Sydney Public Humanities is a university-wide initiative founded on the belief that the humanities are at their best when they are answerable to people beyond the academy.
Led by staff from the School of Humanities, we’re a coalition of academics, communities and other partners dedicated to collaboratively producing, sharing and translating new scholarship. Why? Because we’re committed to closing the gap between research and the diverse publics, institutions and communities that it should serve.
Our people are already doing work that matters — in prisons and policy settings, schools, Indigenous communities, museums and galleries. Sydney Public Humanities exists to enable that work and bring it to a broader audience. It's also helping us get the right people in the room to co-produce new research on the questions that count.
Ultimately, we're interested in a humanities that resists vanity, questions orthodoxy and isn't afraid to get its hands dirty.
1. public humanities is what happens whenever humanities scholarship interacts with public life
2. a spectrum of activities ranging from from public-facing academic writing and teaching through to collaborative knowledge-making with communities and policy work.
Sydney Public Humanities researchers, communities and partners are working across a wide range of academic disciplines and subject areas, from the therapeutic benefits of classical drama to the lived experiences of Indigenous people living in settler colonies.
Project Description—
This interactive, multimedia, storytelling project explores the strange and fascinating lives of animals. The project brings together an assortment of animal stories inspired by the collection of the Chau Chak Wing Museum at the University of Sydney. The stories explore the strange and fascinating lives of animals, from avian musicians learning to inhabit new soundscapes and mobsters hosting turtle races, to snails hitching a ride on migrating birds to establish themselves on far flung islands. Ultimately, the project opens up new possibilities for exploring not only how animals live their own lives, but also the diverse and fascinating ways in which they make our lives both meaningful and possible.
Rather than collecting all of these objects together into a single space to create a conventional exhibition, this project has created an interactive trail of audio stories that weaves its way throughout the entire museum, leading visitors between selected objects and sharing stories with them along the way. The stories can be explored in the museum through an immersive app or listened to/read anywhere in the world via the project website. In addition, the project includes a range of exercises that help participants to think about and work with the museum collection and this set of stories from multiple creative perspectives. The animal trail launched in early 2025.
Research team and partners—
This project was developed by Julia Kindt, Thom van Dooren, Zoë Sadokeirski, and Andrew Burrell, researchers from the School of Humanities at the University of Sydney and the Discipline of Visual Communication at the University of Technology Sydney, in collaboration with the Chau Chak Wing Museum at the University of Sydney.
Funding—
Funding and support for this project was generously provided by the School of Humanities and the Sydney Environment Institute at the University of Sydney.
Link/s—
A Curious Trail of Animal Tales
Project Description—
The Powerful Stories Network (PSN) was established in 2024 at the University of Sydney to present research, support community organisations, and publish on Indigenous and refugee stories in settler colonies across the world. It grew out of the Powerful Stories Workshop, which brought together researchers, and Indigenous and refugee communities, to discuss the diverse forms, practices and outcomes of storytelling.
Since then, PSN has become a lively space to showcase research and host critical conversations about Indigenous and refugee struggles, both locally and internationally. The project is committed to interrogating and subverting settler colonial violence through the voices of the most marginalised in society.
The PSN runs a popular program of public events, including book launches, panel discussions and talks by visiting researchers and community figures, and welcomes researchers and community members to join the network.
Research team and partners—
TBC
Link/s—
powerfulstories.org
Project Description—
Were there any women in the history of philosophy? Until very recently, the answer has been a resounding No. Slowly, however, we are starting to uncover women’s place in the emergence of philosophy, from ancient Greece onwards. This project contributes to this important work, by homing in on women’s contributions to the crucial debates concerning the “human” and the “natural.”
These two categories have for centuries shaped our thinking about the world and the human place within it. The same is the case for the category “woman,” which has often been identified with nature. While scholars have critically investigated these categories and their consequences, none has considered how women themselves theorised nature and their distinctive status as both natural and human.
