Recent Recipients

Kerrin Rowlands and Eliza Lovell

Kerrin Rowlands, a Lecturer in Arts Education at the University of South Australia (UniSA), and Eliza Lovell, a graduate of Flinders University Drama Centre, received funding to support their involvement in an ongoing collaboration between UT-Austin’s Department of Theatre and Dance, UniSA, and Arts>Rich>Together (A>R>T), an alliance of South Australian arts and education leaders that seeks to improve creative learning opportunities for young people and of which Lovell is an original member. Rowlands and Lovell will use their grant to participate in an International Symposium, “Drama for Schools: Creating and Sustaining School Change Through the Arts,” hosted by UT-Austin and to further their research on the role of the Teaching Artist in Creative Body-Based Learning and Drama Based Pedagogy within the Australian educational context.

Andrew Gibbons, Ph.D.

Postdoctoral Fellow, Edward A. Clark Center for Australian and New Zealand Studies, The University of Texas at Austin
Grant Type: UT-Austin Faculty and Graduate Student Grants Program
Project: Media Framing and Policy Decisions in Australia: The Case for Media Reform

Dr. Andrew Gibbons was awarded funding to support an ongoing research project on news coverage of media policy reform in Australia.  Australia has one of the most highly-concentrated media markets. Like other western democracies, Australian news organisations are facing intense financial pressures that have manifested into widespread cutbacks and job losses across the media sector. In 2017, the Australian government announced a plan to amend the media ownership laws to improve commercial stability in the media market. The government’s widespread reforms to the media sector included changes to media ownership rules. At the time, the government argued these amendments would allow media organisations to consolidate their organisational structures and achieve the necessary scale to remain competitive in this new digital environment. In addition, the 2017 reforms allowed media organisations to consolidate their ownership of print, television, and radio outlets.  According to critics, these new changes will further concentrate media ownership in Australia. Gibbons’ study examines how media framing of this issue shaped the contours of policy debate and, more importantly, decision- making in 2017. Through an analysis of newspaper coverage, policy documents and press releases, this project advances our understanding of decision-making and media reform in Australia. Gibbons plans to use the funds to collect and analyse press material and policy documents.  The project offers new empirical insights into Australia media policy and contributes to an ongoing debate about press power and influence in Australian politics.

Stefanie Shackleton

PhD Candidate, Department of History, The University of Texas at Austin
Grant Type: UT-Austin Faculty and Graduate Student Grants Program
Project: The Imperial Republic: Australian Settler Colonialism and the Political Cosmology of Empire, 1870-1914

Stefanie Shackleton explores the construction of ideas about what made a working-class group or individual respectable, learned, and “British” in the Victorian period. She contends that this process occurred within networks of exchanges between the capital and the periphery. By examining the working-class pursuit of knowledge as a whole, bringing together mechanics’ institutes, public libraries, public lectures, exhibitions, educational periodicals, and cooperative learning groups, Shackleton seeks to demonstrate that these were not, as many historians have suggested, separate, isolated efforts disconnected by regional boundaries. Rather, when considered as a single movement of knowledge acquisition for the purpose of “improvement,” the wider trend becomes apparent. Shackleton’s approach contrasts with that of scholars of education, leisure, radicalism, publishing, and literature, all of whom have studied specific knowledge-acquisition activities individually and within specific geographic boundaries. Shackleton argues that studied in isolation, the impact of these learning activities on the working class is obscured. Clark Center funding will enable her to spend four weeks in Australia to consult materials at the National Library of Australia in Canberra as well as at resources located in Sydney and Melbourne.

Adam Clulow, Ph.D.

Associate Professor, Department of History, UT-Austin
Grant Type: UT-Austin Faculty and Graduate Student Grants Program
Project: Submerged Sovereignties

Professor Adam Clulow received funding for a research collaboration with Professor Lauren Benton, Nelson O. Tyrone Professor of History and Professor of Law at Vanderbilt University. Their project maps the history of the Cocos-Keeling Islands, a small group of 27 atoll islands located over 1500 miles northwest of Perth that became an Australian territory in 1955.   Australia’s only majority-Muslim territory, the islands are populated by the descendants of former slaves brought to the islands from Southeast Asia in 1826 by Alexander Hare, a British merchant and corrupt colonial entrepreneur. When Hare departed in 1831, the Cocos-Keeling Islands came under the control of the Clunies-Ross family, which effectively ruled the islands for over 150 years, through its formal acquisition by the British Empire and until its incorporation into Australia following a referendum in 1984. Under the Clunies-Ross dynasty, the islands minted their own currency, maintained a distinctive legal regime, and developed an elaborate labor system organized around debt peonage and the export of copra and coconut oil. Successive generations of the Clunies-Ross family maneuvered successfully to maintain elements of autonomous rule while also courting the British and Dutch empires for protection. The islands acquired a quality of in-betweenness reflected in their designation as “external territories” of Australia. This status resembles that of other island groups in the region variously labeled by the United Nations as “dependent territories, “external territories,” “special administrative regions,” and “autonomous collectivities.” Clulow and Benton’s research exposes the origins of this anomalous status, tracing the politics of imperial protection and inter-imperial rivalry, the efforts of private individuals to preserve control over coerced labor, and the maneuvering of imperial agents to extend influence without assuming the full responsibilities of governance.

