Investigators:

Dr Amy Matthews

Summary:

My research focusses on women's fiction and book club fiction: high quality general fiction that concentrates specifically on women's stories.

I am interested in the intersections between the literary and the commercial, and in the boundaries between genres and ways they can be explored and/or stretched.

Grants:

CHASS funding

Category:

Romance fiction

Commercial fiction

Investigators:

Dr Sean Williams

Summary:

I write novels and short stories in series or as standalone stories that use the tropes of the fantastic (science fiction, fantasy, horror, etc) and other genres to explore pressing contemporary issues, such as identity, disability, and social justice.

These works are intended for middle grade (10+) or YA (13+) readers, are set in contemporary and pseudo-historical periods, and are occasionally written with a collaborator, such as Garth Nix.

With Dr Lisa Harper-Cambell, I am co-writing the definitive book on the trope of the matter transmitter ('Beam me up, Scotty'), which will be published by Peter Lang in 2024.

Awards:

2021 Shortlisted, Patricia Wrightson’s Prize for Young People’s Literature, NSW Premier’s Literary Awards for Her Perilous Mansion

2021 Nominated, Aurealis Awards (Best Children’s Fiction) for Her Perilous Mansion

2021 Notable Book, Children’s Book Council of Australia for Her Perilous Mansion

2020 Shortlisted, Ethel Turner Prize for Young People’s Literature, NSW Premier’s Literary Awards for Impossible Music

2020 Notable Book, Children’s Book Council of Australia for Impossible Music

2016 Nominated, Aurealis Award, Best Science Fiction Novel for Twinmaker: Fall

Grants:

Sean received an Arts SA grant in 2017 (New Work, $8,000) to finish writing Impossible Music (previously funded by the Australia Council)

Category:

Speculative fiction

Commercial fiction

Historical fiction

Investigators:

Professor Kim Wilkins (University of Queensland)

Dr Helen Marshall (University of Queensland)

Dr Lisa Bennett (Flinders)

Summary:

The Ursula Project is a collaboration between The University of Queensland, Flinders University, and the Australian Department of Defence, Science and Technology.

Our aim is to adapt story-telling techniques drawn from speculative fiction (across books, games, and screen) into workshop material that will help Defence personnel prepare for the potential disruptive effects of new technologies.

Writers of speculative fiction have expert knowledge in building and populating imagined worlds and communities, and playing out chains of cause and effect within them.

The skill set that we aim to develop into transferable skills for technology foresight are the four key domains of speculative fiction storytelling, broadly: setting, character, plot, and style.

Grants:

• ORNet Defence Innovation Partnership grant ($98,000)

Categories:

Speculative fiction

Writing about writing 

Investigators:

Dr Amy Matthews

Summary:

My research focuses on the generic conventions of popular romance and the intersections between feminisms and romance fiction and includes the novels I write under the names Amy T. Matthews, Amy Barry, and Tess LeSue.

This large-scale project has multiple outcomes (novels, short stories, a short film, and exegetical and scholarly papers and articles) and considers the cultural conversations enacted in popular fictions; the interplay between progressivism and conservatism in the genres of romance and women’s fiction; the cultural and economic power of this more than $1billion industry; and the tensions between love and romance.

Grants:

This project has received internal funding from CHASS.

Category:

Romance fiction

Investigators:

Dr Amy Matthews (CI), Dr Tully Barnett, Dr Rachel Hennessy (University of Adelaide/University of Melbourne), Dr Alex Cothren (Research Associate, Flinders) 

Summary:

As a research team, we consider posthuman theory and climate change fiction, exploring the artistic and emotionally supportive possibilities of collaborative storytelling.

Our research considers how narrative and storytelling might counter affective responses of solastalgic anxiety; our project includes analysis of existing climate fiction, an enquiry into the health and wellbeing of authors as they create climate change fiction, and the development of posthuman artist laboratories focussed on developing collaborative writing processes.

Grants:

Funded internally by Assemblage project funding, Assemblage next level project funding and CHASS research funding – developing towards an ARC DP application.

