Visiting Fellows

Promoting the study of Australia and developing research collaborations.

The ANU Australian Studies Institute (AuSI) Visiting Fellowship Program brings early and mid-career researchers to the ANU campus to conduct and share research that promotes the study of Australia or transnational and comparative research involving Australia.

This Fellowship opportunity is for scholars of all academic disciplines who are based in Australian and overseas academic institutions.

Associate Professor Filippo Trevisan

Position: AuSI Visiting Fellow
School and/or Centres: Australian Studies Institute

Email: trevisan@american.edu

Visit date: 9 Nov – 9 Dec 2023

Website: http://www.filippotrevisan.net

Dr Trevisan's Fellowship project builds on my on-going collaboration with ANU colleagues – in particular, Crawford School’s Professor Ariadne Vromen with whom I co-authored a forthcoming book on crowdsourced storytelling and policy advocacy – and will investigate the transition from storytelling to story “action” in policymaking. Specifically, we will develop a model for building capability within government to engage effectively with narrative evidence drawn from lived experience that can spur action, support new policy narratives, and create change. In the spirit of “engaged” research, this model will be co-created with policymakers and public servants. This inter-disciplinary project cuts across policy studies, communication, and political science, and centers on a distinctive moment in Australian policymaking, laying the foundation for a future international study of government use of narrative evidence.

Dr Sophie Loy-Wilson

Position: AuSI Visiting Fellow
School and/or Centres: Australian Studies Institute

Email: sophie.loy-wilson@sydney.edu.au

Visit date: 20 Nov – 15 Dec 2023

Website: https://www.sydney.edu.au/arts/about/our-people/academic-staff/sophie-loy-wilson…

At the ANU, Sophie will be working closely with colleagues on a series of newly uncovered court cases involving Chinese Australians 1850s-1940s. These cases include large caches of Chinese-language material and further her intellectual interest in uncovering Australia's Asian past. They will also allow her to investigate the survival strategies employed by Chinese Australians to circumvent the extensive surveillance systems in place under the auspices of the White Australia Policy and its early colonial iterations.

Associate Professor Xiaoming Liu

Position: AuSI Visiting Fellow
School and/or Centres: Australian Studies Institute

Email: xiaomliu@unc.edu

Visit date: 7 Feb – 22 Mar 2024

Website: https://emes.unc.edu/people-indiv/xiaoming-liu/

The geochemist Associate Prof. Xiao-Ming Liu will come to ANU for a two-month research stay as an ANU Australian Studies Institute Fellow. She will be hosted by and collaborate with Prof. Penny King and others at ANU. Associate Prof. Xiao-Ming Liu plans to perform research projects that aim to investigate soil formation in Eastern Australia through the innovative use of non-traditional isotopes. Specially, the project aims to trace the movement of potassium, a fundamental plant nutrient, from rocks to soil, providing vital insights into global soil nutrient dynamics. This study is of particular significance considering Australia's unique environmental circumstances, such as its varied climates, frequent bushfires, and significant dust transport. The findings from this research will contribute to our global understanding of soil formation and will shed light on nutrient transportation in response to bushfires and dust transport. This knowledge is essential in addressing the challenges posed by climate change. To ensure the success of this project, Prof. Liu will leverage the advanced research infrastructure available at the Australian National University (ANU), including the Sensitive High Resolution Ion Microprobe (SHRIMP) and the East Australian Regolith Collection.

Dr Fernando Martinez Coma

Position: AuSI Visiting Fellow
School and/or Centres: Australian Studies Institute

Email: f.martinezcoma@griffith.edu.au

Visit date: 5 Feb – 8 Mar 2024

Website: https://experts.griffith.edu.au/8140-fernando-martinez-coma

During his Fellowship Ferran proposes to asses the reasons on migration preferences of the Australian people over immigration as well as the variations in these attitudes. He propose that with climate change impacting our lives, climate migrants are another group of potential migrants that have recently raised attention. We currently lack an account of the preferences of the Australian people towards such group. Their importance will increase in the coming years, as climate change and environmental hazards will also impact in the Indo-Pacific. During the Fellowship, Ferran will assess not only the views of the Australian people on the number of migrants, but also on the reason for migration. The general research questions are: Do the reasons for migration matter for preferences of the Australian people over immigration? And what explains variations in these attitudes?

