Our projects

The future of AI is a site of considerable philosophical and cultural anxiety in the West. Given the future of AI is currently only available to the public through literary or fictional tropes, it’s vital that we investigate the historical evolution of these literary or fictional tropes of AI to understand its future direction. 

Expressive music playing is much more than just the right notes. For wind instruments, a beautiful, expressive performance requires fine control and coordination of several physical gestures that include breath pressure, mouth geometry and forces, tongue action and finger motions. The non-linear physics of these gestures and their interactions is subtle and poorly understood. 

The Breaking Silences: Media and the Child Abuse Royal Commission project analyses the role of media, journalism and social media activism in the ground-breaking Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse (2013 – 17) (RCIRCSA). 

The Listening In research project analyses the politics of voice and listening in response to First Nations media, community media and intersectional media practices.

This project is funded by the Australian Research Council’s Discovery Project scheme Future Fellowship program FT140100515 (2015 – 2020).

During the height of the post-war immigration boom, Sydney’s metropolitan neighbourhoods played a key role in the reconstitution of migrant identities. Taking a cluster of these neighbourhoods as its case studies, this project will inscribe the memories of Greek-Australians into a history of post-war migration. It will do so through the construction of a corpus of oral histories, photographs, home movies and memorabilia archived in the State Library of NSW that will reveal how Greek migrants remade themselves as shopkeepers, factory workers, customers, homemakers, parents, spouses, sportspeople and playmates. 

AusStage provides an accessible online resource for researching live performances in Australia. Development is led by a consortium of universities, government agencies, industry organisations and collecting institutions with funding from the Australian Research Council and other sources.

This project will examine writers’ enduring engagement with the riot’s destructive energy and transformative potential. Tracing a long arc from the 18th century novel to recent multi-medial narratives generated in the wake of the Arab Spring, this project will uncover a history largely ignored by literary scholars. 

This project investigates the way social anxieties provoked by the strangeness of Charlotte Brontë’s unorthodox novels were converted into aesthetic pleasures by publishing institutions and practices. Combining methods from editorial scholarship, literary and/or cultural history, digital humanities and literary criticism, the project proposes an innovative new scholarly print and/or digital edition of Brontë’s novels, together with a pioneering online critical archive of Brontë’s manuscripts, texts and contexts, and a ground-breaking book-length interpretive study.

Since 9/11, drones have moved from the margins of the military to reshape war and surveillance, but they have also had wide-ranging effects on visual culture and the creative arts. This project aims to investigate how drones and other technologies of perception are changing how we bear witness and determine the meaning, importance and truth of events. It seeks to generate new knowledge about the impact of drone warfare and drone technologies on forms and processes of witnessing by analysing primary and creative texts and by conducting field research into new practices of testimony. 

In 2017, UNSW Sydney became the caretaker for the Dennis Wolanski Library collection. The collection was originally part of the Sydney Opera House performing arts library. It consists of 1600 archive boxes, holding an estimated 4 million pages of information about the performing arts in Australia from 1789 to 1997. The boxes contain press clippings, programs, correspondence, discographies, CVs, invitations, funeral service programs, program notes, publisher blurbs, press releases and a card index of 80,000 entries.

Precarious Movements: Choreography and the Museum is a project that aims to bring artists, researchers and institutions into dialogue about best practice to support the choreographer and the museum, and to sustain momentum in theory and practice around dance and the visual arts. 

In an ocean of poachers, pollution, overfishing, prey decline and climate change, preserving the lives of many endangered marine species requires persistent monitoring by sensing technologies such as drones.