The Australian Academy of the Humanities has announced the eight recipients of its prestigious 2026 Humanities Travelling Fellowships, which supports international research projects on issues of national and global significance.
The Fellowships will enable the humanities researchers to undertake critical projects which will generate new insights, and forge global connections.
“The strength of the applications received in this round and the breadth of scholarship they represent is testimony to the excellence of Australia’s early-career researchers in the humanities,” said Professor Stephen Garton AM FAHA FASSA FRAHS FRSN, President of the Australian Academy of the Humanities
“Each recipient exemplifies the kind of rigorous, curious, and outward-looking scholarship that keeps Australia connected to the world, while addressing some of our most pressing national issues: from how we understand our own history to how we navigate an increasingly complex future.”
2026 recipients
Ecologies of Empire in Roman Dalmatia
Dr Ewan S. Coopey
Macquarie University
Working with data collected in Croatia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina, ‘Ecologies of Empire in Roman Dalmatia’ draws upon posthumanism to investigate how assemblages of media, such as inscribed stone monuments, coins, and items of dress, wove imperialism into the environmental, social, and mental landscapes (the ‘ecologies’) of Roman Dalmatia in the first three centuries CE.
The Fellowship will enable Dr Coopey to connect with various universities and archaeological institutes across Croatia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina to explore the effects of this on the natural environment, and to reflect upon how dominant ideologies, both ancient and contemporary, are sustained by networks of things and the everyday practices that bring people into contact with them.
“This research investigates the role of everyday objects in sustaining Roman imperialism, providing insights into how networks of things can sustain systems of power. This confronts how objects are implicit to the perseverance of the imperialist logics which underpin our seeming inability to confront the environmental and political crises of today and attests to the importance of the humanities for facing these complex contemporary issues.”
Reading the Maghreb in eighteenth-Century Scotland
Dr Nat Cutter
The University of Melbourne
The Maghreb—Algiers, Tunis, Tripoli, and Morocco—loomed large in the early modern British imagination through threats of piracy, captivity, and conversion. Yet scholarship has focused overwhelmingly on the text of London-produced publications, overlooking how readers engaged with them and how perceptions shifted from place to place.
Dr Cutter’s project examines marginalia, ownership marks, and annotations in over 340 Maghreb-related books in Scottish rare-books libraries to reconstruct how Scottish readers received, resisted, and reshaped ideas about the Islamicate world. He will visit rare books libraries in Edinburgh, Glasgow, Aberdeen, Perth, and St Andrews, and map reader communities with digital network analysis.
Eighteenth-century readers loved to write in books. By searching out the marks they left – signatures, notes, underlinings, even scribbles and doodles – we can get a sense of how they received the information books contained. This fellowship allows me to travel through Scotland and visit unique collections of books whose readers shaped Scotland’s intellectual, economic, and imperial history, and think about how their reception of the confronting foreign Maghreb influenced their views of themselves and the wider world.
Bringing stories home: Tracing Aboriginal histories in the Vatican archives
Dr Monica Galassi
Jumbunna Institute for Indigenous Education and Research, University of Technology Sydney.
Dr Monica Galassi is the recipient of the David Philips Travelling Fellowship, established in memory of historian Dr David Philips (1946 – 2007).
In Australia, European anthropologists, migrants, missionaries and collectors produced extensive written accounts documenting encounters with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. These records form transnational archival networks dispersed across Europe, often in languages other than English, and are frequently unknown to communities themselves. A significant gap lies in the largely unexplored correspondence between Australia and European religious institutions, as well as in the official records of missionary orders.
Under this Fellowship, Dr Galassi will undertake archival research in Vatican City at the Historical Archives of Propaganda Fide, producing a finding aid and publication to improve access to these precious resources.
Echoes of women in early colonial Brazil
Dr Jessica O’Leary
Monash University 
Dr O’Leary’s project interrogates the central but obscured role of Indigenous women in the formation of early colonial Brazil. Focusing on Portuguese America between 1500 and 1700, she argues that Indigenous women shaped colonial life through their relationships with land, food, healing, spirituality, and community. Although European sources rarely preserve their voices directly, attentive reading of missionary writings, chronicles, recipes, travel accounts, and later ethnobotanical evidence reveals their knowledge embedded in colonial practices.
Under the Fellowship, Dr O’Leary will travel to Italy to conduct archival research at the Archivum Romanum Societatis Isue in Rome, examining 17th-century Jesuit missionary documentation relating to Portuguese America. By centring land as an analytical category, the project shows that colonisation depended on Indigenous women’s expertise to shape the foundations of early colonial society.
