Publication grants support new humanities research

Having supported hundreds of scholars over more than five decades, the Publication Subsidy Scheme is one of the Australian Academy of the Humanities’ longest-running awards programs.

The Academy is pleased to announce 8 successful projects will receive support of up to $3,000 toward the publication of scholarly work that advances knowledge in the humanities.

The publication subsidies come at an essential time for Australia’s early career researchers in the humanities.

Dr Jessica Urwin’s book, Contaminated Country: Nuclear Colonialism and Aboriginal Resistance in Australia, explores how radioactive mineral extraction, weapons testing and nuclear waste disposal have harmed Indigenous communities and lands, and how Australia’s deep nuclear past became entangled with colonialism.

“I am incredibly grateful to receive an Australian Academy of Humanities Publication Subsidy grant for my forthcoming publication. This grant will provide invaluable assistance in publishing Contaminated Country both overseas—with Washington University Press—and in Australia—with Melbourne University Press.”

“Contaminated Country contributes to the global theorisation of “nuclear colonialism”, a phenomenon that has been historically characterised as a top-down imposition upon First Nations people the world over. Moving beyond this characterisation of nuclear colonialism, this book explores how First Nations nuclear survivors in Australia have challenged and resisted nuclear colonialism for decades, influencing Australians’ understandings of and engagement with both nuclear processes and settler colonialism over time”, Urwin says.

Professor Stephen Garton AM FAHA FRAHS FASSA FRSN, President of the Academy, commended the breadth of projects recognised in this year’s awards.

“Publication is the cornerstone of research, and the publication grant subsidy has a long track record of supporting early career academics to make inroads in their research careers. The breadth of scholarship represented in this year’s applications is significant, and the strong pool of applications reflects a very active field of researchers. The Academy is proud to continue to support early career humanities scholars through this scheme, and demonstrate the broad value of the humanities across society.”

The 2025 Publication Subsidy Recipients are:

Dr Caroline Ingram

University of Western Australia

Women on Trial: Criminal Trials in Colonial Western Australia Palgrave MacMillan

This book investigates how Western Australian women accused of crime were treated in the courtroom, and in public discourse, by examining the records of women’s trials in the upper courts of colonial Western Australia. It examines how legal rules and institutions affected the outcome of women’s trials and the way in which the trials were gendered. To do so it examines four factors: the use of defence counsel, multi-defendant trials, Aboriginal women as defendants and the use of mercy. In doing so, it also shines a light on the everyday lives of working-class women in the nineteenth century.

Dr Darja Hoenigman

Australian National University

Talk goes many ways

This book provides an ethnography of the Awiakay, a small Papua New Guinean village society, viewed through the prism of language use. By focussing on speech registers and their uses as an aspect of social life in this face-to-face Sepik society, it explores complex cultural matters and the nexus between linguistic and societal change. The book’s architecture pairs seven key social themes with their corresponding linguistic registers. As well as its written analysis – based on twenty years of ethnographic and linguistic fieldwork – the book incorporates film segments which offer real-world insights into everyday realities of the Awiakay.

Dr Deirdre O’Connell

University of Sydney

The World of Crickett Smith: The Global Odyssey of a Black American Trumpeter, 1881-1944: A Negative Space Biography

Oxford University Press

Crickett Smith was a pioneering trumpeter, traveller, and modernist bellwether who helped germinate American popular culture and foster its global expansion. Born in the tumult of the Exoduster migration in 1881, his life story tracks the rise of Black show business after the Reconstruction and before the Civil Rights Movement. From a child performer in Kansas City to a celebrated bandleader in Paris and Bombay, Crickett Smith was an American cultural ambassador, yet one who hovered on the margins of national acceptance. Today, his name is largely unknown, a legacy of erasures and omissions. For the first time, this biography pieces together the fragments of his world.

Dr Emily Gallagher

Australian National University

Playtime: A History of Australian Childhood 

La Trobe University Press/Black Inc

Book launch to be held at Harry Hartog ANU on Monday 22 September, from 6pm. Register here.

For nearly a century, the adult imagination has prevailed as the governing lens through which Australians have written and understood their history. Playtime represents a dedicated attempt to disrupt that narrative. It reinterprets a formative period in the country’s history through the lens of childhood experience and imagination, painting a new and less familiar portrait of modern Australia, and bringing age to the centre of analysis as a critical category alongside class, gender and ethnicity. Ultimately, this book seeks to broaden our understanding of the possibilities of Australian social history and to move young people from the margins to a more central position.

Dr Fabricio Tocco

Australian National University

Precarious Secrets: A History of the Latin American Political Thriller

Forthcoming University of Texas Press.

For the past five decades, a distinctive type of political thriller has been steadily developing in Latin America. Precarious Secrets is a panoramic overview of the genre in the hands of renowned writers and filmmakers from Argentina, Mexico, and Brazil, as well as lesser-known Uruguayan, Peruvian and Paraguayan artists for whom the style has been a vehicle for pungent narratives shot through with menace and conspiracy. Isolating the genre’s tensions between secrecy, space and precarity, the book explores its unique role in Latin American entertainment and activism, tracing its evolution from its emergence in the 1970s until our days.

Dr Jessica Urwin

La Trobe University

Contaminated Country: Nuclear Colonialism and Aboriginal Resistance in Australia

Forthcoming University of Washington Press (2025) and Melbourne University Press (2026)

Taking Australian nuclear history as its focal point, Contaminated Country explores how radioactive mineral extraction, weapons testing, and nuclear waste disposal have caused incalculable physical, spiritual, and cultural harm to Indigenous communities and lands for over a century. The book acknowledges, however, that Indigenous peoples all over the world have not only survived nuclear colonialism but challenged it time and time again. Tracking the colonial mechanisms Australia has used to pursue its nuclear industry, Contaminated Country simultaneously highlights how Aboriginal peoples refused and reshaped those same mechanisms over time, revealing how Australia’s deep nuclear past has been entangled with colonialism locally, nationally, and internationally.

Dr Pao-Chen Tang

University of Sydney

The Animist Imagination in East Asian Cinema

Amsterdam University Press

Whispering winds, speeding trains, wandering balloons, and swirling snowflakes—these are the living entities that humans find themselves enmeshed with in their ecological co-flourishing in contemporary East Asian cinema. Tang theorizes this new mode of filmmaking, which delves into both the definition of cinema and how to live with the nonhuman. Moving images are animate beings and the animism of cinema further compels anti-anthropocentric forms of existence and action. The book distils these forms of agency through a systematic analysis of narrative structures, stylistic devices, and cultural implications in a stunning demonstration of a world viewed and enacted otherwise.

Dr Romy Ash (University of Melbourne), Kate Mildenhall, Dr Penni Russon (Monash University), Dr Nicola Redhouse (University of Melbourne), Leanne Hall (RMIT University), Dr Rose Michael (RMIT University)

Novel Laboratory: five creative practice researchers discuss the process of novel-making

In Novel Laboratory, five creative practice researchers discuss the process of novel-making. This monograph is co-authored by members of NovelLab, a small group of established novelists and emerging / mid-career creative practice researchers experimenting and evolving new methods to understand and reflect their book work: why and what we write, as well as how novels work in – or can be made to work on – the world. This publication addresses the isolation of creative practice and is the original outcome of five artist–academics – all with established long-form non-traditional research output track records (ie novelists) – iterating and reflecting on their own practice(s) and processes in a collaborative research context.

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