Category:

Speculative fiction

Writing about writing

Investigators:

Dr Lisa Bennett (writing as Lisa L. Hannett), Dr Sean Williams

Summary:

Among practitioners, ‘speculative fiction’ is used as an umbrella term for all fantastical modes of writing, including, but not limited to, fantasy, science fiction, horror, magical realism, post-apocalyptic fiction, alternate history, utopian and dystopian fiction.

All of these subgenres concern themselves with a “world that is and isn’t ours” while readers can “expect intrusive unreality” within their narratives.

Between us, we have published over 200 original speculative fiction short stories. Our works have won or been shortlisted for numerous national and international award, including the World Fantasy Award, the Aurealis Award (over 40 times), the Australian National Science Fiction Award (20 times), the Australian Shadows Award, and the Norma K. Hemming Award. 

Category:

Speculative fiction

Commercial fiction

Investigators:

Dr Sean Williams

Summary:

In 2017, I was part of the Australian Antarctic Division's expedition to Casey research station, on a funded Fellowship to bring experiences of our southern territories to greater public awareness through the Arts.

This expedition has resulted in a string of creative works that continue to the present day, each of which explores Antarctica through the lenses of creative and speculative history.

With my fellow investigators of the multi-institutional Creative Antarctica ARC grant, I will be continuing my exploration of the "far south" through music and a novel-in-progress.

Some details below, and more under Links.

2022, forthcoming. “Last of the Rational Actors at the End of the Unnatural World,” Griffith Review (short story)

2019. “The Second Coming of the Martians,” War of the Worlds: Battlefield Australia, eds. Steve Proposch, Christopher Sequeira & Bryce Stephens, Clan Destine Press (short story)

2017. “An Alien Landscape,” Writers Victoria (article)

Grants:

• ARC Discovery Project “Creative Antarctica: Australian artists and writers in the far south” through University of Tasmania with CIs Elizabeth Leane, Hanne Nielsen, Carolyn Philpott, Philip Samartzis, Martin Walch, and Sachi Yasuda (2022-2025)

• Australian Antarctica Division Arts Fellowship (2017)

• ACT Eminent Writer-in-Residence - partnership between ACT Writers’ Centre, the Museum for Australian Democracy at Old Parliament House, and the Ainslie and Gorman Arts Centre

Categories:

Speculative fiction

Historical fiction

Commercial fiction

Writing about writing 

Investigators:

Dr Amy Matthews

Summary:

In 1949 the critic Theodor Adorno famously proclaimed that ‘To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.’

Adorno’s statement, made so soon after the horrors of the Holocaust, still resonates today and can be (and is) applied critically to all imaginative literature about the Holocaust. 

My work considers the ethics of fictionalizing the Holocaust in the context of this heated critical debate.

The award-winning novel End of the Night Girl, the exegetical monograph Navigating the Kingdom of Night, and scholarly chapters and articles are the outcomes of this work.

Category:

Historical fiction

Writing about writing

Investigators:

Dr Alex Vickery-Howe

Summary:

Watchlist is an original stage play written to confront themes of impending ecological disaster, extreme climate change, and the choices we make as individuals whether to engage with the problem or pretend it isn’t happening.

The work emerged from a sense of urgency, with the core research question: How can the rom-com genre be used to engage young people with the pressing political issue of environmental decline?

Categories:

Commercial fiction

Speculative fiction

Climate fiction

Performance writing

Investigators:

Dr Amy Matthews, Dr Alex Vickery-Howe, Dr Sean Williams

Summary:

Word Docs is a pioneering podcast, featuring three academic Creative Writers in exegetical conversation.

These three creative scholars and practitioners explore and complicate questions of research and the limitations of creative research in the academe.

Using examination of their own processes, methodologies, and creative works (Matthews as a novelist; Williams as novelist and musician; and Vickery-Howe as a playwright) and those of other authors (including Garth Nix and Lisa L. Hannett) the researchers seek to expose and unpack the frameworks of creative research.

The podcast serves as exegesis for projects including Decameron 2.0 and Watchlist (Vickery-Howe); Impossible Music and His Perilous Mansion (Williams); and Bound for Glory and Someone Else’s Bucket List (Matthews).

