Early-mid career researchers (EMCR), typically defined as those within fifteen years of obtaining their PhD (not including career breaks), are vital to the future of the humanities.
To honour their outstanding contributions to the future of their disciplines and conclude the year on a positive note, the Academy’s disciplinary sections were invited to nominate one ECMR in their field who they recognised as having an exemplary year.
Take a moment to meet some of the brightest stars across the humanities, as recognised by our Academy Fellows.
Archaeology
Dr Chris Urwin
Monash University
Dr Chris Urwin is an archaeologist working with First Nations communities and sea rangers to chart the history of interactions of First Nations people with Macassan voyagers as they traversed through the Gulf of Carpentaria.
This year, Chris secured an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) to continue his research with Yanyuwa families & sea rangers, and support better conservation of threatened Indigenous coastal sites.
In 2021-2022, Chris was Peter Buck Postdoctoral Fellow at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History and in 2019 was Senior Curator for First Peoples archaeology at Museum Victoria.
Chris’s (2019) PhD was an ethnoarchaeological study of the people of Orokolo Bay in Papua New Guinea. The publication of Building and Remembering: An Archaeology of Place-Making on Papua New Guinea’s South Coast (University of Hawaii Press, 2022) was supported by the Australian Academy of the Humanities and it won the 2023 John Mulvaney Book Award by the Australian Archaeological Association.
Classical Studies
Dr Daniel Hanigan
Cambridge University
A literary critic and cultural historian of Greece and Rome, Dr Daniel Hanigan is working at the interface of the spatial and environmental humanities. His 2023 PhD considered how Greek authors of the Roman Empire challenged, complicated, and sometimes cooperated with the vision of “empire without end” that featured so prominently in the propaganda of the Augustan (and post-Augustan) empire.
He has also published on late Hellenistic geographical poetry and Christian apologetics in the second and third centuries. He is currently a Junior Research Fellow in Classics at Trinity College Cambridge, where he is finishing a book on the seacoast in imperial Greek geographical literature and beginning a new project of the cosmographical innovations of late antique Christian intellectuals.
In 2024, Daniel received a Title A Junior Research Fellowship and a Visiting Fellowship from the Australian National University and is currently a Praeceptor in Classics at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge University.
“Dr Daniel Hanigan has shown the most impressive career trajectory last year and is now a holder of the highly competitive Junior Research Fellowship at Trinity College Cambridge. He is a significant asset to the Australian research community.”
Professor Julia Kindt FAHA
Cultural & Communication Studies
Dr Mathias Felipe de Lima Santos
Macquarie University
With a Bachelor of Computer Science and Journalism, and a PhD in Communications from the University of Navarra (2021), Dr Mathias Felipe de Lima Santos is an early-career researcher deeply interested in the nature of communications driven by technological innovations, particularly in journalism, media, and online social networks.
He is currently a lecturer at Macquarie University, and research associate in the Digital Media and Society Observatory (DMSO) at the Federal University of São Paulo, Brazil. The Australian named Mathias Felipe an ‘early career researcher rising star’ in 2024.
Described as ‘extraordinarily productive’, across 2024, Mathias Felipe published 14 journal articles and book chapters across a range of high-profile publications. Mathias Felipe is also the co-editor of the book “Journalism, Data and Technology in Latin America” published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2021.
English
Dr Tyne Daile Sumner
Australian National University
An interdisciplinary scholar working in the fields of literary studies, digital humanities, and surveillance studies, Dr Tyne Daile Sumner is an ARC DECRA Fellow in English and Digital Humanities on a project about the relationship between contemporary global fiction and surveillance. Drawing from the 75th anniversary of George Orwell’s novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, the project examines how writers capture the experience of surveillance today, and how literature helps us understand intensifying forms of digital and algorithmic surveillance.
Tyne has published two major monographs, Lyric Eye: The Poetics of Twentieth-Century Surveillance (Routledge 2021) and Small Data is Beautiful (Grattan Street Press, 2023).
Tyne is also the President of The Australasian Association for Digital Humanities (aaDH) and the Constituent Organization (CO) Representative for the Australasian region in The Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO). She is also on the International Steering Committee of the Art, AI & Digital Ethics Network, currently based at the University of Melbourne and a Co-Director of the Centre for Australian Literary Cultures (CALC) at ANU.
European Languages & Cultures
Dr Daniel Canaris
The University of Sydney
Dr Daniel Canaris completed his Ph.D. at University of Sydney in 2016 with a dissertation on the reception of Confucianism in the thought of Giambattista Vico (1668-1744).
In 2022, Daniel received a DECRA for research into the ‘The Aristotelian Soul in Late Ming China’, which aims to uncover a seminal moment during the first stage of Sino-Western intellectual encounters when the Jesuit Francesco Sambiasi (1582-1649) collaborated with the mandarin Xu Guangqi (1562-1633) on the Lingyan lishao (1624), a Chinese translation of Aristotle’s On the Soul. Since Ming Chinese lacked direct analogues for the Aristotelian soul, this work provides significant insights into how conceptual translation is conducted between disparate cultures.
