Advanced Studies in the Humanities (ASH)

The scheme supports researchers:

• who want to work for a brief period at the University of Adelaide;
• who want to work with staff in the School of Humanities at the University of Adelaide in their field of humanities research; and
• who is at least 3 years beyond Ph.D.

Fellows must work in one of the disciplines represented within the School of Humanities. Applicants are encouraged to show how their project articulates with the strengths and trajectories of the research areas within the School of Humanities.

Fellows are expected to visit Adelaide for a minimum of 3 weeks, maximum of 8 weeks.

The total funding available for each ASH Fellowship is AUD$10,000 (this includes flight and accommodation costs). Fellows are expected to visit Adelaide for a minimum of 3 weeks, maximum of 8 weeks. An ASH Fellow will also receive:

• A workspace within the School of Humanities
• Access to the Library of the University of Adelaide
• Access to relevant staff

Your Fellowship must be undertaken in 2024 or early 2025.

ASH Fellows are expected to:

• Undertake innovative and internationally significant research in the humanities.
• Contribute to the academic life of the School of Humanities through public lectures, masterclasses and/or seminars (by negotiation).
• Collaborate with School of Humanities staff by engaging with academic events, co-publication, or other similar activities.
• Produce a publication wherein the School of Humanities is listed as one of the affiliations for the author and where the ASH Fellowship is appropriately acknowledged.

The recipients of the ASH Fellowships are encouraged to consider ways in which collaborative research with staff in the School of Humanities may be undertaken in the future after the fellowship period is over.

The School of Humanities at the University of Adelaide now welcomes applications for their Advanced Studies in the Humanities (ASH) Fellowships. The aim of the ASH Fellowships is to support advanced study in Humanities disciplines through a short-term visiting research fellowship scheme. This fellowship is intended to support research into any aspect of humanities research for which a period of time in Adelaide, and collaboration with staff and HDRs in the School of Humanities, would be advantageous.

Applicants are encouraged to show how their project articulates with the strengths and trajectories of the research areas within the School of Humanities. The Departments within the School of Humanities are: 

• English, Creative Writing, and Film
• European Languages, and Linguistics
• Historical and Classical Studies
• Media
• Philosophy

See the School of Humanities for further information on the disciplines represented within the School of Humanities as well as staff profiles.

The ASH Fellows would be expected to:

• Undertake innovative and internationally significant research in the humanities.
• Contribute to the academic life of the School of Humanities through public lectures, masterclasses and/or seminars.
• Collaborate with School of Humanities staff by engaging with academic events, co-publication, or other similar activities. 
• Produce a publication wherein the School of Humanities is listed as one of the affiliations for the author and where the ASH Fellowship is appropriately acknowledged. 

The recipients of the ASH Fellowships are encouraged to consider ways in which collaborative research with staff in the School of Humanities may be undertaken in the future after the fellowship period is over. 

The total funding available for each ASH Fellowship is AUD$10,000 (this includes your flight and accommodation costs). Fellows are expected to visit Adelaide for a minimum of 3 weeks, maximum of 8 weeks. 

An ASH Fellow will also receive:

• A workspace within the School of Humanities
• Access to the Library of the University of Adelaide
• Access to relevant staff

Your Fellowship must be undertaken in 2024 or early 2025. 

Applications should be addressed to:

Associate Head of Research, School of Humanities (sally.may@adelaide.edu.au) and should be received no later than 1 March 2024.

Application - ASH Fellowship 2024/2025

The relationship between the University of Adelaide in Australia and Bath Spa University in the UK goes back almost a decade. Both are partners in the Global Academy of Liberal Arts (GALA), an international community of diverse, innovative, and socially responsible universities that aims to transform lives and to enhance global understanding through interdisciplinary collaboration in teaching and research. The two universities also have a Study Abroad agreement, with a particular focus on the humanities and creative arts; most recently, this involved Bath Spa Creative Computing students travelling to Adelaide for a one-month traineeship, funded by the Turing scheme and GALA.
 