Through systematic study of women’s contributions to these debates taps into unique resources for thinking carefully and critically about the human place in and responsibility toward nature. In so doing, the project aims to advance Australia’s collective resilience by helping to develop ways to live ethically in challenging times.
Recent reports (e.g., 2022 SDG Gender Equity Index) have shown that Australia is falling behind other countries in terms of gender equality. Through the podcast, “The Wednesday Society,” and public-focused discussions and articles, the project aims to increase awareness of women’s contributions to European thought and culture and thereby advance Australia’s effort to achieve equality and inclusivity in society and professional life.
Research team and partners—
Professor Dalia Nassar
Funding—
ARC Future Fellowship (2025-2028)
Link/s—
The Wednesday Society
Project Description—
In 403 BCE the herald Cleocritus stopped a civil war in Athens by reminding the men across the line that they had danced in choruses together. Choreia, the collective song and dance that every Athenian citizen underwent, was ordinary civic training. This project asks what that training did to the people who undertook it, and whether it still can.
It grows out of Performing Wisdom, which since 2004 has staged more than a dozen Greek plays with school students, undergraduates, working professionals, and military veterans. With Out of Chaos Theatre and the Australian Defence Force's ARRTS programme, service members develop, rehearse, and stage a production of Sophocles' Philoctetes, carrying it from Brisbane to Lemnos. Secondary school and university students in Sydney train in reconstructed choral practice and perform for their own communities. Participants are surveyed, observed, interviewed, and physiologically monitored throughout, in schools and in the MARCS laboratory. Findings from the modern performers are then turned back on the ancient evidence and used to read it again.
Public outputs include the performances and their talk-backs, open community workshops, freely available teaching resources for schools, a documentary record of the Lemnos production, and writing for general readers, beginning with "Dancing Democracy" in Public Humanities (2026).
Research team and partners—
James H. Collins II (Classics and Ancient History, Sydney) leads the project with Peter Wilson (Classics and Ancient History, Sydney), Kate Stevens (MARCS Institute for Brain, Behaviour and Development, Western Sydney), and Jose Hanham (Educational Psychology, Australian Catholic University). Paul O'Mahony and Out of Chaos Theatre direct the practice-based reconstruction work. Community and institutional partners include the ADF's ARRTS programme, the Lysicrates Foundation, Harvard's Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington and Nauplio, the National Theatre of Greece, and schools in the Research Invested Schools Network.
Funding—
Pilot work at the University of Texas at Austin was supported by a Ransom Center fellowship; at the University of Sydney, by a SOH Research Support Scheme.
Project Description—
Living on the Edge: River Country was a multi-year collaborative project that explored the relationships of Australian communities with freshwater ecological communities, with a particular focus on connecting to threatened species and places. This project considered what these places are like, why they matter and how we can protect and regenerate them.
The project brought together a wide range of community voices and perspectives—including cultural researchers, writers, curators, traditional custodians, artists, school children, policymakers, scientists and community conservationists—to share knowledge and explore ideas. Ultimately, it aimed to create both spaces and resources for a broad public dialogue on our changing relationships with watery places through a series of public and scholarly events, broadcasts, publications, and the development of educational resources.
Research team and partners—
This project ran from 2023-2026 and was developed by the National Museum of Australia (through the James O Fairfax Senior Fellow in Culture and Environment Program) and the Sydney Environment Institute at the University of Sydney, and was led by Kirsten Wehner (NMA), Cameron Muir (NMA), and Thom van Dooren (Sydney).
Funding—
The core of this project was generously supported by the James O Fairfax Foundation, the Australian Research Council (FT160100098, DP220101258), the National Museum of Australia, and the Sydney Environment Institute at the University of Sydney. Specific outputs were made possible by additional funding and support from Petaurus Education Group, the Cad Factory and a NSW Government Regional Arts Touring Fund grant.
Link/s—
Living On The Edge: River Country
Project Description—
Blue Mountains Archaeology is an interdisciplinary research program that combines cultural and scientific knowledge to advance understanding and protection of Aboriginal cultural heritage across the Greater Blue Mountains World Heritage Area. Designed and delivered in partnership with Aboriginal custodians and organisations, the program brings together Indigenous knowledge, archaeology, and environmental science to investigate Aboriginal cultural practice from the Last Ice Age to the present.