Zeynep Somer-Topc, Ph.D. and Joseph Cozza, MS

Associate Professor, Department of Government, UT-Austin
Graduate Student, Department of Government, UT-Austin
Grant Type: UT-Austin Faculty and Graduate Student Grants Program
Project: Leadership Selection Process: Consequences for Legitimacy and Efficacy Evaluations

Whether to increase transparency, appeal to democratic legitimacy, improve the quality of leaders, or bypass activists, parties in advanced democracies are increasingly adopting more inclusive mechanisms of leadership selection that incorporate rank-and-file members into the process. Professor Zeynep Somer-Topcu and Joseph Cozza seek to fill a glaring gap in the literature on this phenomenon. They received funding to conduct a survey experiment in Australia to examine how different mechanisms of leadership selection influence citizen perceptions of the strength and legitimacy of leaders and the parties they represent. Several factors make Australia an ideal setting, including the robust debate being had about the role of party members in internal decision-making and the wide variety of selection mechanisms used at the state level to choose candidates for federal office. Professor Somer-Topcu and Cozza’s study will assess the legitimacy of both inclusive and exclusive leadership selection processes, while also examining how these mechanisms shape the perceived strength and electability of the new leader, the perceived strength and unity of the party, and the participants’ political efficacy and satisfaction with democracy. It will contribute to the cross-national conversation about intra-party democracy and speak to a significant debate in contemporary Australian politics. Professor Somer-Topcu and Cozza will present their findings at a major political science conference and submit their final manuscript to a top-tier political science journal. The project also contributes to Cozza’s dissertation work, which seeks to analyze how different mechanisms of citizen inclusion in political processes impact the sociological legitimacy of democratic outcomes.

William Matthew Kennedy, Ph.D.

Postdoctoral Fellow, Institute for Historical Studies, The University of Texas at Austin
Grant Type: UT-Austin Faculty and Graduate Student Grants Program
Project: The Imperial Republic: Australian Settler Colonialism and the Political Cosmology of Empire, 1870-1914
 
Dr. William Matthew Kennedy, a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute for Historical Studies at UT-Austin, received funding to travel to the United Kingdom in 2019 to visit various archives to complete research for his first scholarly monograph in Australian colonial intellectual and legal history. His project draws on Didier Fassin’s method of moral anthropology to excavate the “political cosmology of empire” that grew up among middle-class Australian settler colonists. Kennedy uses this term to describe the blending together of European and colonial ideas about the political past, present, and future, culminating in a sustained, settler-colonial legal fiction of Britain’s empire as a “global white republic.” His research analyzes the main modes through which such a political cosmology was materially and intellectually reproduced into the colonial and imperial political imaginary. It also examines the operation of this cosmology during archetypical colonial situations, including the transnational humanitarian and philanthropic Indian famine-relief movements of the 1870s and 1890s; periods of institutionalized and non-institutionalized mass violence throughout the 19th and 20th centuries; debates about the kidnapping and enslavement of Indigenous people from the Pacific Islands; and, the administration of Australia’s own colonial territories in the Pacific Islands from the 1870s. Overall, the work promises to make a substantial contribution to Australian and imperial history by identifying new contours in the discourses and processes of empire, ones less evident from the metropole than they were from the quite different perspective of settler societies in Australia. Kennedy will undertake research in the UK national archives, the British Library in London, the National Library of Scotland in Edinburgh, at Rhodes House Library in Oxford as well as in other private collections in Brighton and London.

Lara Dossett, MFA

Lecturer, Drama and Theatre for Youth and Professional Learning Coordinator, Drama for Schools, The University of Texas at Austin
Grant Type: UT-Austin Faculty and Graduate Student Grants Program
Project: Creative Body-Based Learning in South Australia: University

Connections and Pilot Research in Student Learning Communities
Lara Dossett received support from the Clark Center to travel to Adelaide, South Australia in March 2019. The trip offered the opportunity to grow previously established relationships with The University of South Australia and a local primary school. Dossett gave several lectures in Drama for Elementary Education at the university along with Katie Dawson, a colleague from the Department of Theatre and Dance. This exchange of knowledge between the students and Dossett will help shape and inform future teaching. Dossett also spent two days in the Murraylands of South Australia, just outside of Adelaide, with a school implementing an innovative method of professional learning, the Student Learning Community. This powerful model partner’s students and teachers together to explore how collaborative, professional learning in arts integration can activate students as the key catalyst for learning improvement at their school. Dossett’s teaching and observations helped prepare her to launch the first US adaptation of the model in Round Rock, TX.

Julianne N. Phillips, M.A.

Graduate Student, Department of Government, The University of Texas at Austin
Grant Type: UT-Austin Faculty and Graduate Student Grants Program
Project: Hierarchy in Nuclear Proliferation: How Nuclear Weapons Shape the International System
 
In her dissertation, Julianne Philips examines how interactions between countries shape choices about the development of nuclear weapons programs and how these choices, in turn, shape the international system. Taking into account the external threats countries face, the security guarantees they possess, and the strategic decisions of other actors, she shows how the decisions of proliferators, their allies, and their adversaries are intertwined. Phillips contends that the effects of nuclear weapons extend beyond simply deterring attacks. Often, countries with nuclear capabilities also have a vested interest in preventing other countries from acquiring “the bomb” in order to preserve their own influence. Countries that have close relationships with nuclear powers, such as those belonging to the Commonwealth, offer opportunities for examining precisely how nuclear powers choose to exert their influence on countries within their spheres. Australia, a member of the Commonwealth and a US ally, is an ideal case study for pursuing this line of inquiry. Although it served as a testing ground for the UK’s program and may even have contemplated developing its own weapon in conjunction with the UK, it has to date not acquired a working nuclear weapon, despite possessing a high level of capability to do so. Exploring the decision-making of Australian governments promises insight into how the specter of nuclear technology has shaped Australia’s place on the global stage. Phillips used her grant to visit the National Archives of Australia in Canberra, where she examined records of UK-Australia relations with respect to nuclear development and testing. 

Courtney Handman, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology, The University of Texas at Austin
Grant Type: UT-Austin Faculty and Graduate Student Grants Program
Project: Imagining an English future: The Australian administration, Christian missionaries, and “the language problem” in colonial New Guinea, 1955-1960
 
In 2018, the Clark Center provided funding to Dr. Courtney Handman, an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at UT-Austin, to support her travel to Australia, where she undertook archival research into issues arising from Australia’s colonial relationship with Papua New Guinea. Handman also delivered talks at the University of Melbourne and Australian National University. Handman spent most of her time at the National Archives of Australia in Canberra, examining and digitally photographing documents related to Australia’s time as the Administering Power of the UN Trust Territory of New Guinea. Handman paid special attention to Australia’s experience with the UN Trusteeship Council in the mid-1950s, during which time Australia and other Administering Powers on the Council were feeling pressure from an “anti-colonial”-bloc of Council members. In 1956, the Trusteeship Council voted, under strong protest from Australia, to ask Australia to set a target date for Papua-New Guinea’s independence. Handman is exploring the implications of this vote for Australia’s subsequent administration of Papua-New Guinea. In addition, she is examining education and language policy proposals from the era, with particular emphasis on debates and arguments between the colonial administration and Christian missionaries about the decision to make English the official language of the largely Mission-run education system. Handman is using the fruits of her research to advance a larger project on colonial communication networks in 1950s-New Guinea, which she expects will yield a monograph on the subject.