The Adelaide-Bath Spa Collaborative Fellowship — jointly funded by the University of Adelaide and Bath Spa University — builds on this existing relationship. It offers staff at each university with particular interests in English literature, history, philosophy, creative writing, creative media, digital humanities, heritage and museum studies the opportunity to visit the other university to develop collaborative initiatives and projects of any kind, with at least one tangible outcome anticipated during the Fellowship period. A Fellow will also be expected to give one masterclass to university staff and students and deliver one public lecture related to their field of research or creative practice.

In the first year, Bath Spa University staff will be eligible to apply to visit Adelaide; it is hoped that in succeeding years the Fellowship will be reciprocal, alternating between Adelaide and Bath.

The successful Fellow will be expected to visit the host university for six weeks or longer, depending on the project, where they will be given access to facilities as a Visiting Research Fellow. The dates of the Fellowship are negotiable but it is expected that the visit should coincide at least in part with a teaching period at the host institution. The Fellowship needs to be taken up within 12 months of its award. 

The Fellowship will provide:

• a return airfare to Adelaide and college accommodation for a period of at least six weeks (up to AU10,000 in total);
• a workspace within the School of Humanities;
• access to the Library of the University of Adelaide; and
• access to relevant staff.

Applications are now open to colleagues at Bath Spa University. Applicants should include: 

• A proposal for potential collaboration between the two universities in one or more of the following disciplines: English literature, history, philosophy, creative writing, creative media, digital humanities, heritage and museum studies. It should include aims, significance, and intended outputs  (i.e. article, exhibition, lectures, etc) and their outcomes - no more than 1000 words. Wherever possible, the collaboration should support a longer-term project, or inform the development of one. 
• The names of relevant colleagues at the University of Adelaide’s School of Humanities and/or the J. M. Coetzee Centre for Creative Practice — please indicate if you have already contacted them
• Written confirmation from your Head of School endorsing your application
• The period in which you wish to work (between one to three months).

Each application will be reviewed by a joint panel of senior staff at the University of Adelaide and Bath Spa University.

Applications have closed for 2024.

View current and past fellows

Robyn McKenzie is a post-doctoral research fellow at the Australian National University working on the multi-team project ‘Beyond Reconciliation: Truth-Telling for Indigenous Wellbeing and the Health of the Nation’. She has research interests in First Nations collections, museums and the making of value. In the first half of the 20th century string figures became a key focus of ethnographers working with material culture. The South Australian Museum has rich holdings of mounted figures collected from Aboriginal communities at this time, with further documentary material in the Museum archives. These holdings are complemented by the papers of Honor Maude, ‘the world’s foremost authority’ on Pacific string figures, in the Pacific Collection at the Barr Smith Library at the University of Adelaide. As ASH Fellow Robyn will be working across these collections to bring this material into focus through a range of public programs: including an exhibition co-curated with Stephen Zagala, Curator of World Cultures at SAM, planned for 2024.

Recent Publications

• ‘“Such intimate relations”: on the process of collecting string figures and the paradigm of participant observation fieldwork’ Royal Anthropological Institute, Art and Anthropology online pamphlet series [March 2022] https://www.therai.org.uk/images/stories/AnthArt/AnthandArtVol4.pdf
• ‘The revaluation of historical collections by source communities: The string figures of Yirrkala.’ In Howard Morphy and Robyn McKenzie (eds.), Museums, Societies and the Creation of Value, Routledge, London, 2022, pp. 152–166.
• ‘Strange and complicated feats with string’, in Gaye Sculthorpe, Maria Nugent and Howard Morphy (eds.), Ancestors, artefacts, empire: Indigenous Australia in British and Irish museums, The British Museum, London, 2021, pp. 216–223.

