21 Fellows awarded ARC Discovery Grants

The Australian Academy of the Humanities is delighted to see 21 Fellows have been awarded Discovery Projects in the 2025, round 1, by the Australian Research Council.

ARC Discovery Projects offer crucial funding to develop new knowledge and expand Australia’s research capacity. Research projects funded by the ARC’s National Competitive Grants Program such as those awarded under the Discovery Projects scheme have been found to generate $3.32 in economic output for every $1 of research funding.

This round of projects includes heritage management of seawalls in the wake of climate change, the history and emergence of truth as a social value, preservation of Papuan languages, how people with a disability experience digital technology, and more.

Our congratulations to all Fellows, and other humanities discovery project winners, including:

Harnessing Artificial Intelligence to Reduce Loneliness

Professor Jill Bennett FAHA, Professor Michael Thielscher & Mr Volker Kuchelmeister

This project aims to develop Artificially Intelligent [AI] companions that are able to meaningfully engage with experiences of loneliness. Its principal innovation will be the prototyping and evaluation of digitally embodied AI companions that can respond dynamically to changing user-states (eg. emotions or moods) as an attentive human companion might. This step change in the effectiveness of AI companions is the key to addressing the socio-emotional states associated with loneliness. The project will thereby provide both the psychosocial and technical knowledge-base to enable Australia to harness AI to reduce the social and economic burden of loneliness.

Translation and Transformation in Late Antiquity

Dr Michael Hanaghan; Associate Professor Stephen Carlson; Professor Bronwen Neil FAHA; Professor Dr Andrew Cain

This project offers the first holistic assessment of translation in Late Antiquity, a critically important cultural transformation on par with the introduction of the printing press. It will explore who translated texts, when and why, when the norms for modern European literary analysis were set. It aims to uncover how new translations communicated and shaped knowledge while developing distinct social, political, and cultural groups. It will expand our understanding of the rich variety of Late Antique translation techniques and apply this understanding to how translation methods in modern Australia are changing, including the use of AI technologies, the presence of multi-language communities, and the experience of bilingual speakers.

The stone toolkit of the first Homo sapiens from Africa to Australia

Professor Christopher Clarkson FAHA

This project aims to explore the technological variability of Homo sapiens in their expansion out of Africa to Australia over the last 200,000 years. The project expects to generate new knowledge in the areas of archaeology and human origins by employing groundbreaking 3D computational analysis of stone tools found in sites spanning the period of Homo sapiens expansion. Expected outcomes of this project are to understand the technological underpinning of our forebears’ successful expansion out of Africa, their replacement of other hominin species, and the pace and routes of expansion. This should provide significant benefits in understanding human evolution and the resilience of our species in the face of major climate change.

Dingo Lingo: Australia’s past through the lens of biology, language & music

Professor Felicity Meakins FAHA FASSA; Associate Professor Myfany Turpin FAHA; Professor Linda Barwick FAHA

This project investigates ‘dingo’ related words in Indigenous languages to transform our understanding of the linguistic landscape of Australia from a static collection of languages to a complex picture of vibrant language exchange and social dynamics. As the dingo arrived around 4,000 years ago, these words are within the scope of evolutionary models of language. With First Nations rangers, this project will create a large-scale database of dingo words including from different speech styles and song through detailed case studies. This database will be the basis of a model of language change that better reflects dynamic historical relationships between Indigenous groups. The project will also extend ranger programs to cultural conservation.

The legacy of coastal infrastructure: reclamations and seawalls.

Professor Denis Byrne FAHA; Professor Gay Hawkins; Professor Lara Lamb; Assistant Professor Shi Chi Leung

Positioning coastal reclamations and seawalls in Asia-Australia as artefacts of the Anthropocene, the project aims to highlight their historical role in the expansion of human habitat into the sea, provoking debate on the sustainability of human coastal terraforming practices and assisting the heritage field to reassess the significance of historic coastal infrastructure in the context of the current climate crisis. Examining the threat that sea level rise poses to reclaimed land that, over time, has been integrated into the terrain of everyday life in Sydney, Hong Kong, and Japan, the project will better equip the Australian public to understand the background to this threat, thus laying groundwork for enhanced climate resilience.

Decolonising the History of Childhood(s), 1946-2023

Professor Mina Roces FAHA

This project aims to partially resolve the problem of Eurocentric bias in histories of childhood by proposing a new construction of childhood through a history of Philippine childhoods. It will allow concepts of childhood from Southeast Asia to be recognised alongside the Western norm and demonstrate how children from non-European contexts can be empowered by criticizing indigenous constructions. Using archival sources, interviews, and ethnography, it will contribute to understanding the diversity of childhoods in Australia’s multicultural society where multiple views of childhood exist, compelling international scholarship to move beyond the Euro-Atlantic context that has dominated the field and hindered it from becoming truly global.