Belinda Wheeler, Ph.D.

Associate Professor of English, Department of English, Claflin University
Grant Type: Visiting Scholar Grants Program
Project: How R.G. Howarth’s Editorial Choices at Southerly (1939-1955) Shaped Early Australian Literature

Professor Belinda Wheeler received support from the Clark Center to travel to UT-Austin to use the Robert Guy (R.G.) Howarth collection that is housed at the Harry Ransom Center (HRC). Her project focuses on Howarth’s leadership as editor of Southerly, one of Australia’s oldest and longest running literary journals. Established in 1939 and headed by Howarth until 1955, Southerly occupied a unique position to shape Australia’s literary canon. And yet, relatively little attention has been paid to the editorial decisions that Howarth made while at the journal’s helm. Instead, existing work focuses on his early years, scholarly work, and career in the professoriate, with some briefly mentioning Howarth’s literary relationships with authors such as Norman Lewis, Hugh McCrae, A. D. Hope, J. M. Coetzee, and Judith Wright. Drawing on Howarth’s correspondence, diaries, editorial notes, and magazine galley proofs, Wheeler seeks to answer the following questions: What was it about the work of then unknown writers like Judith Wright or A. D. Hope that inspired Howarth to publish their work? Why did he choose to publish some author’s non-traditional work instead of genres for which they were known? What attention did Howarth pay to Indigenous Australian authors? Why did Howarth also choose to publish international authors such as Karl Shapiro in a journal that was devoted to material from the Southern hemisphere?  

Amy Liu, Ph.D.

Associate Professor, Department of Government, The University of Texas at Austin
Grant Type: UT-Austin Faculty and Graduate Student Grants Program
Project: The Politics of Chinese in Schools: A Study of Language-in-Education Policies in Australian States (1848-2018)

Professor Amy Liu received support from the Clark Center to travel to Canberra in the summer of 2018 to conduct research at the National Library of Australia into the evolution of Chinese language schools in Australia. Liu has since used this research to provide comparative context in a book that she is writing on Chinese migrants in Eastern Europe. In addition, Liu collected data on Australia’s state and national policies regarding the English language. She plans to subject these data to a text analysis and incorporate her findings into the signature course that she teaches at UT-Austin, Language, Politics, and Culture. While in Australia, Liu also met Zoe Meers and Luke Mansillo, both affiliated with the United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney. The three of them are now working on a project that examines pronoun usage of prime ministers within the context of electoral cycles. They presented an early draft of the paper at the 2019 annual meeting of the Australian and New Zealand Studies Association of North America in Austin, Texas.

Scott Wolford, Ph.D.

Associate Professor, Department of Government, The University of Texas at Austin
Grant Type: UT-Austin Faculty and Graduate Student Grants Program
Project: How Peace Ends

Professor Scott Wolford traveled to Canberra in the summer of 2018, where he spent several days in the National Archives researching the origins of the ANZUS Treaty that bound the United States to the defense of Australia and New Zealand. The grant covered travel and lodging, allowing him access to physical documents—exchanges between leaders, diplomats, military offers, etc.—that he couldn’t get elsewhere. What he learned has contributed to an ongoing book project that examines the negotiation and survival of peace settlements, such that Wolford can now provide evidence that the ANZUS Treaty was part of a renegotiation of the postwar balance of power after it was upset by the Korean War. 

Kathryn Dawson, MFA

Associate Professor, Department of Theatre and Dance, The University of Texas at Austin
Grant Type: UT-Austin Faculty and Graduate Student Grants Program
Project: Creative Body-Based Learning in South Australia: Expanding the Adelaide and Austin Partnership

Professor Kathryn Dawson applied her grant towards the cost of spending six months in Adelaide as a Visiting Professor at the University of South Australia (UniSA) in 2016. Since 2012, she’s worked closely with UniSA, South Australia's Department for Education and Child Development, and the state’s arts and culture sector. In the course of multiple trips to Australia, Dawson has presented keynote addresses, run workshops for the arts and education sectors, organized symposiums, and facilitated a pilot study that draws on her work in using drama-based pedagogy as a tool to improve student engagement in public education. She has facilitated a robust set of collaborative relationships between faculty and graduate students at UT-Austin and their counterparts at UniSA as well as across South Australia’s arts and education communities. Dawson’s research has been published in a variety of venues, most notably in a 2018 book with the University of Chicago Press, Drama-based Pedagogy: Activating Learning across the Curriculum. 

Stephanie Kent

Graduate Student, Department of Theatre and Dance, The University of Texas at Austin.
Grant Type: UT-Austin Faculty and Graduate Student Grants Program
Project: Creative Body-Based Learning in South Australia: Expanding the Adelaide and Austin Partnership
 
 Stephanie Kent received funding to facilitate her travel to Adelaide, Australia to participate in an ongoing collaboration led by UT-Austin Professors Kathryn Dawson and Stephanie Cawthon in conjunction with the University of South Australia, South Australia’s Department of Education, and Arts>Rich>Together (A>R>T), an alliance of South Australian arts and education leaders that seeks to improve creative learning opportunities for young people. During her visit, Kent conducted an independent study into how drama-based strategies can enhance learning in middle-school math classrooms. She was able to engage with educators in South Australia about their educational system, the standards and expectations for mathematics education there, and how drama-based and creative body-based pedagogies enable teachers to satisfy these standards and expectations.

Stephanie Cawthon, Ph.D.

