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 9 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 Catherine Gay’s forthcoming book, Australian girls: Growing up in the nineteenth century (Monash University Publishing) will consider the identity and experiences of girls growing up in Australia.
“I’m extremely grateful to have received an Australian Academy of the Humanities Publication subsidy as it will allow me to create a diverse, representative and richly illustrated book,” said Dr Gay.
“Drawing on materials and artworks uncovered in local and national archives and made by girls themselves – including diary entries, needlework, traditional fibrecraft and exercise books – the book explores the girls’ removal or migration, homemaking, intimate sisterly ties in the school classroom, and a swelling of activism against colonial oppression. The subsidy will cover licencing fees to reproduce these artworks, as well as remunerate the Dja Dja Warrung Clans Aboriginal Corporation (DJAARA). With Elders and community members, we uncovered untold stories of Djaara girls and young women, and their stories are represented authentically in the book.”
For Dr Niro Kandasamy, the grant comes as she prepares to release her first book, Refugee Memory as Resistance: Tamil Persecution, War, and Resettlement with Melbourne University Publishing.
“Drawing on archival materials from Australia, Sri Lanka, and the United Kingdom, alongside oral history interviews and creative works, the book traces the private and public memories of Tamil refugees as they rebuilt their lives in Australia following their exodus from the homeland,” she says. “I am incredibly thankful to the Australian Academy of Humanities for supporting this research. This grant will support the costs of publishing the book with Melbourne University Publishing this year.”
Professor Stephen Garton AM FAHA FRAHS FASSA FRSN, President of the Academy, congratulated this year’s recipients.
The Academy’s publication grant subsidy has a long track record of supporting early career academics to make inroads in their research careers and support the publication of award-winning publications. The breadth of scholarship represented in this year’s applications reveals the extraordinarily exciting and innovative work being done by emerging humanities researchers in Australia, with wide-ranging outcomes for both Australia and the wider world. 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.
2026 recipients
Dr Roberto Chauca
The University of Sydney
A River of Many Names: Mapping the Early Modern Amazon
University of California Press
The Amazon River, as understood today, emerged in the mid-17th century after Iberian expeditions in the 1630s inspired maps and geographical treatises exclusively focused on the river. Before then, the Amazon appeared under shifting denominations and outlines: ‘Mar Dulce’, ‘Río Grande’, ‘Marañón’, ‘Orellana’, and eventually ‘Amazon’. Rather than a single river, multiple and often contradictory ‘Amazons’ were ‘discovered’, which defies any unequivocal definition of the river. A River of Many Names traces how Indigenous and European actors shaped these competing definitions, examining the diverse mapping practices and concepts used to define the Western Hemisphere’s largest river in early modern times.
Dr Ryan Cox
The University of Sydney
Fairness and Equality in Education: A New Approach to Educational Justice
Oxford University Press
Fairness and Equality in Education argues that existing theories of educational justice misdiagnose what makes schooling unfair. The book contends that fairness in education is not about eliminating the influence of factors beyond individual control, but about giving each person the best possible chance of success compatible with fairness to others. It develops a “fair chance approach” to distributive justice in education and combines this with an extended relational egalitarian account of how schooling shapes social hierarchy and class-based inequality. Fairness and Equality in Education is the first book-length treatment of educational justice grounded in relational egalitarianism, offering a unified theory of fairness and equality in schooling.
Dr Catherine Gay
The University of Newcastle
Australian girls: Growing up in the nineteenth century
Monash University Publishing
Despite their significant contributions to our nation’s past, settler and Aboriginal girls have been overlooked in Australian history. Australian Girls: Growing Up in the Nineteenth Century reinterprets our national story through the lens of these girls’ experiences. Drawing on materials made by girls themselves – including diary entries, needlework, traditional fibrecraft and exercise books – the book explores girls’ migration and encounters on stolen land, homemaking, sisterly ties, friendships, and a swelling of activism against colonial oppression. Australian Girls illuminates the ways in which girls were drivers of their own futures, central voices who contributed to the formation of a nation.