Addressing the opportunities and risks of HIV elimination in Australia

Dr Dean Murphy; Professor Kane Race FAHA; Professor Andrew Gorman-Murray; Professor Edwina Wright; Dr John Rule

This project aims to provide the first critical analysis of public policy related to HIV ‘elimination’, including the emerging notion of ‘micro-elimination’. Using a novel ‘policy ecology’ approach involving an analysis of media coverage, policies, health promotion materials, and qualitative interviews with stakeholders and people affected by HIV, it seeks to identify the benefits and risks of implementing this policy in Australian settings. It also seeks to identify the role of this policy in perceptions of HIV prevalence and transmissibility, and its potential role in relation to HIV stigma. Expected outcomes of the project include urgently needed new knowledge on the adoption and implementation of a powerful global public health policy.

What does ‘doing diversity’ do, and how can it be done differently?

Professor Bronwyn Carlson FAHA; Associate Professor Debbie Bargallie; Associate Professor David Nolan; Dr Archie Thomas

This project aims to take stock of the state of news media’s ‘diversity problem’—developing the first detailed, Australia-wide study of how news media organisations respond to criticism of the makeup of their workforce. We will examine what initiatives are being taken to diversify news media workplaces and their workforce, and the frameworks and approaches to understanding and addressing the problems of racism, discrimination, and harm inside the workplace. We will build new knowledge on strategies and practices of survival employed by diverse media workers who navigate careers in often hostile environments, using this to inform a set of strategies for industry to improve their practices, and make news media organisations safer workplaces.

Herodotus, Thucydides, and the ‘Discovery’ of Truth in Ancient Greece

Professor Julia Kindt FAHA

Ancient history has much to tell us about the polarization in the political cultures of many Western societies today. More specifically, it speaks to larger questions emerging from contested notions of truth and truthfulness at the heart of this polarization. This project aims to explore how truth first emerged as a problem among some thinkers in Classical Greece. It expects to generate the first study of the social, political, and intellectual conditions that led to the emergence of truth as a social value. Outcomes include a better understanding of what is at stake in our joint commitment to the real and factual, and what would be lost if we give up on it now – with broad benefits for our grasp of political cultures past and present.

The sounds of Papua

Professor Marija Tabain FAHA; Professor Birgit Hellwig

This study investigates speech in the Papuan languages spoken to the immediate north of Australia, which have very simple consonant and vowel systems, but which have been consistently reported as showing a very high level of language-internal variability. The New Guinea area is recognised as having the highest language diversity in the world, yet the sound systems of its languages are greatly under-studied. This project aims to produce the first ever large-scale phonetic studies of these superficially simple sound systems of Papuan languages. This is expected to provide a better understanding of human speech production in general. In addition, online dictionaries are planned based on the sound recordings from this project.

Generative AI and the future of academic writing and publishing

Associate Professor Michelle Riedlinger; Professor Peta Mitchell; Dr Jake Goldenfein; Distinguished Professor Jean Burgess FAHA; Dr Aaron Snoswell

This project examines the impact of Generative AI (GenAI) technologies on scholarly research and publishing. The project investigates how GenAI technologies are shaping the future of academic research from search to publication, including how academic publishers and peak research advisory bodies are responding to the potential of these technologies. The project develops a framework for understanding the sociotechnical drivers shaping the debate and establishes cross-sector principles to promote a more consistent and critical response by key stakeholders. In doing so, it supports ongoing learning within scholarly communities for a more responsive national research system, optimising GenAI for public good.

Disability and Digital Citizenship

Distinguished Professor Gerard Goggin FAHA; Professor Kathleen Ellis; Professor Jennifer Smith-Merry; Professor Simon Darcy; Professor Paul Harpur; Professor Bree Hadley; Professor Michael Kent; Associate Professor Dinesh Wadiwel; Dr Natasha Layton; Associate Professor Mary-Ann O’Donovan; Professor Scott Avery; Professor Karen Soldatic; Professor Lorenzo Dalvit; Dr Kuansong Victor Zhuang; Associate Professor Meryl Alper

This project investigates people with disability’s full participation in the digital age by advancing a new conceptualization of digital citizenship. Via a co-designed benchmark Australian study, the project generates knowledge on how people with disability experience digital technology, barriers encountered and how to address inequities. Expected outcomes include an evidence base on the nature and state-of-play of disability digital citizenship, and resources to support embedding of inclusive design in future technology. The project’s benefits should help optimise national digital policy, and strengthen national research capabilities in the emerging area of inclusive and accessible technology.