This assemblage of new knowledge and analysis hints at intriguing future possibilities for the exegesis. 

Categories:

Writing about writing 

Investigators:

Dr Sean Williams

Summary:

As a composer of music as well as literature, I am fascinated by the transmission of meaning through both artistic practices.

Under the name "theadelaidean", I craft works in the ambient experimental genre that test traditional notions of musicality employing contemporary and traditional methods of composition, creation, and post-production.

By embedding storytelling and literature in works of music (and vice versa), through narrative, spoken word and experimental uses of the human voice, I am exploring the cross-pollination of words and musical notes, such as the contemporary mass and opera.

2023. Bárbaros inSPACE project premiering 26/7, with Lina Limosani (movement) and Thom Buchanan (visual art). In development since 2016.

2022, forthcoming. Eternity Is (album) (as “theadelaidean”), Projekt Records.

2022. Solarpunk (album) (as “theadelaidean”), Projekt Records.

2020. “Disjecta Membra”, Alive in the Hall of Possibility (album) (as “theadelaidean”), Projekt Records.

2016. “M-Cubed” (libretto), Cabinet of Oddities, Melbourne Fringe Festival. With Sam van Betuw (composer)

Grants:

• Australia Council for the Arts: 2016 - Project Grant, $30,000 - Bárbaros
• Arts SA: 2020 - New Work, $26,680 - Bárbaros
• Arts SA: 2022 - Bringing Bárbaros to world premiere performance in the Adelaide Festival Centre's 50^th year

Category:

Speculative fiction

Investigators:

Dr Lisa Bennett (writing as Lisa Hannett)

Summary:

There is an enduring fascination with Vikings in literature and popular culture — and yet, even now, when we think of them it’s often men who take centre stage: Vikings like Ragnarr loðbrók, Sigurd the dragon-slayer, Eirík the Red and his brave sons, who discovered North America centuries before Columbus set sail.

Stories about Viking women — if they get told at all — tend to focus on three incredible but fantastical figures: shieldmaidens, goddesses, Valkyries.

Regular women too often get overshadowed by their flashier legendary sisters, though their feats and personalities are no less impressive despite being tied to everyday life in this world.

Viking Women: Life and Lore delves into these women’s astounding everyday lives and their far-reaching legacies.

It presents engaging historical context alongside thoroughly-researched speculative biographies of women from all ages and social strata: slaves, housewives, mothers, far-travellers, young girls, old widows, and anchoresses. 

Category:

Life writing

Historical fiction

Investigators:

Dr Amy Matthews

Summary:

This interdisciplinary project considers the politics of representation in commercial fiction.

My research sits in the fields of Creative Writing, Literary Studies, and Cultural Studies, and looks at intersections of race and gender in historical commercial fiction set in colonies.

My research considers issues of masculinities, femininities, and the frontier (in the American Western and the Ozstorical); invasion and violence; imperialist nostalgia and colonial reinscription; and the role commercial fictions play in representing and reinscribing colonial history.

This project includes my fiction written under the names Tess LeSue and Amy Barry.

Grants:

This work has received internal research funding from CHASS.

Category:

Commercial fiction

Romance fiction

Investigators:

Chief investigators:

Dr Alex Vickery-Howe

Ms Sally Hardy

Ms Emily Steel

Ms Alexis West

Mr Ben Brooker

+100 further investigators

Summary:

Decameron 2.0 is a creative response to COVID-19, building from a very pragmatic research question: How can theatre survive in the midst of a global pandemic? 

The work was developed as a collaboration between the State Theatre Company of South Australia, Arts SA and ActNow Theatre for Young People. Five core playwrights from South Australia were chosen to contribute weekly: Sally Chance, Emily Steel, Alexis West, Ben Brooker and Alex Vickery-Howe.

Each writer delivered a set of ten original monologues, written in 24 hours, for the State Theatre company to interpret, perform and record. 

Every Thursday morning, these core writers were given a provocation, such as ‘Those Who Make Sacrifices’ or ‘Those Who Seek Revenge’. We had until C.O.B to create a character, a situation and a body of text building from the structure of the original Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio and reflecting the diversity of contemporary Adelaide. Each provocation became a separate episode of Decameron 2.0. 

