The University of Sydney has entered into a three-year agreement with the Australian National University (ANU) to establish and deliver a Fellowship to be known as the SSSHARC/HRC Fellowship in Creative Practice.

Designed with the aim of establishing opportunities for collaboration in the creative practice space, the Fellowship provides a platform for interdisciplinary and cross-institutional exchanges.

"In this flagship fellowship scheme, we aim to advance recognition of creative practice and the contribution creative practitioner’s make to the wider research environment. I think we all understand that creativity is at the core of research inquiry and the methods we develop to further and share knowledge," said SSSHARC Director, Professor Lee Wallace.

One creative practice scholar or practitioner will be selected every year to spend time collaborating with colleagues at the Sydney Social Sciences and Humanities Advanced Research Centre (SSSHARC) and the Humanities Research Centre (HRC). Fellows will divide their time between the University of Sydney and ANU where they will feature in the ANU’s Distinguished Lecture Series.

“As public debates over the value of humanities-oriented research escalate, the need to engage with different knowledge practices, systems, and cultural products has become acute. This new Fellowship supports a creative research leader who will share and seed research ideas, links, capacity, and collaborations across and beyond scholarly and public communities of knowledge. Through the fellowship, they will contribute to current conversations about the cultures, conditions, and experiences of life in in our anthropogenic world,” HRC Director Kylie Message said.

For 2023, the inaugural SSSHARC/HRC Fellowship in Creative Practice for 2023 has been awarded to Jean McNeil.

Professor McNeil is an award-winning author of 15 books of fiction, non-fiction, poetry and essays. Much of her work deals with nature, the environment and climate change. She has worked closely with a number of organisations as writer-in-residence, including the British Antarctic Survey and the UK Natural Environment Research Council.

Through her work with climate change narratives she has achieved considerable impact within and beyond academic settings. She is now extending her work to include other global climate change imaginaries and writing the Anthropocene. During her SSSHARC / HRC Fellowship she will continue to work on the aesthetics and politics of narrating climate change. Given Australia’s position on one of the front lines of climate change transformations, she is keen to explore Australian stories, institutions and imaginaries.

For more information on events related to Professor McNeil’s visit, see the SSSHARC website.