Police Collecting of Ancestral Remains and Cultural Property, 1825-1930

Professor Cressida Fforde; Professor Daryle Rigney FAHA; Emeritus Professor Paul Turnbull; Professor Lisa Ford FAHA; Associate Professor Steve Hemming; Professor Craig Longman

The project aims to investigate the history, legality and modern implications of police collecting of Indigenous Ancestral Remains and cultural property and the role of museums and governments in directing this activity (1825-1930). By examining relevant law and jurisprudence during this period, and assumptions about applicability to Indigenous ownership and enjoyment of their possessions, we expect to generate new knowledge of the legal bases on which resulting museum collections rely. Expected outcomes include new histories about police-collecting and their legal, social and political implications, benefitting repatriation, truth-telling and reconciliation, and decolonised heritage legislation and museum policies here and overseas.

Transformed landscapes: 3000 years of adaptation and resilience in Vanuatu

Associate Professor Stuart Bedford; Associate Professor Christopher Ballard; Dr Rosey Billington; Associate Professor Nicholas Thieberger FAHA; Professor Thegn Ladefoged; Ms Anna Naupa; Mr Richard Shing; Mr Edson Willie

This project aims to explore the history of dramatic human modification of a Pacific Island landscape over the past 3000 years and draws out the implications of these transformations for future generations in a changing global climate. Since initial settlement, the island of Efate in Vanuatu has been spectacularly altered by a series of socio-agrosystems, recently revealed by LiDAR aerial imagery. This transdisciplinary project will combine field and archival research by archaeologists, historians and linguists to map social and agricultural development across Efate, generating a deep-time perspective that will inform responses to contemporary challenges around population growth and food security in the Pacific.

Translation and Transformation in Late Antiquity

Dr Michael Hanaghan; Associate Professor Stephen Carlson; Professor Bronwen Neil FAHA; Professor Dr Andrew Cain

This project offers the first holistic assessment of translation in Late Antiquity, a critically important cultural transformation on par with the introduction of the printing press. It will explore who translated texts, when and why, when the norms for modern European literary analysis were set. It aims to uncover how new translations communicated and shaped knowledge while developing distinct social, political, and cultural groups. It will expand our understanding of the rich variety of Late Antique translation techniques and apply this understanding to how translation methods in modern Australia are changing, including the use of AI technologies, the presence of multi-language communities, and the experience of bilingual speakers.

Human Rights and Corporal Punishment: Australia and Britain, 1970-2000

Professor Christopher Hilliard FAHA; Dr Marco Duranti; Dr Isobelle Barrett Meyering; Dr Emily Baughan

This project aims to provide a transnational and comparative history of efforts to abolish corporal punishment in Australia and Britain, and to explain the partial success of these efforts. It expects to generate new knowledge about human rights and children’s rights campaigns based on extensive archival research, including the analysis of recently declassified material. Expected outcomes include an explanation of why abolitionists succeeded in banning the hitting of children in schools but not in the home. Anticipated benefits include a better identification of paths to reform in this space than the idea, common in the public health literature, that scientific studies and human rights reports will ‘trickle down’ into public opinion.

Derailing Empire? A transcultural and gendered history of Australian rail

Professor Amanda Nettelbeck FAHA; Associate Professor Carolyn Holbrook; Dr Leah Lui-Chivizhe; Associate Professor Benjamin Mountford; Associate Professor Emma Robertson; Professor Robert Fletcher.

This project investigates what the history and memory of rail (1870s-1960s) can tell us about some of Australia’s most neglected social histories. Focusing on transcultural and gendered histories of railway, it aims to ‘derail’ a more familiar progressivist or technological story of nation-building to highlight histories of non-European and gendered labour and community-building. These aspects of railway networks’ social histories remain little understood within either a national or an international comparative frame. Supported by collaboration with the museum and library sector, and generating an outward-facing digital Story Map, this project will help make our transcultural and gendered railway heritage accessible to new public audiences.

The Australian experience of automated advertising on digital platforms

Associate Professor Nicholas Carah; Dr Thao Phan; Professor Mark Andrejevic FAHA; Dr Scott Wark

This project aims to produce new knowledge about how the advertising practices of global digital platforms have developed and how they impact Australians. Expected outcomes include new digital research approaches to investigate how Australians are tracked and targeted by automated and algorithmic advertising. The project will benefit scholarly and public understanding of how advertising on digital platforms represents and classifies Australians, including whether their models discriminate by race, gender, age or class. The project will produce novel and transferable approaches for studying digital media industries and cultures that envision forms of automated media accountable to shared values through public and policy engagement.

Race Science and the Human Hand: Dermatoglyphics in the Twentieth Century

Professor Alison Bashford FAHA

This project aims to deepen our understanding of the history of physical anthropology, comparative anatomy and population genetics over the twentieth century. It will do so through analysing ‘dermatoglyphics’, the study of ridges, lines, and shape of the human (and other primate) hand. Still occasionally pursued to study human variation, as well as medical diagnostics, the project will be the first historical study of this little-understood aspect of ‘race science’, and of its legacy, including its Australian applications. This research should improve our capacity to assess the ethical dimensions of current human, medical and life sciences.

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