Director of Research and Evaluation for Drama for Schools and Associate Professor, Department of Educational Psychology, The University of Texas at Austin
Grant Type: UT-Austin Faculty and Graduate Student Grants Program
Project: Engaging Artists in Body-Based Learning: Lessons from the Adelaide-Austin Partnership

Dr. Stephanie Cawthon’s project is part of an ongoing collaboration between researchers from UT-Austin, the University of South Australia, and the Arts>Rich>Together (A>R>T), an alliance of South Australian arts and education leaders who seek to improve creative learning opportunities for young people. These researchers are involved in a major effort to improve student learning outcomes through the integration of arts into learning environments. Cawthon’s project investigates the effectiveness of Creative Body-Based Learning approaches in mathematics instruction for Aboriginal and disadvantaged students in South Australia. More specifically, it focuses on the impact of arts integration approaches on engagement, dispositions, conceptual understandings in mathematics, and abilities of thinking and working mathematically for students from aboriginal and disadvantaged backgrounds. It also investigates how Creative Body-Based Learning supports educators in the State of South Australia who are using the Teaching for Effective Learning Framework that was developed by the South Australia’s Department of Education and Child Development.

Catherine Weaver, Ph.D.

Associate Professor of Public Affairs, LBJ School of Public Affairs and Co-Director, Innovations for Peace and Development, The University of Texas at Austin
Grant Type: UT-Austin Faculty and Graduate Student Grants Program
Project: How We Study the World: A Comparative Analysis of Australian and American International Relations Disciplines

With funding from the Clark Center, Dr. Catherine Weaver traveled to Brisbane to initiate new research with Dr. Jason C. Sharman, then a Professor of Politics at Griffith University, on the structural and substantive differences between the academic disciplines of international relations (IR) in Australia and the United States. The project, entitled “How We Study the World: A Comparative Analysis of Australian and American International Relations Disciplines,” explores how the policies, practices and norms of the IR discipline compare between the two countries with respect to graduate training, hiring and promotion practices, publication expectations, and the impact of institutional and national research evaluation practices. Weaver and Sharman used a triangulated methodology of content coding of syllabi, journal articles and books, survey methodologies, and key informant interviews to discern key differences in the way Australian versus American scholars approach scholarly inquiry and professional training, with an eye to explaining how these differences may lead to very different worldviews on international relations and engagement with national policy in our respective countries. The project builds upon the pair’s previous collaborative work that also involved extensive primary coding of book publications in IR as well as use of the data on journal content from the Teaching, Research and International Policy (TRIP) program at the College of William & Mary. It extends this analysis to a comparative examination of theoretical and methodological training in graduate programs in U.S. and Australia, with additional comparative analysis possible with forthcoming TRIP survey data from 27 other countries.

Cate Palmer

Graduate Student, Michener Center for Writers, The University of Texas at Austin
Grant Type: UT-Austin Faculty and Graduate Student Grants Program
Project: Klara (a novel)

In December 2014, Cate Palmer traveled to Australia and New Zealand using funding awarded by the Edward A. Clark Center for Australian and New Zealand Studies. She is pursuing a Masters in Fine Arts from the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin. Palmer spent over a month in Melbourne, Auckland, and Wellington conducting research for her novel Klara, the first part of which will satisfy the thesis requirements for her MFA degree. Palmer will complete the manuscript after she graduates in May 2015 and hopes to have the novel published in the United States, New Zealand, or Australia.

As a fiction writer, Palmer’s research entailed exploring and recording her observation of life in and around Melbourne, Auckland, and Wellington. She not only photographed the cities' most noteworthy physical features, but she also collected details about more ordinary aspects of the cities and their inhabitants. This sort of information includes various sensory impressions as well as descriptions of people and interpersonal interactions that she observed. It also includes local knowledge about basic facts, such as how the various cities' public transport systems operate. 

During her visit Palmer admits that she grew "thoroughly accustomed to the strange looks from people who seemed to wonder why I was taking so many photos or what I could be scribbling so urgently about." By the close of her travels, she had collected several thousand photos and half a notebook worth of thoughts and impressions. These materials will enable Palmer to convey to her novel's readers the dynamics of life in Melbourne, Auckland, and Wellington with a greater degree of accuracy and authenticity than might otherwise have been the case. According to Palmer, her research experience has already made "a significant contribution" towards the realization of her novel.

Eugene Gholz, Ph.D.

Associate Professor, LBJ School of Public Affairs, The University of Texas at Austin
Grant Type: UT-Austin Faculty and Graduate Student Grants Program
Project: Implications of the Rare Earths Market and for National Security: The Case of Australia

With support from the Clark Center, Professor Eugene Gholz traveled to Canberra, Sydney, and Perth during two weeks in October 2014. The trip offered a tremendous opportunity for primary research, and Gholz also gave four public talks, building ties between UT and major universities and public policy institutions in Australia. Gholz is an expert on the intersection of economics and national security policy. Several years ago, he spent two years on leave from UT working in the U.S. Department of Defense, where he became involved in the U.S. policy response to extreme concentration in supply of rare earth elements to global markets: companies in such important sectors as defense and clean energy were getting essentially all of these important raw materials from China. In 2010, China apparently tried to use its near monopoly to gain political leverage against Japan, spurring a mini-panic around the world: were there not other sources available? Understanding the rare earths market and its implications for national security — and, more broadly, using that understanding of rare earths as a critical case study of whether countries can gain geopolitical leverage from economic policies and control of raw materials — has become a major part of Gholz’ academic research since his return to full-time work as a professor. That means that Australia has become a major part of Gholz’ work, because one of the two mines that has begun to produce rare earths outside of China is located at Mount Weld in Western Australia. Understanding the future of the rare earths market, the role of public policy in that market (from mining to downstream uses such as production of high-strength magnets that are used in many high-technology applications), and Australia’s role vis-a-vis China in both market and security terms are all of widespread interest to Australians.  Because the United States is the other new non-Chinese producer of rare earths and because the United States is one of the major consumers of rare earths products, the evolution of the rare earths market also emphasizes the U.S.-Australian relationship, making support for research in this area a natural fit for the Clark Center.  During his trip, Gholz met with officials in several departments of the Australian government, with leaders of the Lynas Corporation that is now producing rare earths in Australia, with several other Australian companies that are trying to get into the rare earths market, and with technologists at the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organization, who are world-leading experts in the chemical processing of rare earths. He also gave presentations about rare earths hosted by the Australian National University, the University of Western Australia, and Curtin University along with a presentation about emerging technology and the balance of power in Asia at the Lowy Institute in Sydney.