Awards:

2021 Ruby Award for Best Work or Event Outside a Festival - awarded by Department of Premier and Cabinet.

Category:

Speculative fiction

Performance writing

Investigators:

Dr Amy Matthews (in partnership with HarperCollins and Writers SA)

Summary:

In partnership with Harlequin/HarperCollins and Writers SA, this project sought to create a pathway for Indigenous authors to publish in the Australian commercial fiction landscape.

The Fellowship invited submissions from emerging First Nations authors, and Angie Martin was selected to develop her novel Melaleuca.

The Fellowship ran 2019-2022: Angie attended Adelaide Writers’ Week; participated in Writers SA masterclasses; was a visiting Fellow at Flinders; was mentored through three drafts of her novel with Dr Amy Matthews at Flinders; underwent a publisher’s edit of the novel with Jo Mackay, Head of Local Publishing at HQ/HarperCollins, and has recently signed a two-book deal as an outcome of the Fellowship.

Grants:

This work has received internal research funding from the DVCR and CHASS.

Category:

Commercial fiction

Romance fiction

Investigators:

Dr Alex Vickery-Howe 

Summary:

Out of the Ordinary builds from Vickery-Howe’s earlier research around generational difference.

The play tells the story of Jasper Sprout, an ageing not-quite rockstar, and his mathematician daughter, Theo.

Inspired by John Carey’s What Good Are the Arts? (2005), the conflict centres around the desire to leave one’s mark on the future versus simply living an empathetic and connected life in the present.

A critique of aestheticism at the expense of kind-heartedness, the play is nonetheless colourful and musical with nods to Kim Carnes, Annie Lennox and Guns N’ Roses.

Category:

Commercial fiction

Performance writing

Investigators:

Dr Alex Vickery-Howe 

Summary:

Alex Vickery-Howe has been addressing current events and political issues in a series of articles for The Big Smoke that respond to the major global stories of our times.

By demonstrating the link between fiction and ideology, this form of writing serves as both a compliment and an alternative to mainstream academia, drawing attention to complex debates through short, snappy, reflective articles that appear monthly.

Category:

Life writing

Investigators:

Dr Lisa Bennett, Professor Kim Wilkins (University of Queensland)

Summary:

While the term 'bestseller' explicitly relates books to sales, commercially successful books are also products of individual creative work.

Our monograph presents a new perspective on the relationship between art and the market, with particular reference to bestselling writers and books. 

We examine some existing perspectives on art's relationship to the marketplace to trouble persistent binaries that see the two in opposition; we break down the monolith of the marketplace by thinking of it as made up of a range of invested, non-hostile participants such as publishing personnel and readers; we articulate the material dimensions of creative writing in the industry through the words of bestselling writers themselves; and we examine how the existence of bestselling books and writers in the world of letters bears enormous influence on the industry, and on the practice of other writers.

Categories:

Commercial fiction

Writing about writing

Investigators:

Dr Christopher Hurrell, Dr Tiffany Lyndall-Knight, Dr Alex Vickery-Howe

Summary:

Performing Justice on the Queen’s Stage is a trans-cultural, immersive performance project. It brings together performance makers from Indigenous and non-Indigenous backgrounds to re-enact the courtroom dramas, both real and fictional, which played out on the stage of the Queen’s Theatre in Adelaide from 1841-1851. 

Categories:

Performance writing

Investigators:

Dr Sarah Peters, Dr Tom Young, Dr Sean Williams, Helen Carter, Rebecca Edwards, Dr Nicholas Godfrey, Shane Bevin, Katie Cavanagh, Jason Bevan

Summary:

The Life Savings project began in May 2021 with the establishment of an interdisciplinary writers room.

Our goal was to identify and experiment with innovative ways of working collaboratively in the development of a short film, generating a case study of methods and strategies which can then be implemented both in the classroom and in wider industry environments.

Grant:

• Assemblage Funding
  

Categories:

Interdisciplinary collaboration