Dr Leonie John

Position: AuSI Visiting Fellow
School and/or Centres: Australian Studies Institute

Email: l.john@uni-koeln.de

Visit date: 8 Feb – 15 Mar 2024

Website: https://anglistik1.phil-fak.uni-koeln.de/abteilungen-lehrende/sprachwissenschaft…

Dr John’s Fellowship project is aimed at illuminating the intersections and cross-connections between the growing fields of nuclear and medical humanities. By examining historical documents alongside different forms of creative writing, she seeks to reveal the complexity and variety of narratives surrounding the nexus of nuclear technology, health and wellbeing in Australia, to contemplate their continued impact on Australian society, and to identify associated visions of, as well as implications for, the future.

Dr Nóra Ni Loideain

Position: AuSI Visiting Fellow
School and/or Centres: Australian Studies Institute

Email: nora.niloideain@sas.ac.uk

Visit date: 9 Feb – 9 Mar 2024

Website: https://research.london.ac.uk/search/staff/1231/dr-n%C3%B3ra-n%C3%AD-loide%C3%A1…

Safeguarding the Health and Digital Rights of Vulnerable Groups: A Role for AI Digital Assistants? Research undertaken during this Fellowship will examine the regulation and mainstreaming of human rights in AI-based systems adopted to interact and monitor individuals, in order improve the health of vulnerable groups. Analysis will focus on whether current safeguards and oversight of the design and deployment of these systems to protect the privacy and data protection rights of individuals are still fit for purpose. Building on ground-breaking research concerning human rights law and government use of automated decision-making systems in Australia, South Africa, and Europe. Comparative insights, findings, and policy recommendations will be drawn from oversight mechanisms in the emerging privacy and data protection frameworks of Australia and South Africa which have been influenced by EU standards (GDPR) and the European Convention on Human Rights. This work recognises that policymaking and scholarship on how best to collect and use health data from vulnerable groups, whilst respecting key data protection principles and safeguards, should be informed by a global dialogue of shared data and leading expertise.

Dr Geraldine Fela

Position: AuSI Visiting Fellow
School and/or Centres: Australian Studies Institute

Email: geraldine.fela@mq.edu.au

Visit date: 12 Feb – 22 Mar 2024

Dr Fela is undertaking the first sustained scholarly examination of the 1998 waterfront dispute between Patrick Stevedores, the Coalition government, and the Maritime Union of Australia. Dr Fela’s fellowship will enable her to undertake sustained research in the ANU’s Noel Butlin Archives Centre, which is home to significant archival holdings relevant to the dispute. This research will lead towards the production of a monograph, the first book-length historical study of this watershed moment in Australia's political and industrial history.

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Dr Kate Fitch

Position: AuSI Visiting Fellow
School and/or Centres: Australian Studies Institute

Email: kate.fitch@monash.edu

Visit date: 25 Jul – 26 Aug 2022

Website: https://research.monash.edu/en/persons/kate-fitch

Dr Fitch's Fellowship project focuses on Phyllis Parkinson, who worked for the Australian Wine Board from the early 1950s to the late 1970s. Her public relations activities targeted women and helped normalise wine consumption in the home, creating a strong domestic market for Australian wine and changing perceptions around women and alcohol. The findings will provide a better understanding of feminised labour and promotional culture.

Dr Ipsita Sengupta

Position: AuSI Visiting Fellow
School and/or Centres: Australian Studies Institute

Email: ipsita444@gmail.com

Visit date: 11 Sep – 11 Nov 2022

Website: https://www.bankurauniv.ac.in/uploads/faculty/1653293837.pdf

Dr Sengupta’s Fellowship will cultivate a monograph on Australia’s India between 1890 and 1950, an area hardly explored in its plural palette in excess of the colonial rote of tea, cricket or – the camels. India had been a formative influence in shaping debates and narrations around Australianness in the nascent years of Federal formation, if sometimes as a creatrix of alterities. Dr Sengupta’s research aims to dig into India as shadow-narrative in the policies, published volumes and private journals of three time Prime Minister Alfred Deakin, trace the subcontinent confected by storytellers and travel-writers in journals and magazines of the period, as also explore the India-perfumed translational models of Australianness limned by invisibilised authors deemed “failures” at the time, such as Mollie Skinner. The monograph aims to cultivate “failure” and the dis(re)membered pasts of Indo-Australian connections as non-formulaic places of possibility for the nation and trans-nation, presently plagued by holograms and retrotopes of the insular singular.