Dr Madeline Jenkins-Smith
Macquarie University
Making meaning. The lexicographic tradition of the ancient Egyptian language from the twentieth to the twenty-first century
Harrassowitz Verlag
Dictionaries of the ancient Egyptian language play a formative role in Egyptological research. Despite our reliance on these resources, dictionaries are seldom the subject of their own critical enquiry, and little consideration has been given to how and why they are created, or to their relationships with each other and the lexicographic tradition. This book presents a timely state of the art of the Egyptian lexicographic tradition from the turn of the nineteenth century to today, drawing upon approaches from historiography and dictionary criticism. In characterising this tradition, the book also identifies challenges and considers their implications for Egyptological research.
Dr Niro Kandasamy
The University of Sydney
Refugee Memory as Resistance: The Making of Tamil History
Melbourne University Publishing
Refugee Memory as Resistance provides a crucial and much-needed scholarly examination of memory in refugee histories, within the context of the Tamil diaspora. Drawing on oral history interviews and archival research across Australia, the United Kingdom and Sri Lanka, the book explores how war, displacement and resettlement are lived and remembered across generations and borders.
The book explores the experiences of Tamil refugees/migrants who fled the brutal ethno-separatist war in Sri Lanka, offering deep insights into how memory and identity are constructed, preserved, and transmitted within this diaspora.
Dr Beth Kearney
The University of Queensland
Unfixing the Self in Contemporary Women’s Phototexts of the Francophone World
Edinburgh University Press
World literature has seen a marked shift toward formal innovation in life writing, illustrated by the explosion of autofictional publications and the increasing popularity of autotheory. Within this global literary landscape, the inclusion of photography in works of experimental autobiography is also expanding, particularly in the French-speaking world. Unfixing studies a series of contemporary autobiographical works – including autofiction, biofiction, autotheory – that include photographs alongside text. I argue that, in these ‘phototexts,’ the combination of photography and autobiographical text disrupts fixed modes of understanding identity and experience by challenging hegemonic narratives about the self.
Dr Yvonne Low
The University of Sydney
Remodelling Art Worlds: Women becoming artists in Malaya and Singapore
De Gruyter Brill
Remodelling Art Worlds examines how women in colonial and postcolonial Malaya and Singapore led art clubs, organised exhibitions and set aesthetic standards from the 1880s, yet were written out of the histories that followed. Reading imperial structures alongside national narratives, it draws on over 200 newspaper reports, institutional records, catalogues and oral histories. It introduces dis/appearance as a framework for understanding women extensively documented in their time yet invisible to art history, tracing how the gendering of “amateur” and “professional” shaped careers, institutional hierarchies and art history itself. The study moves beyond compensatory recovery toward structural analysis of cultural authority.
Dr Madeline Roycroft
The University of Melbourne
Shostakovich in France: Reception and Mediation in Paris and the Regions
Boydell & Brewer
This book examines shifting critical responses to Shostakovich’s music in France throughout the twentieth century – from its introduction in Paris during the 1930s, through to the 1990s, when the symphonies and the opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District were being performed and staged widely in the capital and across the regions. It shows how Shostakovich served as a means for French writers to articulate their ideas, opinions and concerns about the Soviet Union, and how his music ultimately evolved from an icon of French Communism to a symbol of humanism and resistance with broad social and political appeal.
Dr Connie Skibinski
The University of Newcastle
Re-imagining Warrior Women in Premodern Literature: Queen Penthesilea of the Amazons and the Trojan War
Arc Humanities Press
Women warriors are inherently transgressive figures, fighting (literally and metaphorically) against patriarchal norms to excel in the traditionally masculine realm of warfare. Tales of warrior women have been told for millennia, occupying a key place in Western art and literature. The legendary Amazons – a fiercely militaristic all-female society – have an especially long legacy. They feature heavily in ancient, Medieval and Early Modern storytelling and continue to be reconfigured in contemporary adaptations. Among the most renowned Amazon queens is Penthesilea, who famously fought against Achilles in the Trojan War. This book examines Penthesilea’s portrayal as an aspirational figure in Medieval and Early Modern literature, to shed light on the complex attitudes towards women, warfare and heroism over time.