Brenda Machosky, Ph.D.

Associate Professor in English and Humanities, The University of Hawai'i West O'ahu
Grant Type: Visiting Scholar Grants Program
Project: Revisiting and Revising “White Australia” and “Aboriginal Protection” Policies

Professor Brenda Machosky spent three weeks in residence at UT Austin as a Visiting Scholar with the Clark Center and as a visiting faculty member of the Program in Comparative Literature at UT-Austin. The main purpose of her visit was to research the White Australia immigration policies and the government policies related to the Aboriginal peoples of the continent, and to consider relationships between them. The Grattan and Howarth collections at the Harry Ransom Center offered rare books and pamphlets on this topic, and the research provided invaluable insights about the ideologies and practices designed to “keep Australia White.” Professor Machosky’s research advanced several facets of her research agenda, and she would build upon it with visits to the Australian Institute for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies and the University of New South Wales-Canberra. While in residence at UT-Austin, Professor Machosky presented some of her own recent work on the pre-historic cave art of the Kimberley (also known as Bradshaws) in an event co-sponsored with the Program in Comparative Literature.

Kristie Patricia Flannery

Graduate Student, Department of History, The University of Texas at Austin 
Grant Type: UT-Austin Faculty and Graduate Student Grants Program
Project: Australia, Asia, and the Making of a Pacific World 1788-1850
 
Funding from the Edward A. Clark Center for Australian and New Zealand Studies made it possible for me to travel to Australia from 26 June (arriving 28 June) to 24 July 2014 in order to conduct dissertation research and participate in a conference.

During this period I conducted dissertation research at the Mitchell Library and State Library of New South Wales (SLNSW), and the National Library of Australia (NLA) around the broad theme of the emergence of an interconnected Pacific world in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and the place of Australia within this regional system. I consulted many rare books in these respective collections that shed light on the links between Australia and Asia before Australia’s mid nineteenth century gold rush.

Some of the most interesting materials that I consulted were travel narratives from this period, including the NLA’s copy of J. Shillibeer’s A narrative of the Briton's voyage to Pitcairn's Island: including an interesting sketch of the present state of the Brazils and of Spanish South America (1817), and the SLNSW’s copy of Arthur Adams’ journal and drawings documenting the later voyage of the H.M.S. Samarang (1841-1845). This ship visited ports in Singapore, Borneo Celebes, Malaya, Hong Kong, Japan, Korea, China, and Manila, as ports on Australia’s east coast. These sources are fascinating because they reveal that nineteenth century Anglo travellers and observers perceived these diverse parts of Asia, Australia, and the Americas to form part of a connected Pacific world. Such views of the Pacific system challenge more recent popular and scholarly understandings of the Anglo and Asian Pacific worlds as distinct and separate spheres.

As the Spanish Philippines is a key vantage point from which my dissertation explores the development of the Pacific world, I was also fortunate to locate and examine a number of rare books and manuscripts published in the Philippines, including the NLA’s copy of the rare manuscript of the late eighteenth-century Reales ordenanzas formadas por el superior gobierno, y real acuerdo de estas islas (Ordinances made by the superior government and royal resolution). 

Given the limited time that I had to work through a large amount of material, I decided to devote much of my efforts to ‘collecting’ or taking photographs of the sources that are relevant to my research. I can now work through the digital archive that I have created.

I participated in the Fifth University of Sydney International History Graduate Intensive from 16 to 18 July. This three-day seminar dedicated to cultures of diplomacy was the highlight of my time in Australia. The seminar began on 16 July with an interesting roundtable on the Congress of Vienna featuring professors from the University of Sydney, UNC-Chapel Hill, Harvard, Oxford, and the University of Vienna, as well as graduate students from many different institutions. The following two days were dedicated to the presentation and discussion of graduate student research projects. I presented my paper Battlefield Diplomacy and Empire-building in the Early Modern Pacific World. Certainly my research will benefit from the important feedback that I received from Harvard Professor David Armitage, who formally responded to my paper. The seminar also proved to be a valuable networking opportunity. Professor Glenda Sluga, the head of the University of Sydney’s Laureate Research Program in International History, invited me to become one of the Program’s affiliate graduate students. This affiliation will enable me to maintain a scholarly and professional connection to the Program and its research activities. I have attached the seminar agenda to this report.

During my visit I met with several other historians to discuss my dissertation project. In Sydney I met with Chris Maxworthy, who is currently a PhD student at the University of Sydney, as well as the Vice President of the Australian Association for Maritime History and a Councilor of the Royal Australian Historical Society. Chris and I have been corresponding for over a year in relation to our mutual research interests in the Iberian Pacific world. Chris is very knowledgeable of Spanish archival holdings related to my dissertation research, and provided very practical advice that will help my upcoming research visit to Spain.

I also met with Dr Emma Christopher, a Senior Lecturer in the History Department at the University of Sydney. Emma’s research into the British and Spanish Empires in the Atlantic and Pacific worlds is well known and widely respected. Emma provided important feedback on my dissertation research as well as career advice.  

Finally, in Canberra I met with Dr David R. M. Irving, who is a lecturer at the Australian National University (ANU). I reached out to David over a year ago after reading his book Colonial Counterpoint: Music in Early Modern Manila (2010), which is one of the most rigorously researched and fascinating studies of the colonial Philippines. David gave me very useful advice for navigating the Philippines archives before my pre-dissertation research visit to Manila in summer 2013. The Clark Center funding made it possible for us to meet and discuss my dissertation in person. As a result of our meeting, David agreed to serve as an external member on my dissertation committee.

Overall, my research trip to Australia was a rich and rewarding experience. I thank the Clark Center for its generous support.