A key component of the program is the Gulamada Project, co-directed by Dharug Custodian Aboriginal Corporation. The project supports First Nations teams to record previously undocumented Aboriginal heritage sites while providing opportunities for University students to work alongside cultural custodians in the field. This work strengthens heritage protection by providing new cultural information to National Parks and Wildlife Service (NPWS) managers and supports the recognition of Indigenous Cultural Heritage values within the Greater Blue Mountains World Heritage Area.
The next phase of research focuses on the upper Blue Mountains, one of Australia's most significant yet under-researched high-altitude cultural landscapes. Through analyses of stone artefacts, environmental records, and cultural sites, the research will generate new knowledge about how Aboriginal people adapted to changing climates, lived in mountain environments, and maintained trade networks over the past 20,000 years.
Research team and partners—
Academic team: Amy Mosig Way (USYD/Australian Museum), Wayne Brennan (USYD), Emily Nutman (USYD), Tim Barrows (UNSW), Mike Spate (La Trobe), Paul Hesse (Macquarie). Community research partners: Dharug Custodian Aboriginal Corporation and the Blue Mountains Indigenous Advisory Committee.
Funding—
ARC Discovery Project DP260101656 New insights on Australia’s oldest high-altitude occupation
Federal Department Climate Change, Energy, Environment and Water (DCCEEW) First Nations Heritage Grants The Gulamada Project: Documenting previously unrecorded rock art sites in the Blue Mountains.
Australian Museum Foundation Deep Time on Bell’s Line
Link/s—
Australia's oldest occupied Ice Age cave found at high elevation in Blue Mountains
Dargan Shelter: Oldest human occupied Ice Age site found in the Blue Mountains
The earliest evidence of high-elevation ice age occupation in Australia
Project description—
A key methodological commitment is to bring established academic ethical frameworks into stronger dialogue with Pacific stakeholders, through a series of stakeholder, academic, and policy workshops.
Australia has recognised an ethical responsibility to share in the international response to climate displacement. Australia’s ethical responsibility derives from factors including geographical proximity to affected communities, high carbon-emitter status, and wealth. Acting on this responsibility in practice is challenging, however, because the ethical scope and content of Australia’s responsibility has not yet been clearly established. Progress requires answers to several questions: Should Australia understand its ethical responsibilities as directed primarily towards displaced individuals, or rather towards larger communities whose traditional lands and ways of life are existentially threatened by climate change? On what basis should these ethical responsibilities be shared: between Australia and other states in the international community; among people and institutions within Australia; and between displaced and non-displaced communities in the region? What policies and institutions could best uphold these ethical responsibilities.
Research team and partners—
Chief investigators; Associate Professor Terry Macdonald (Melbourne Uni), Associate Professor Stephanie Collins (Monash Uni), Associate Professor Luara Ferracioli (Sydney Uni). Research Assistant; Zamela Gina.
Partner Organisation; Australian Pasifika Educators Network
Advisory board; Reverend Dr. Cliff Bird, Professor David Schlosberg, Dylan Asafo, Professor Jane McAdam, Jessica Van Son, Professor Jioji Ravulo, Dr. Justin See, Associate Professor Krushil Watene, Ruben Robin, Teanibuaka Tabunga, Reverend Professor Dr Upolu Luma Vaai.
Funding—
Australian Research Council (Discovery Project)
Image/Artwork: Jenine Tewid
Project Description—
Politics as a Way of Life begins from a simple idea: politics does not just govern us. Political ideas and institutions reach deep into everyday life, shaping our identities, desires, relationships, moral judgments, and sense of what makes a life worth living. In societies where organized religion has receded, politics can even become a source of meaning and self-formation.
