Research Projects in AustLit
AustLit is a unique record of Australia's literary and storytelling history and culture. It has been developed to support scholarship, research, teaching and general enquiry.
We welcome approaches from scholars and others to discuss ideas that might form new Research Projects or which make use of the AustLit infrastructure to organise, analyse and present research findings.
Research projects supported by AustLit are designed to extend and share knowledge about Australia's cultural history by adding rich and diverse content streams while supporting scholarship in specific fields.
AustLit is regularly involved in research and development projects that provide infrastructure and tools to support research projects. See Tools and Collaborations for more details.
Projects supported include:
BlackWords provides access to both general and specific information about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander literary cultures and traditions, providing a platform for the investigation and articulation of what 'Black writing' and 'Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander literatures' might be. BlackWords also contains records describing published and unpublished books, stories, plays, poems and criticism associated with eligible writers and storytellers and includes works in English and in Indigenous languages. Team members contextualise AustLit's timeline by adding ancient stories and songs.
Australian Literary Responses to 'Asia'
This research presents the impact of censorship on reading in Australia between 1901 and 1973. By collecting details of literary publications that were prohibited as imports into twentieth-century Australia, it traces the main arc of federal publications censorship. The bibliography relies on the documented evidence of department and agency practice held by the National Archives of Australia. It has an international scope and includes titles from all over the world, including works by Australian writers published abroad.
Book History and Print Culture
Literary and Publishing History
Hidden Treasures of the Mitchell Library
Australian Newspaper Reviews of 1930
Australian Magazines of the 20th Century
This project mined, visualised and modelled data from AustLit to produce a study that revises established conceptions of Australian literary history. It challenges established arguments in Australian literary studies, book history, feminism, and gender studies, while presenting innovative ways of understanding literature, publishing, authorship and reading, and the relationships between them.