Trey Thomas

Graduate Student, Department of Government, The University of Texas at Austin
Grant Type: UT-Austin Faculty and Graduate Student Grants Program
Project: Interest Groups and the Media in Australia:  The Role of Media Releases in Policy Advocacy

The Clark Center provided funds for my research and travel to Australia from July 8-22, 2014.  While there, I worked directly with Associate Professor Darren Halpin at the Australian National University on our research related to how Australian interest groups utilize the media for policy advocacy.  Dr. Halpin and I conducted new research and writing during my visit, which included the scheduling and execution of five phone interviews with staff from national Australian interest groups representing various industries and causes as well as with experts engaged in policy advocacy consulting.  With some initial assistance from Dr. Halpin, I conducted each of the interviews and transcribed large segments of my discussions for use in our article during my visit.  I spent most of my time in Bungendore at Dr. Halpin’s residence or at the ANU campus in Canberra, returning to the US on a flight from Sydney. 

We were fortunate to benefit from a high level of access during my short visit, and respondents were very forthcoming with information about each of their group’s use of media releases and related policy advocacy strategies. One respondent in particular cited a prime example, and agreed to let us name his organization in our article: only about an hour before I had called to begin the interview, Prime Minister Abbott mentioned on the floor of the parliament that he 'consulted' with their group on the carbon tax repeal.  The respondent attributed this solely to their press release strategy from the previous day, as they had no additional contact with the PM’s office.  This example provides an illustration of the dynamics we suspected were ongoing between organized interests and government officials.  While the interviews generally confirmed many of our expectations about group media strategy, they also led us to broaden the project's scope from a narrow focus on policy-related activity directed toward government officials to a broader study of media use by interest groups.

We found clear indication that media releases are not used to primarily garner actual media coverage and respondents often suggested that releases were only one part of their policy advocacy strategies—with the importance and audience of particular releases varying widely depending the context of each issue up for debate.  Much of my time spent in Australia involved preparing for, conducting/transcribing, and discussing respondent accounts with Dr. Halpin, but we also engaged in new writing based on our preliminary paper presented at the ANZSANA conference. That earlier quantitative analysis provided the context for my interviews and supported the generation of specific questions tailored to each group.  We will continue our work in the near future, with the goal of preparing the first of a series of related papers for an Australian political science journal early this fall.  We intend to extend our analysis in comparative context when appropriate and collect additional press release data to expand both our Australian and US samples.  

We also briefly worked on a revision to a pre-existing study on interest group mobilization that was recently returned from peer-review at an academic journal.  We evaluated how to proceed with the article and worked on reframing of our analysis, expecting to finish these revisions in the early fall.  Last, during my visit Dr. Halpin and I also discussed his Australian Research Council-funded project on the Australian organized interest system and groups’ influence in policymaking.  I will be working on the project as contract Research Associate from January-August 2015, and my research funded by the Clark Center provides a useful foundation for this future. 

Tina Hunter, Ph.D.

Director, Centre for International Minerals and Energy Law, University of Queensland, Australia
Grant Type: Visiting Scholar Grants Program
Project: Handbook of Shale Gas Law and Policy

Dr. Tina Hunter received funding to spend four weeks in Austin researching shale gas regulation, comparing Australian regulation to that which has historically occurred in Texas as a result of developments in fracking technologies and techniques. Her project analyzes geological and engineering developments as well as legislative response to those developments and forms part of a larger study that also encompasses Canada and the United Kingdom.

Sean Fern

Graduate Student, Department of Government, The University of Texas at Austin
Grant Type: UT-Austin Faculty and Graduate Student Grants Program
Project: Agenda Setting on the Supreme Court of New Zealand

“I survived the big one.”  That was my Facebook post after a 6.6 earthquake struck Wellington, New Zealand.  Though there are constant reminders that, in case of an earthquake, you should stay indoors and hide under a desk, commonly one’s first instinct is to run outside as fast as humanly possible.  So, when I felt the ground shake beneath me while reading through case files in the basement of New Zealand’s Supreme Court building, I grabbed my research notes and ran outside as quickly as possible.  Having never felt an earthquake, I assumed the worst. Afterwards I learned that the buildings are designed to shake and that the inside of a building really is the safest place to be.  Although as the accompanying picture illustrates, one must beware of falling light fixtures!  This is one of several lessons that I learned during my first experience conducting research “in the field.” 
 
I and Dr. Evans traveled to Wellington to research the New Zealand Supreme Court’s leave process, the practice by which the Court’s justices decide which cases to hear.  Specifically, in order to hear a case, the justices must decide that it is in the public interest to do so.  Being new to fieldwork, I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. Despite the pre-trip planning that Dr. Evans and I did to ensure a successful visit, we soon had to shake up (pun obviously intended) our plans.  For instance, when I first arrived at the courthouse, I was led downstairs to the courthouse basement where stacks of boxes filled with case files where stored.  The files hadn’t been touched in years and were placed in those boxes in no particular order.  “We consider this trash,” an administrative staffer said.  Although I wasn’t expecting legal fieldwork to involve manual labor, I proceeded to empty over fifty cardboard boxes and line rows of bookshelves with their contents. Though that endeavor would take over three days, it would eventually pay dividends by allowing us to locate case files in an efficient manner.

I also wasn’t expecting important members of New Zealand’s legal and political elite to be so accessible.  Sir Geoffrey Palmer, a former Prime Minister of New Zealand, stopped to introduce himself as he walked by my office in the Law Faculty at Victoria University of Wellington, where he is a Distinguished Fellow.  Dr. Evans and I would later interview him for over an hour.  Sometime after that, we were introduced to Sir Kenneth Keith, a former New Zealand Supreme Court justice and current justice on the International Court of Justice.  A few weeks into our trip, we finally gained enough rapport with our hosts that we managed to sit down with four out of the five sitting Supreme Court justices.  We chatted with them (over afternoon tea, obviously) and sought answers to some of the questions to which only they would know the answer. 