The project explores this formative power from two directions. Liberalism as a Way of Life (Princeton, 2024) asks how liberal values can be consciously taken up as resources for living. The forthcoming The Good Life State: Politics After Liberalism (Allen Lane and Liveright) turns to states that reject liberal restraint and openly use law, education, welfare, media, and public culture to cultivate particular kinds of people and rival visions of human flourishing.
Together, the books ask a question increasingly urgent around the world: what role should politics play in shaping who we become?
The project carries this conversation beyond the university through essays, interviews, podcasts, public lectures, policy discussions, and international symposia, including the ABC’s Alan Saunders Lecture, Festival of Dangerous Ideas, Sydney Ideas events, and an address to Australia’s Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet.
Research team and partners—
The project is led by Alexandre Lefebvre, Professor of Politics and Philosophy at the University of Sydney, and developed through an international network of research collaborations. Fieldwork and institutional partnerships include the Danube Institute in Budapest, the Tsinghua Institute for Advanced Study in Humanities and Social Sciences in Beijing, and Fudan University’s China Institute in Shanghai, with forthcoming research in the United States, India, and Israel. Liberalism as a Way of Life was developed with support from Princeton University’s Center for Human Values. As the project expands, it brings together scholars, institutions, policymakers, and other interlocutors across its different national cases.
Link/s—
alexlefebvre.com
Description—
Vythoulas is the only known site on Kythera with over 5000 years of human activity. Throughout this long period, its landscape sustained populations. Yet the region also experienced significant climatic, political, and social changes. How did its people manage their natural resources in the face of extended periods of heat or cold? How did these practices change when new groups arrived seeking refuge or to assume political control? EVOKE asks these questions to address two known challenges today: the impact of climate change, and the Greek diaspora’s desire to retain linguistic and cultural connections with Greece.
Specifically, EVOKE’s results are being used to recommend sustainable environmental practices that help Kythera and other islands better manage their natural resources, particularly water. It also uses its deep-time knowledge to enhance cultural and linguistic connections between Kythera and its global diaspora by producing bilingual educational resources for Kytherian and Greek-Australian diaspora schools, and creating exhibition content for Melbourne’s Hellenic Museum and Kythera’s new Migration Museum.
To achieve this, EVOKE unites archaeology, landscape research, environmental analysis, archival work, ethnography, and material culture studies. It documents archaeological, environmental, written and lived histories of Vythoulas to reconstruct long-term patterns of natural and social resilience and change.
Research team and partners—
Project Director: Professor Tamar Hodos (University of Sydney), Field Director: Dr Konstantinos Trimmis (University of Sydney affiliate), Logistics Director: Dr Lita Tzortzopolou-Gregory (University of Sydney affiliate).
Senior Team members are from Cardiff Metropolitan University (UK); Institut national de recherche archéologiques preventives (France); Universidade de São Paulo (Brazil); Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina (Brazil); University of California San Diego (USA); University of Melbourne (Australia); University of Oklahoma (USA); University of Vienna (Austria).
Funding—
University of Sydney, Harvard University’s Center for Hellenic Studies in Greece, The Nicholas Anthony Aroney Trust and Peter Maneas
Description—
What is it like to be a boy today? The Boys Research project makes sense of competing expectations around boys' identity, relationships, and wellbeing from an affirmative feminist perspective. At a time when public debate often presents boys either as being in crisis or as beneficiaries of masculine privilege, our research moves beyond these narratives to attend to the diverse experiences and representations of boys in a time of profound social change. Through research, public engagement, and collaboration with schools and educators, the project contributes to broader conversations about gender equality. By generating accessible and nuanced analyses of how boys and boyhood are understood and represented, the project aims to support more informed public discussions and constructive responses to the challenges facing young people today.
Research team and partners—
University of Sydney; Professor Catherine Driscoll, Dr Shawna Tang, Dr Jessica Kean, Dr Finola Laughren, Dr Prudence Black, Dr Kellie Burns, Hannah Hayes and Sarah Demekech.
