognition; materialisms and emotional objects; embodied experience, including its gendered, raced, psychological, and experiential dimensions; the senses; emotional communities, belonging and group identities; law, politics, colonialism, and emotion; applied medical humanities and wellbeing applications; and histories of specific emotional experiences, including love, pain, grief and more.

    For more information or to participate in this research cluster, contact theme leader Katie Barclay.

  • Digital Futures

    For more information or to participate in this research cluster, contact theme leader Aaron Humphrey.

  • Thinking with the Environment

    This research theme brings together cultural and creative research in the Environmental Humanities, including: food and animal studies; ecopoetics; climate change ethics; Indigenous environmentalisms and caring for country; Anthropocene thought; and sustainability and energy studies. By advancing a Humanities-led approach to environmental questions and concerns, researchers in this theme analyse and produce the complex cultural, material, textual, historical, creative, and philosophical resources shaping how we imagine and enact environmental pasts, presents and futures.

    For more information or to participate in this research cluster, contact theme leader Michelle Philipov