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, I was expecting to find that the “leave process” for the New Zealand Supreme Court works just like the comparable “certiorari process” for the US Supreme Court, with which I’m very familiar.  Thus, I expected the legal briefs filed by New Zealand lawyers to devote considerable effort to laying out the political imperatives that make a case worthy of the Court’s time and attention.  We found, however, that these briefs focused heavily on alleged legal errors in the decisions of the lower courts and paid far less attention to why the case was particularly important or in the public interest.  We had to revise our research plan to meet the reality of what we observed.
 
My experience in New Zealand was an excellent one – both professionally and personally.  As a graduate student, I had experiences that will undoubtedly further my career development.  In addition to sitting down with Supreme Court justices, a sitting judge on the International Court of Justice, and a former Prime Minister, I conducted my first foray into archival research and participated in my first set of “elite” interviews.  Of course, no discussion of travel to New Zealand would be complete without relating the country’s natural splendor.  I spent my free time exploring a country widely known for its beautiful scenery, for its sheep, and for being the home of hobbit holes and “Middle Earth.”  Yet, the country’s hidden treasures are what made New Zealand even more stunning. Simple pleasures, like a freshly made “flat white,” the neon orange yolk of a poached egg at Prefab, or simply the warm hospitality of our hosts, colleagues, and the Tranz Metro ticket collector in Ngaio made the experience all the more worthwhile.

Anushka Jasraj

Graduate Student, Department of English, The University of Texas at Austin    
Grant Type: UT-Austin Faculty and Graduate Student Grants Program 
Project: Internship with the J.M. Coetzee Centre for Creative Practice, Adelaide, Australia

I arrived in Adelaide on 15th June, and was invited to attend the English Discipline’s Postgraduate Symposium on June 18th and 19th. The conference included presentations by Creative Writing as well as English Literature postgraduates. There were new postgraduates who were presenting their work for the first time, and some second and third year students as well. I was also asked to give the opening address on June 18th, where I talked about the MFA at UT-Austin and read an excerpt of my own work. On June 19th there was a Reading evening at the Wheatsheaf Hotel, organized by Alison Coppe, where students read and performed their creative work. During the symposium I had the opportunity to get to know the other postgraduates and learn about their work.

On 2nd July and 9th July I attended the Lee Marvin Readings at Dark Horsey bookshop, where I had the opportunity to meet some writers from Adelaide, and hear their work. Professor Nicholas Jose hosted the readings on 2nd July, where other faculty and postgraduates presented their work as well.

Dr. Carol Lefevre invited me to sit in on the first Travel Writing lecture of the Winter School. There was a lecture by travel writer Max Anderson, following which the class split up for smaller discussion sections. I sat in on a session tutored by Emma McEwin, which I found particularly interesting because I was to lead a discussion section for an undergraduate creative writing class during the Fall 2013 semester. It was helpful to observe how Emma engaged the class, and I enjoyed participating in the in-class writing activities with the undergraduates, and hearing about their experiences in Adelaide.  

Apart from these events, the rest of my time was spent exploring the city, meeting with postgraduates in a more informal environment, and working on my thesis. I was assigned a desk in the postgraduate office and I had a library pass that allowed me to borrow books. I stayed at the Kathleen Lumley College, which is a graduate residence about fifteen minutes away from campus.

On 12th July I gave a postgraduate seminar. The topic I chose was “Historical Fiction Conventions and the Mughals in South Asian Literature.” I read from a paper I had written as part of my coursework during the Spring 2013 semester. The seminar was chaired by Professor Brian Castro and was fairly informal. I found the feedback I received after the seminar extremely helpful since the paper I read did not yet have a conclusion. Overall, the internship was a wonderful experience and the most valuable thing it offered me was the time I needed to work on my thesis. I was also introduced to many wonderful new writers, and I enjoyed taking on new and different perspectives.

D'Arcy Randall, Ph.D.

Senior Lecturer, McKetta Department of Chemical Engineering, The University of Texas at Austin
Grant Type: UT-Austin Faculty and Graduate Student Grants Program
Project: Australian Literary History Research Projects

The Clark Center travel grant enabled me to take up a Fryer Library Fellowship offered by the University of Queensland in 2012. Timing constraints prevented me from using the funds that year, but the Fryer librarians agreed that I could return to the St. Lucia (Brisbane) campus in the Summer of 2013 to spend more time in both the established Archives and the editorial files of the University of Queensland Press (UQP). I am writing a memoir about my work as a fiction editor for UQP during the 1980s, with a specific focus on women authors such as Thea Astley, Olga Masters, and Kate Grenville. Access to both sets of archives has been essential for this project. The Clark Center grant also allowed me to make a trip to Sydney, where I made critical discoveries in the Mitchell Library and met with former UQP authors and colleagues.

Between the Fryer and UQP, I was able to find nearly all of the archival material I needed for the memoir. In addition, I drafted two chapters and saw opportunities for writing more scholarly versions that will fill gaps in current research. For instance, the memoir chapter on Thea Astley will focus on our author-editor relationship. A more scholarly article, however, will address a gap of information about Astley’s larger publishing relationship with UQP, and UQP’s role in her long but ultimately successful ambition to find a US publisher.  The scholarly article will be useful for at least three works in progress: a biography of Astley, a study of Astley’s publishing history, and a longer study of US editions of Australian books. Over the spring and summer I both met and corresponded with the scholars working with all three projects.

In Brisbane I also worked with Fryer librarians and UQP management to review 77 boxes of UQP editorial files that will be added to the Fryer’s existing UQP Archive. Former UQP colleague Sue Abbey and I found and recovered boxes of important editorial material relating to the David Unaipon Prize for Indigenous Writers; Peter Carey’s True History of the Kelly Gang (winner of the Mann Booker Prize in 2001); plus correspondence, manuscripts, and proofs for leading Black writers Melissa Lucashenko, Mudrooroo, and Alexis Wright. Abbey and I discussed possible future work on UQP’s Black writing list and attended the Byron Bay Writer’s Festival, which featured Lucashenko, plus other UQP writers Peter Carey, Trevor Shearston, and Matthew Condon.