Menzies School of Health Research; Associate Professor Liam Grealy
University of Technology Sydney; Associate Professor Timothy Laurie
University of Wollonging; Sophie Gilfeather-Spetere
Funding—
Australian Boys: Beyond the Boy Problem, Australian Research Council (ARC)2 Mar 2021 - 30 Apr 2025; Driscoll C, Tang S, Kean J, Grealy L, and Laurie T.
Link/s—
https://boysresearch.org/
Description—
Truths Past and Present takes the discovery of truth as a shared civic value in ancient Greece and puts it in conversation with one of today’s most urgent challenges: the erosion of public trust, the decline of truth as a common point of reference, and the rise of mis- and disinformation. Rather than staying within academia, this program is built around various forms of public engagement. In 2025 I co-authored a report for the Office of the Chief Scientist on how museums, galleries, and libraries can build resilience to mis- and disinformation, now under consideration by Cabinet. The project also runs a series of Humanities Salons at the University of Sydney, bringing humanities students together with judges, journalists, scientists and members of the public to discuss truth and misinformation in everyday life. Two of the three Salons last year were co-taught with Justice Anthe Philippides from Queensland.
Alongside this, I have served as an advisor for the ABC History Briefs format and am one of the inaugural editors of Public Humanities, a new international journal dedicated to publicly engaged scholarship published by Cambridge University Press. My opinion writing includes an article in the Sydney Morning Herald that has sparked public conversation about the value of the humanities. I am currently developing partnerships with public sector collaborators (museums, universities, public broadcasters, doctors, judges, teachers, etc.). Together these activities translate historical insight into practical tools, conversations, and policy guidance that help Australian institutions and publics to navigate problems of truth and truthfulness today.
Research team and partners—
The research is led by Prof. Julia Kindt and the larger team includes Dr. Edward Armstrong and Dr. Joshua McDermott.
Funding—
A part of this project is funded as a proof-of-concept study by the Australian Research Council (DP250102223).
Michael is Professor of History, specialising in the American Revolution and early America, with current projects examining comparative Indigenous experiences of empire, the place of the Revolution in Black American life, and memoirs written by ordinary Revolutionary War soldiers. He also runs the Powerful Stories Network, which was established in 2024 to examine Indigenous and refugee stories in settler colonies, and has held research fellowships at the Huntington Library, the International Center for Jefferson Studies, and the Massachusetts Historical Society.
Julia is Professor of Ancient History, and the first woman appointed full professor in Classics and Ancient History at the University of Sydney. A historian of ancient Greece, her writing has appeared in History Today, Meanjin, the Australian Book Review and The Conversation, alongside work as an Associate Editor of Public Humanities. Her book The Trojan Horse and Other Stories: Ten Ancient Creatures that Make Us Human won the 2024 Rhakotis Prize for book of the year.
Dalia is Professor of Philosophy and an Australian Research Council Future Fellow, working across the history of German philosophy and environmental philosophy and ethics. Her monograph Romantic Empiricism: Nature, Art, and Ecology from Herder to Humboldt traces a neglected philosophical tradition and argues for its relevance to environmental thinking today. In August 2026, she launched The Wednesday Society, a podcast that invites listeners to discover neglected thinkers and ideas - and asks the question, why do they still matter? The first season, 'On Beauty', is co-hosted with acclaimed pianist and writer Simon Tedeschi.
Thom is Professor of Environmental Humanities in the School of Humanities. His research explores the philosophical, ethical and political questions raised by species extinction and human entanglements with threatened species and places — work developed across four books, including A World in a Shell: Snail Stories for a Time of Extinctions (short listed for the Prime Minister’s Literary Award). His popular essays have appeared in The Atlantic, The LA Review of Books, The Griffith Review, and elsewhere. In 2025 he received the BBVA Foundation's Biophilia Award for his contribution to understanding and communicating the significance of species extinction.
The School of Humanities and its disciplines run an exciting calendar of public lectures and events each year.
Room 607, Brennan MacCallum Building A18,
The University of Sydney, NSW, 2006
Phone: 1800 SYD UNI (1800 793 864) (in Australia)
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Email: soh.enquiries@sydney.edu.au
