Dr Maria Nugent (research fellow in the Australian Centre for Indigenous History within the School of History) has achieved the breathtaking success of winning a prestigious Australian Research Council Future Fellowship plus three other ARC grants, all in the recent round of ARC announcements.  Her achievement demonstrates the high quality and innovation of her research and writing.

Maria's Future Fellowship has been awarded for her project Remembering Dispossession: Interpreting Aboriginal Historical Narratives.  The project grapples with the challenge to produce Australian historical studies that have Aboriginal people's own interpretations and moral reasonings at their core.  The study will not only reveal the richness of Aboriginal people's historical storytelling and remembrance since colonisation, but also model ways of using it to narrate Australian history in new ways.

One of the case studies in the project focuses on Aboriginal people's histories and memories of Queen Victoria, for which Maria received an ARC Discovery Project grant that provides research funding for two years.  She is also involved in two related collaborative research endeavours.  For one, she has teamed up with Dr Shino Konishi (also a research fellow in the Australian Centre for Indigenous History within the School of History) and Dr Tiffany Shellam (a graduate of the former History Program in RSSS and now based at Deakin University).  They received ARC funding for a project called Exploring the middle ground: New histories of cross-cultural encounters in Australian maritime and land exploration.  Maria will focus particularly on Aboriginal people's own historical narratives about encounters with explorers.

The other is a Linkage Project initiated by Dr Ian Coates at the National Museum of Australia and led by Professor Howard Morphy.  Called Engaging Objects: Indigenous communities, museum collections and the representation of Indigenous histories, it involves a partnership between the NMA, the British Museum, ANU and Indigenous researchers and communities exploring research processes leading up to a major exhibition of Aboriginal material culture.

Photo courtesy of National Museum of Australia.  Image by Lannon Harley