Dr Erin O'Brien

Position: AuSI Visiting Fellow
School and/or Centres: Australian Studies Institute

Email: erin.obrien@qut.edu.au

Visit date: 22 Sep – 8 Oct 2022

Website: https://www.qut.edu.au/about/our-people/academic-profiles/erin.obrien

During this fellowship Dr O'Brien will undertake research on the role of the state in relation to market-based activism. A particular focus is the Australian government’s responses to political consumerism (for example, boycotts and buycotts), and political investorism (for example, divestment and shareholder activism). The aim of this research is to improve understandings of the intersection between the state, corporate actors, interest groups, and individual citizens in protest politics in the marketplace.

Dr Piers Kelly

Position: AuSI Visiting Fellow
School and/or Centres: Australian Studies Institute

Email: piers.kelly@gmail.com

Visit date: 26 Sep – 25 Oct 2022

Website: https://www.une.edu.au/staff-profiles/hass/piers-kelly

Message sticks are marked wooden objects that were once used throughout Indigenous Australia to convey important information between communities. Dr Kelly's Fellowship will address the question: What role did message sticks play in Indigenous long-distance communication? Drawing on archival evidence and original fieldwork, the project aims to be the first empirically grounded study of message sticks as a practice. The project is informed by Australian linguistics and anthropology, as well as historiography and material culture studies. Dr Kelly will interact with colleagues at the Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language, the ANU Centre for Heritage and Museum Studies, the Australian Centre for Indigenous History, and national collecting institutions. The projected outcomes of the fellowship are: to initiate collaborations, explore significant archival resources and to promote the study of message sticks as a uniquely Indigenous information technology.

Dr Rhonda Evans

Position: AuSI Visiting Fellow
School and/or Centres: Australian Studies Institute

Email: revans@austin.utexas.edu

Visit date: 9 Oct – 9 Nov 2022

Website: https://liberalarts.utexas.edu/government/faculty/arden

Dr Evans' book-length project is the first longitudinal, systematic analysis of the Australian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) as an institution—in fact, it is the first such analysis of any National Human Rights Institution (NHRI). It adapts concepts and theories from scholarship on judicial independence and the political construction of judicial power and uses them to develop a more robust analysis of NHRI independence than is currently offered in the extant literature. Marshalling five original datasets that draw on a diverse array of primary sources, Dr Evans will examine how partisan political actors have used the means at their disposal to enlarge and constrain the AHRC’s capacity to act independently.

Dr Alice Garner

Position: AuSI Visiting Fellow
School and/or Centres: Australian Studies Institute

Email: agarner1@unimelb.edu.au

Visit date: 1 Nov – 10 Dec 2022

Website: https://unimelb.academia.edu/AliceGarner

The extraordinary life of Mavis Robertson offers a window onto major social and political movements in 20th-century Australian history. Robertson, a key figure in the the Communist Party of Australia, left the Party in the 1980s to became a pioneer in the development of industry and compulsory superannuation in Australia. She was actively involved in the peace, anti-nuclear, women's and post-Allende Chilean solidarity movements, helped establish Emily's List, the Jessie Street Trust and the Mother's Day Classic for breast cancer research. Dr Garner's Fellowship will enable a close study of Robertson's papers in the Noel Butlin Archives, leading to the eventual production of a biographical-historical audio documentary series.

Dr Kamaljit Sangha

Position: AuSI Visiting Fellow
School and/or Centres: Australian Studies Institute

Email: Kamaljit.Sangha@cdu.edu.au

Visit date: 31 Jan – 10 Apr 2023

Website: https://researchers.cdu.edu.au/en/persons/kamaljit-sangha

Dr Sangha will use this Fellowship to focus on analyzing the existing Indigenous welfare policies, frameworks, and developing an Indigenous specific well-being framework that can inform future policy decisions and development programs. Currently, the Australian Bureau of Statistics measures every Australian’s well-being applying a standard framework, which fails to reflect Indigenous well-being.