History
Associate Professor Alecia Simmonds
University of Technology Sydney
Alecia Simmonds is a multi-award-winning scholar and writer who works at the interface of law and history, and is currently an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Law at the University of Technology Sydney.
In 2024, Alecia’s second book, Courting: An intimate history of love and the laws (2023, La Trobe University Press/Black Inc Books) was shortlisted for the 2024 Prime Minister’s Literary Awards, and was the recipient of the WK Hancock Prize, the NSW Premier’s History Award for Australian History, the Australian and New Zealand Law and History Society’s Annual Prize in Legal History, and the Australian Legal Research Award for a Book.
In 2019, Alecia received ARC Discovery Project funding for her research Juries Justice and Citizenship: Historicising Women’s Inequality, which examines the cultural and legal processes that denied women the equal right to sit on juries, with a short article recently published in The Monthly.
Alecia is also researching the history of defamation cases brought to court by non-Europeans on the basis that racist epithets directed at them were ‘false and malicious’ throughout the 19th-and-20th-centuries, and how these actions contested ideas of British subjecthood and stimulated debate over the perceived attributes of subjecthood in law and society.
Indigenous Studies
Dr Shauna Bostock
Dr Shauna Bostock is a Bundjalung woman who completed her PhD in history at the Australian National University in 2021. In 2023, Shauna published a successful monograph, Reaching through time: Finding my family’s stories, based on her PhD with Allen & Unwin.
Shauna was able to trace back her four Aboriginal grandparents’ family lines back to just after the settlement of New South Wales, drawing on previously unaccessed Aboriginies Protection Board and ASIO documents. The book traces the different sides of Shauna’s family history including her Bundjalung family and her “white” family which included a slave trader, but also reveals truths about the cataclysmic impacts of colonialism, systemic maltreatment, discrimination and ongoing surveillance of Aboriginal families well into the 20th-century
Reaching through time: Finding my family’s stories was awarded the Community and Regional History Prize in the 2024 NSW Premier’s History Awards and it was shortlisted for the 2024 Mark & Evette Moran Nib Literary Award.
Philosophy & history of ideas
Dr Michelle Liu
Monash University
Dr Michelle Liu completed her PhD at Oxford University in 2019, followed by a two-year lectureship at the University of Hertfordshire and a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship. Michelle’s research interests span across the philosophy of mind, philosophy of language and aesthetics, and she is particularly interested in the nature of consciousness and the intuition of dualism.
In 2024, Michelle was awarded the Annette Baier Prize for an outstanding philosophical paper or book chapter published by an Australasian woman, and the Paul Bourke Award for Early Career Research from the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia.
“Dr. Michelle Liu is an exceptional early career researcher whose interdisciplinary work in philosophy, drawing from linguistics and psychology, has significantly enriched debates on topics such as consciousness and word meaning.”
— Professor Garrett Cuility FAHA
Religion
Dr Michael Zellman-Rohrer
Dr Michael Zellmann-Rohrer is a palaeographer, epigraphist, and papyrologist with a research focus in ancient religion and magic. He has published extensively on pre-modern manuscript culture, including a dissertation on the manuscript sources for Byzantine popular religion and magic, and recently published a monograph on bilingual Greek-Coptic magical and medical codex.
Most recently he has been employed as a postdoctoral researcher for the ERC-funded ZODIAC project at Freie Universität Berlin (2021–2026), examining the transmission of astrological texts in Greek papyri. His research contributes to the social history of ancient people who practiced the astral sciences and what those traditions of knowledge meant to them.
Michael is proficient in several ancient languages, including Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Arabic, Aramaic (all dialects including Syriac), Phoenician, Akkadian, Coptic, Middle Egyptian, and Old Nubian. He also speaks English and French and has reading proficiency in German, Greek and Italian.
“Dr Zellmann-Rohrer demonstrates an outstanding track record for an early career researcher. He has published extensively on pre-modern manuscript culture and has a rare facility in numerous languages. He is a generous and reliable colleague and a valuable addition to the academic community.”
— Professor Bronwen Neil FAHA
The Arts
Dr Jesse Adams Stein
University of Technology Sydney
Dr Jesse Adams Stein is a design researcher and historian specialising in the relationship between technology, labour and material culture. Currently, she is a Senior Lecturer and ARC DECRA Fellow at the School of Design, UTS.
In 2025, Jesse’s co-edited collections, Designing through Planetary Breakdown and Working through Planetary Breakdown will be published with Routledge. In 2024, Jesse was the Program Director of the History Speaker series, History Now 2024, in collaboration with the History Council of New South Wales. Stein published two articles in 2024, and has five articles to be published across journals in in 2025.
Stein is deeply involved in the Australian history sector, as Vice-President of the History Council of NSW, as Program Director of “History Now” 2024, and as a member of the Australian Centre for Public History.
