Investigators:

Professor Robert Phiddian, Associate Professor Richard Scully (UNE), Dr Stephanie Brookes (Monash), Mr Lindsay Foyle (independent scholar)

Summary:

This landmark study aims to facilitate a new scholarly and public appreciation of Australian editorial cartooning: something often celebrated, but seldom studied seriously.

At a moment when the art-form is transitioning, the study will elucidate its enduring democratic and cultural significance, revealing diverse stories told through cartoons.

Expected project outcomes include: pioneering new scholarship; the enhancement of cross-institutional networks; and improved capacity for collaboration between academia and industry (professional bodies and collecting institutions).

The project will benefit the nation, providing a truer understanding of the defining Australian sense of humour, press, and political culture, across more than 200 years.

Grant:

• ARC DP 2023
• Ross Steele AM Fellowship, State Library of New South Wales, 2021-3
• ARC DP230101348: Cartoon Nation: Australian Editorial Cartooning - Past, Present, and Future (2023-6)

Category:

Australian cultural history

Investigators:

Associate Professor Tully Barnett, Mr Alex Cothren, Professor Robert Phiddian

Summary:

Laboratory Adelaide: The Value of Culture is a research project based at Flinders University in South Australia looking at ways of understanding the value of arts and culture beyond the economic data, ticket sales and spill-over effects.

Economic impact studies do not tell the full story of the value of an organisation or event. Funding agencies require new ways of understanding the value of arts and culture organisations, events and objects, and policy makers require a new framework for thinking about the value of arts and culture. To remedy this, a team of researchers is partnering with senior arts and cultural organisations in South Australia.

Laboratory Adelaide: the Value of Culture has been funded by two Australian Research Council Linkage projects based at Flinders University (LP140100802 and LP17101933). Its team includes Professor Julian Meyrick, Professor Robert Phiddian, Professor Steve Brown, Associate Professor Tully Barnett with industry partners including State Library of South Australia, the Adelaide Festival, State Theatre Company of South Australia, Arts South Australia and Festival City Adelaide.

The team published the book What Matters? Talking Value in Australian Culture in 2018. Published articles include

Phiddian, R., Meyrick, J., Barnett, T., & Maltby, R. (2017). Counting culture to death: an Australian perspective on culture counts and quality metrics. Cultural Trends, 26(2), 174-180.

Meyrick, Julian, and Tully Barnett. "From public good to public value: arts and culture in a time of crisis." Cultural trends 30.1 (2021): 75-90.

Meyrick, Julian, and Tully Barnett. "Culture without “world”: Australian cultural policy in the age of stupid." Cultural Trends 26.2 (2017): 107-124.

Grant:

• LP140100802 Laboratory Adelaide: Accounting for Cultural Value in the Arts, Cultural Organisations and Events. 
• LP170100933 Meaningfully communicating the value of arts and culture through reporting.

Categories:

Creative industries

Investigators:

Professor Robert Phiddian

Summary:

Does political satire hold the powerful to account? If so, how does it do that? And what else does it do to protect or harm freedom of expression? I’ve been working on these issues for decades and in many publications, focusing on how satirical laughter functions, both socially and emotionally.

Grant:

• ARC DP230101348: Cartoon Nation: Australian Editorial Cartooning - Past, Present, and Future (2023-6)

Category:

Political satire

Investigators:

Associate Professor Kylie Cardell, Associate Professor Lydia Woodyatt, Christiana Harous, Katerina Bryant, Dr Emma Maguire (JCU)

Summary:

This project is exploring how writing can impact wellbeing.

This interdisciplinary project surveys and analyses a large sample of writers in order to understand and map the experiences of wellbeing and resilience across a cohort and to measure and analyse this in accordance with evidence-based psychological methods.

A particular focus of the project is the experiences of memoirists who are representing painful or traumatic personal lived experience.

The project asks: how should the writing and publishing industry support authors? How can we support the broader industry—like editors working closely with trauma texts, or first-time fiction authors who struggle with the rollercoaster of publishing their first book?

And how should authors take care of themselves in the process of writing and publishing—especially when they are putting their lives on the page?

Categories:

Writing and culture

Life narrative 

Investigators:

Professor Kate Douglas

Summary:

By developing readership studies with children, this project aims to produce the first extended study of how children read biographies.

The project expects to generate new knowledge and innovative research methods at the intersection of children's literature and life narrative studies.

Expected outcomes of this project include new knowledge on children as literary critics. How do children engage with and interpret 'true' stories?

Benefits include a focus on children's voices and critical skills at a time when children's perspectives are often marginalised in the public sphere.

Knowledge about children's critical literacy and cultural engagement will be communicated to stakeholders, bringing significant benefit to the Australian community.

Categories:

Life narrative 

Investigators:

Dr Eric Parisot

Summary:

In recent times, two of the most popular literary cults of the new millennium have converged: the cults of Austen and the vampire.

This project examines this seemingly incongruent mash-up in fanfic retellings of Austen’s novels as tales of vampiric adventure and romance.

Despite their ‘lowbrow’ status, these adaptations ask serious questions about traditional and modern conceptualisations of love, sex, gender and immortality.

They also highlight the urgent need to re-examine our adopted understanding of Jane Austen and the vampire (and, indeed, the Gothic) as signifiers of contradictory values in twenty-first century popular culture.

A book will be published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2023.

Categories:

Gothic fiction 

Investigators:

Professor Robert Phiddian, Dr Shane Herron

Summary:

Our aim is to provide a historical understanding of the development of humour in 18th-century literature and culture in Britain.

In the shorter of two parts, we will give an overview of the history and theory of humour in the period, including the ways in which 18th-century developments have informed, and continue to inform, our thinking about and scholarship on humour today.

We will follow this with a series of case studies focused on pairs or small groups of major texts, drawn from a range of forms and genres reflecting a cross-section of 18th-century society and humour use.

Grant:

• Charles Cole Fellowship, Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University

Category:

18th century literary studies