Finding Country - entangled memories, obscured histories and uncanny connections between two cities of empire

Finding Country is an iteration of my intradisciplinary somatic and multimedia practice. The project offers a further exploration of ideas of belonging, memory practices and social justice as an act of repair. I want to extend and deepen my understanding and enactment of decolonisation.  I want to make work in Adelaide bringing an awareness of my sectionality as a White man, as a visitor from the colonising country and as a descendant of those who decided to stay in that ‘mother’ country. I want to invoke and hear the revenants of colonisation making a space, however ephemeral, to be with discomfort, to reflect and learn from it. I want to hold this learning and weave into my ongoing research-creation in England. The concept is speculative with concrete activity emerging through working collaboratively and I invite comments and contributors who might walk with me in the coming weeks.

The activity may include:
Walking in search of the traces and legacies of former slaveowners in Adelaide. Using existing research and data bases and following them through street names and place names I will track those who, having received ‘compensation’ from the British Government following the abolition of chattel slavery and the status of slave in the British Empire, acquired land and funded development in the area.

I will walk tracing the ‘colonial’ Adelaide place names and street names, some hold the names of settlements near where I now live and others the names of London suburbs that migrant/settler relatives of mine emigrated from. I will to explore resonances, synchronicities and serendipities walking and asking questions

Learning and sensing with the land, identifying sites with older, deep time, pre-colonial significance, I hope to find other sites of memory. I hope to meet indigenous custodians who can help me gain an understanding of the land and lives that were colonised by former slaveowners and English economic migrants.

Traversing these three entangled maps of knowledge and experience I seek to develop an embodied understanding of ‘country’.

The work may focus to a particular geographical area or the layering and transposition may be more abstracted. I intend to generate at least one public performative walk using a walking-with approach.

The process will generate social media, tracking and mapping, maybe some geolocated AR, writing and sound work and whatever emerges in the collaborations I hope to establish. These will shared online and in public conversation. There are conversations to be explored between Bath's UNESCO World Heritage status and Adelaide's UNESCO City of Culture status regarding uncomfortable histories and their contribution to ‘building peace in the minds of men and women’.

About Richard 

Kate Pullinger has been at the forefront of experimenting with digital narrative forms over the past twenty years; her most recent digital work, Breathe, is a ghost story for the smartphone that personalises itself to every reader. Her novel, The Mistress of Nothing, won Canada's Governor General's Award for Fiction in 2009; her most recent novel is Forest Green, Doubleday, 2020.  At Bath Spa, Professor Pullinger is the Director of the Centre for Cultural and Creative Industries, where she works on creative technology research projects. While at the University of Adelaide for her Fellowship, Kate plans to engage with the faculty and students via masterclasses and a public lecture, working with Adelaide colleagues from Creative Writing, the Australian Institute of Machine Learning, and other research centres and units.

Scenes from the South has embedded South-South mobilities as a working concept since its inception and launch in South Africa in 2020.  A collaboration with Amazwi South African Museum of Literature and the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin, it is a travelling exhibition on the archives of South African-Australian Nobel Laureate J. M. Coetzee, which I have curated with Professor David Attwell.  It is also an intervention in – and celebration of – ideas of the ‘South’.  Tracking Coetzee across his home ground of the Western Cape and further afield, it is designed around a series of itineraries which speak both to biographical and literary landmarks in Coetzee’s ‘life & times’, and to his intellectual, creative and biographical travels across other ‘southern spaces’. This includes his other southern home of Adelaide, where he has lived since 2002, but also Buenos Aires where, from 2015-18,  he directed the Cátedra Coetzee at UNSAM, bringing together Australian and South African writers, critics and filmmakers to Argentina.  Both cities happen to be located, like his hometown of Cape Town, along the 34th parallel South.  

This shared latitude forms the guiding conceptual basis of my ASH Mobilities fellowship project – a South Australian variation of Scenes from the South. Collaborating with colleagues in the School of Humanities, the History Trust and the J. M. Coetzee Centre for Creative Practice, the project will engage in both archival research and fieldwork to curate and create additional materials for a further exhibition, including maps, photographs and other archives and artworks that specifically speak to questions of country, coastlines and seascapes, navigation and migration, and the city space of Adelaide.