At the University of Queensland, I met frequently with scholars in the field of Australian literature and literary history: Bronwen Levy, David Carter, Laurie Hergenhan, William Hatherell, and Deborah Jordan. I also reviewed the Astley material with former UQP manager Frank Thompson and former Head Editor Merril Yule, who helped fill in the backstories for some of their correspondence.

In Sydney I visited the Mitchell Library to review early drafts of Kate Grenville’s novel Dreamhouse, which will likely be the focus of my chapter on Grenville. I also met with Grenville herself, who provided a serendipitous connection with the Astley story. I discussed UQP’s migrant writing with Angelo Loukakis, former UQP author and now Executive Director for the Australian Society of Authors; this discussion will inform my chapter on Rosa Cappiello and migrant women writers. Former UQP editor and publishing manager Craig Munro offered outstanding advice for and research help with the Elizabeth Jolley chapter.  Finally, I maintained contact with Seven Writers (another Australian research project) through a meeting with Sara Dowse.

Robert Schaffer

Graduate Student, Department of Government, The University of Texas at Austin 
Grant Type: UT-Austin Faculty and Graduate Student Grants Program
Project: Environmental Legislation and Implementation in Australia

In spring of 2013, I was fortunate enough to receive a research fellowship from the Clark Center for Australia and New Zealand Studies. I used the fellowship money to support a research trip to Australia, where I gathered data on Australian environmental legislation and policy implementation. The trip lasted for approximately six weeks (June 1-July 15), and was split between travel (in Sydney, Melbourne, and Canberra) and a visiting scholar appointment at Australian National University (ANU). The information I gathered will contribute to a multidisciplinary project on US, Australian, and Canadian environmental law, which combines legislative politics with scientific and administrative implementation data.

I spent approximately half of the trip contacting and interviewing Australian environmental NGOs. Most prominently, I interviewed several lawyers and analysts from the Australian Network of Environmental Defenders’ Offices, a government-funded organization that argues most of the public interest environmental cases in Australia. I also spoke with staffers from Greenpeace, Humane Society International, and the Invasive Species Council; between them, these organizations bring a large proportion of the lawsuits, public comments, and petitions authorized under the major Australian environmental statutes, making them an important part of the policymaking process. Finally, I talked to several members of Australian environmental agencies and public auditing organizations, which gave me an insider perspective on the environmental regulatory process.

In total, I conducted 9 formal interviews (approximately one to two hours each), as well as numerous informal phone, email, and personal conversations. These interviews were primarily information-gathering exercises, as participants helped me to locate relevant resources from other organizations. I also worked with academics from four different Australian universities (Australian National University; University of Queensland; University of Melbourne; University of Canberra) across multiple disciplines (biology; law; political science), where we exchanged ideas and data that has greatly enriched my project’s intellectual background.

Aside from the interviews, I also collected an array of original data on Australian environmental policy implementation. These data primarily quantify government adherence to administrative requirements, including various deadlines, reporting provisions, and litigation frequency. Most of this information only covers the federal government, however, I was also able to obtain some limited data on comparable state-level programs in Victoria, Queensland, and New South Wales. Public reports by the Australian Senate, the Department of Environment, the Australian National Audit Office, and the Commission on Productivity provided most of the information I obtained (covering 2000-present, the lifetime of the primary Australian federal environmental statute). I supplemented these data with NGO and academic information, including litigation and implementation data maintained by Dr. Andrew Macintosh (ANU) and Dr. Chris McGrath (University of Queensland; Queensland Environmental Defender’s Office), as well as figures maintained by the Australian Network of Environmental Defenders’ Offices and Humane Society International.

On the legislative side, I gathered and studied an array of Parliamentary speeches and party statements surrounding the passage and amendment of the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act (the primary Australian federal environmental statute). These speeches and statements allowed me to track the law’s legislative history, giving me greater insight into the design principles underlying the statute. Cataloguing the Parliamentary debates also allowed me to connect implementation data with stated MP voting motivations, helping me to develop and explore hypotheses regarding statutory design and amendment. Most of the statements I examined dated from the original EPBC Act debates in 1998 and 1999, as well as the debates over major amendments to the statute passed in 2006. I also read and gathered oversight hearings and reports from the Australian Senate, which has produced a number of reports on EPBC Act implementation and proposed amendments.

Finally, I explored potential Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests with the Department of Environment and the Australian National Audit Office. In both cases, I inquired about various internal implementation figures, which were collected but not publicized by both departments. Officials provided me with some of the information I requested, and informed me that most of the rest would be made available in a forthcoming update to government web databases. If these data are not made available by November of 2013, I intend to submit a formal FOIA request to obtain them.

All together, the interviews and data I collected in Australia will contribute to my professional development in several important ways. In the short term, I plan to publish my findings in law and political science outlets, as well as present my research at the ANZSANA annual conference. The ideas and connections I developed during the trip will also lead to new and exciting collaborative efforts, both with American and with Australian academics. In the United States, for example, I am already exploring a potential collaboration with Professor David Adelman (UT Law School). Various ANU professors have also offered to advise, sponsor, and/or support me financially on future trips to Australia, including Andrew Banfield, Keith Dowding, Juliet Pietsch, Marshall Clarke (all School of Politics and International Relations), and Andrew Macintosh (School of Law). Finally, all of the data and contacts I gathered will help support my long-term dissertation research, helping me to develop and test hypotheses regarding statutory design and policy implementation in the comparative context.

Kurt Heinzelman, Ph.D.

Professor, Department of English, The University of Texas at Austin
Grant Type: UT-Austin Faculty and Graduate Student Grants Program
Project: Featured Writer at Adelaide Writers’ Week and John M. Coetzee Center for Creative Practice

Professor Kurt Heinzelman used his grant to travel to Adelaide, Australia. He was a featured writer at Adelaide Writers’ Week, an event held under the auspices of the renowned Adelaide Festival. As such, Heinzelman gave a poetry reading, delivered a talk on translation and originality at the John M. Coetzee Centre for Creative Practice, and was interviewed by the internationally acclaimed poet John Tranter. Heinzelman’s visit was a first step towards more programmatic exchanges between UT-Austin and the University of Adelaide.