AAH Fellows recognise six outstanding humanities EMCRs

Early-mid career researchers (EMCRs) play a critical role in sustaining and renewing the humanities. To recognise their outstanding contributions, the Academy’s disciplinary sections were invited to nominate ECMRs who have demonstrated exemplary achievement over the past year.

The six scholars recognised by Academy Fellows exemplify the intellectual excellence, innovation and disciplinary leadership emerging across the humanities. Together, they highlight the strength of Australia’s next generation of humanities researchers.

Discover the six outstanding EMCRs whose work is shaping the future of their disciplines.

This is a continuation of our Rising Stars list — view the EMCRs named 2024 Rising Stars here.

Indigenous Studies

Dr Cass Lynch

Curtin University

Dr Cass Lynch is an Early Career Researcher and the Postdoctoral Research Fellow on ARC Future Fellowship project ‘Narrative, Technologies and Wirlomin Moorditj-abiny’.

Dr Lynch was named Curtin University’s Indigenous Researcher of the Year for 2025, which recognises her contribution to the university, and especially her work on a world-first trapdoor spider relocation effort in the Porongurup Range National Park. Her trapdoor spider rescue was featured in the Jan/Feb 2025 issue of Australian Geographic.

In partnership with Professor Kim Scott FAHA and the Wirlomin Noongar Language and Stories, Dr Lynch is a co-author on one of a Noongar-language picture book, and she was part of the international research project run by an academic at the University of Kent called ‘Rethinking Fables in the Age of Global Environmental Crisis’.

In addition to her research Dr Lynch writes creatively, and has her short stories added to the curriculum for students studying VCE English.

Classical Studies

Dr Tatiana Bur

Australian National University

Dr Tatiana Bur joined the ANU’s Centre for Classical Studies as a Lecturer in Classics in 2023. Prior to this, she was the Moses and Mary Finley Research Fellow at Darwin College, University of Cambridge.

Dr Bur is a historian of ancient Greece with particular interests in ancient technology, entertainment, and religion.

In late 2024, she was the recipient of the Vice-Chancellor’s Awards for Teaching Excellence (Early Career).

Dr Bur is currently a Chief Investigator on the ARC-funded Discovery Project ‘Night Vision in the Late Ancient Mediterranean‘ (2025-2027).

In 2025, she also founded Fulcrum — Australasia’s network for pre-modern science and technology, launching the network with a one-day Symposium. Dr Bur was selected to complete a competitive ABC media residency as one of the ABC Humanities Top 5 winners for 2025.

History

Dr Geraldine Fela

Macquarie University

Dr Geraldine Fela is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of History and Archaeology at Macquarie University and is a part time producer at ABC RN.

Her research and teaching encompasses histories of gender and sexuality, labour, social movements and medicine.

Her first book, Critical Care: Nurses on the frontline of Australia’s AIDS crisis, was published by UNSW Press in July 2024 and, this year, won 2025 Prime Minister’s Literary Award (Australian History). It was also shortlisted for the NSW History Awards, and highly commended for the Ernest Scott Prize.

She is currently working on a new project, examining the 1998 waterfront dispute between Patrick Stevedores and the Maritime Union of Australia.

Asian Studies

Dr Keru Cai

UNSW

Dr Keru Cai researches modern Chinese depictions of class, gender, and ethnicity, focussing on appropriations from both pre-modern Chinese traditions and from Russian, English, and French literature.

This year saw the publication of her first book, Poverty in Modern Chinese Realism: From Russia, with Squalor (Oxford University Press, 2025), which won the Columbia University Weatherhead East Asia Institute First Book Award (2025).

As of 2025, she is a Lecturer in Chinese Studies at UNSW, having previously held positions at St. Andrews (Scotland) and the Pennsylvania State University. She was the winner of a Fellowship by Examination at University of Oxford (Magdalen College).

The Arts

Dr Sarah Thomasson

Te Herenga Waka – Victoria University of Wellington

Dr Sarah Thomasson, recent recipient of a 2026 Discovery Early Career Researcher Award, focusing on festivals across the Asia Pacific, has published one monograph on the Edinburgh and Adelaide Festivals, and a co-edited book on digital humanities in the performing arts. She is co-editor of Contemporary Theatre Review, one of the leading theatre journals in the world.

Currently, Dr Thomasson is Lecturer in Theatre at Te Herenga Waka – Victoria University of Wellington in Aotearoa New Zealand, with her scholarship drawing on both Australian and New Zealand performance practices.

Her work on Theatre Aotearoa to harmonise it with AusStage data has been extremely important in terms of theatre research and in the advances of digital resources. Additionally, she is co-President of the Australasian Studies of Drama, Theatre, and Performance Studies.

English

Dr Amelia Dale

Australian National University

Dr Amelia Dale is a Lecturer in English at the Australian National University. Her research centres on eighteenth-century and Romantic literature and culture, with particular interests in book history, gender and genre, and histories of the body.

This year, Dr Dale published two major articles — the first on the Croppa Creek murder of environmental officer Glen Turner by farmer Ian Turnbull, and the second on how contemporary experimental writers have reimagined the work of the eighteenth-century novelist Samuel Richardson. This year she also secured a visiting fellowship from Kazimierz Wielki University.

In April this year she convened the symposium “The Unliterary Eighteenth Century” at the ANU. In November she helped organise the conference “The Terraqueous Globe: Land and Sea in the Age of Sterne” at the University of Liverpool. In November she was elected Vice President of the Romantic Studies Association of Australasia.

She is editor of the academic journal The Shandean and also the interviews editor for the poetry journal Rabbit. With A/Prof Nicola Parsons (University of Sydney) she is editor of the forthcoming scholarly edition of Harris’s List of Covent-Garden Ladies, contacted this year with Boydell and Brewer and Durham University IMEMS Press.

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