I’m thrilled to receive this Fellowship, which will allow me to work in the Jesuit archives in Rome and uncover new evidence of how Indigenous women shaped life in early colonial Brazil.
At the coalface of repatriation: Italian Australian cross-cultural collaboration to develop research & resources for the public good
Dr Georgia Pike-Rowney
Australian National University
Sparked by repatriation cases at the ANU Classics Museum, a public education initiative has been co-developed with the Embassy of Italy in Australia with the aim shifting common repatriation narratives of blame and secrecy to that of cultural exchange and transparency.
To date, this collaboration has focused on initiatives based in Australia. Under the Fellowship, Dr Pike-Rowney will conduct field research in Italy and engage with Italian researchers, curators, museum professionals and police officials at the coalface of repatriation, with the goal of developing a deeper understanding of repatriation practices from an Italian perspective, of direct relevance to museums and universities in Australia.
Beyond blame: A new approach to the morality of what we believe
Dr Tim Smartt
The University of Notre Dame Australia
Standard responses to misinformation tend to assume that those who believe it are irrational and blameworthy, while governments have often responded to misinformation with technological solutions—content moderation, media literacy campaigns, and platform sanctions. Dr Smartt’s research challenges this presupposition, developing a new framework for how social institutions can curb misinformation uptake while treating people with dignity, trust, and respect.
The Fellowship will support a three-week research trip to Europe, working with several leading research groups in ethics and epistemology to refine this framework, obtain expert feedback, and build the international connections needed to advance this project to its next stage.
“I’m very grateful to the Academy for this support. The Fellowship will allow me to work directly with leading epistemology and ethics research groups across Europe. These types of sustained, in-person intellectual exchanges are the lifeblood of excellent philosophical research. The trip will strengthen several international collaborations that will shape the next chapter of my research career and, I hope, benefit the humanities in Australia more broadly.”
Bearing witness: Digitising & preserving Bosnian concentration camp survivor testimonies
Dr Tiania Stevens
University of Sydney 
Today, an archive in Europe contains 20,000 testimonies, handwritten immediately after former prisoners were released from concentration camps, and other prisons, during the Balkan wars of the 1990s. Under the Fellowship, Dr Stevens will travel to Bosnia and Herzegovina to research and digitise of these records, representing the first time these documents have been analysed within a scholarly context. Additionally, she will undertake oral interviews with the survivors, both in Europe and in Australia.
Applying the ethical and methodological considerations of the ‘humanitarian’ form of journalistic inquiry both to this unstudied archive and to contemporaneous interviews with some of its authors – many of whom now live in Australia – Dr Stevens will generate new knowledge on mass violence in general and the abuses that occurred in Bosnia, in particular. Through this Fellowship, Dr Stevens’ research demonstrates how the deliberative and survivor-centred approach of humanitarian journalism is a model for ethically sound scholarly practice.
Today, an archive in Europe contains 20,000 testimonies, handwritten immediately after former prisoners were released from concentration camps, and other prisons, during the Balkan wars of the 1990s. Applying the ethical and methodological considerations of the ‘humanitarian’ form of journalistic inquiry both to this unstudied archive and to contemporaneous interviews with some of its authors – many of whom now live in Australia – my research develops new knowledge on mass violence in general and the abuses that occurred in Bosnia in particular. I demonstrate how the deliberative and survivor-centered approach of humanitarian journalism is a model for ethically sound scholarly practice.
Projecting influence: Chinese cultural diplomacy in oceania through China Cultural Centres
Dr Minglei Wang
Flinders University
China has pursued a multidimensional strategy to expand its presence and influence in Oceania over the past decade, with cultural diplomacy playing a key role. Yet this dimension remains underexplored. Under the Fellowship, Dr Minglei Wang will travel to New Zealand and Fiji to conduct site visits, event observations and interviews, to examine China Cultural Centres as a primary platform of Chinese cultural diplomacy and an overlooked aspect of China–Oceania relations, and how they operate in New Zealand and Fiji, compared to Australia.
Through the Fellowship, Dr Wang will investigate how China engages regional actors through cultural initiatives across diverse geographical and political contexts, while evaluating the effectiveness of these efforts in shaping perceptions and influence. The project also broadens current scholarship, which has paid limited attention to Oceania in studies of Chinese cultural diplomacy.
This research is both timely and significant, given the Pacific’s growing strategic importance to Australia and other regional stakeholders, particularly amid China’s evolving engagement with the region.
