ANZAMEMS Success in AAH Awards

ANZAMEMS is pleased to celebrate some of our members’ recent successes in attaining fellowships through the Australian Academy of the Humanities.

Humanities Travelling Fellowships enable early-career researchers to undertake research overseas, where they may access materials otherwise inaccessible, connect with international organisations, researchers and forge new networks.

See the AAH press release for the 2025 round of awardees. Among these are two ANZAMEMS members.

Dr Jennifer Nicholson (University of Sydney)
Shakespeare’s False Friends: French English, Early Modern England, and the Stage

False Friends addresses the curiosity of there being no monograph or extended scholarship concerning William Shakespeare’s knowledge of French. Dr Nicholson’s research considers how relationships between the porous edges of French and English in early modern plays, including those by Shakespeare and his contemporary, Christopher Marlowe, generate new readings of theatre’s textual and philosophical uncertainties.

Under the Fellowship, Dr Nicholson will travel to the United States, Scotland and England to access archival sites containing manuscript materials relating to Shakespeare. In addition to her research, Dr Nicholson will co-facilitate a seminar at the Shakespeare Association of America’s 2026 conference and will visit research centres across the United Kingdom.

Dr Mairi Hill (University of Melbourne)
Women, Language, and Labour in Medieval and Early Modern England

Women played an important economic role in medieval and early modern society. However, the profitability of female labour in early capitalist society is rarely discussed. Women’s work and spaces of work are presented as communal and places which encouraged women’s alleged propensity for excessive speech. This project aims to answer questions around relationships between women, spaces of work and how excessive speech may have contributed to language related to “women’s work” and shaped attitudes still prevalent in contemporary society.

Under the Fellowship, Dr Hill will travel to the United Kingdom to access historical records about premodern women’s labour across the UK National Archives, The London Archives and Surrey House Centre. Dr Hill intends for the research completed under this Fellowship to form the foundation of a second monograph.

Dr Nicholson and Dr Hill join a rich tradition of ANZAMEMS success in for Humanities Travelling Fellowships including recent awardees Matthew Firth (2024), Kirstie Flannery (2022), Michele Seah (2022), Frederic Kiernan (2021), and Janet Wade (2021).

ANZAMEMS Reading Group

The next session of the 2025 ANZAMEMS reading group is on Tuesday 29 July at 11-12pm Melbourne time (UTC+11). This will be on the topic of ‘Gender and Account Books’. See schedule below.

The Zoom links, readings, and full schedule can be found on the Google Drive at https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1Qi0W8i-38w0Dgwia9jJ0aDCh5OEQjpRF.

We are asking those interested to register again on TryBooking at https://www.trybooking.com/CZJNA, although drop-ins are always welcome.

Please contact the convenor with any queries: Emily Chambers (Murdoch University), emily.chambers@murdoch.edu.au.

Reading Group Schedule S2 2025 UPDATEDDownload

ANZAMEMS Postgraduate Peer Support Group

The next cycle of the ANZAMEMS Peer Support Group will begin on Wednesday 13 August. 

The Peer Support Group is a writing and discussion space for postgraduate members of ANZAMEMS. The group will run online, via Zoom, and is open to postgraduate members at any stage from honours to PhD. Attendance across all sessions is not mandatory. This is an informal support group, and we welcome drop-ins as much as regular attendance. See our website for further information.

If you would like to participate or have any questions, please contact ANZAMEMS Postgraduate Representative (AUS) Jenny Davis Barnett at j.barnett@uq.edu.au.

Workshop: Transpacific Knowledges – Women and the Christian World before 1900

Transpacific Knowledges: Women and the Christian World before 1900
Date: Friday 1 August 2025

The organiser are pleased to announce the final program for this hybrid workshop, details below.

Please RSVP to susan.broomhall@acu.edu.au to be added to the Zoom meeting, stating whether you will be joining us in person or online.

Program_Transpacific Knowledges_Women and the Christian World before 1900Download

CFP: Faith in a Material World

Faith in a Material World: Creative Productions of Natural Philosophy in Medieval and Early Modern Europe

Date: 3 October 2025

This seminar seeks to investigate how a diverse range of individuals responded creatively to making faith meaning in the natural /material world in medieval and early modern Europe through artistic, topographical, architectural, embroidered, ceramic, and other material or unusual interventions into natural philosophy and religion. Selected essays may be invited as part of a special issue planned from this event.

Keynote speakers: Prof Elisabeth Crouzet-Pavan (Sorbonne University); Prof Denis Crouzet (Sorbonne University)

Format: 20 min papers; hybrid event: on ACU Melbourne campus and online

Submission contact: Please send questions and proposals (a title, abstract 300 word maximum and short bio) to Susan Broomhall by 25 July 2025: susan.broomhall@acu.edu.au

CFP: Materiality and Confinements in the Medieval and Early Modern Eras

The international conference “Materiality and Confinements in the Medieval and Early Modern Eras: Objects, Actors, Experiences”, is currently seeking paper submissions. The conference will be held at Université de Lausanne from 22 to 24 April 2026.

This conference will examine confinements through the lens of their materiality. Drawing on a recent historiographical broadening of the field, the conference aims to address various forms of medieval and early modern confinement, both judicial and non-judicial: prisons, galleys, hospitals, workhouses, cloisters, monasteries, and the like. At the same time, it seeks to reflect on methodological questions pertaining to material history as an approach and to the sources that underpin it. 

For further details, see the CFP.

Symposium: Marginalia and the Early Modern Woman Writer, 1500-1700

When: 8 August, 2025
Where: National Library of Australia

Early modern women marked their books in myriad ways, and their marginalia provide evidence of their book ownership, their reading, writing and drawing practices, their acquisition of literacy, and the interrelation of body, book, and material world. This one-day symposium interprets this exciting new textual corpus and discusses the challenges involved in locating, attributing and analysing this material. What can marginalia tell us about women’s textual agency, education and literacy, their use of books, their lived experience of household economics, organization and technologies, and their interpersonal, affective and social relationships? What evidence does marginalia provide for women’s engagement with orality, performance, print, and scribal cultures? How can marginalia help us position women as humanist, political and religious agents and understand their worlds of work and leisure? And how can such new analyses of early modern women’s marginalia reshape early modern marginalia studies more broadly?

The symposium will include keynotes by Professor Micheline White (Carleton University), Emeritus Professor Paul Salzman (La Trobe University), Professor Sarah C.E. Ross (Victoria University of Wellington) and Dr Emma Rayner (Australian National University).

For details and registration, click here.