We have the pleasure of announcing the two winners of the inaugural AAANZ Early Career Publishing Program.
But before we do so, we wish to acknowledge the many exciting and more than deserving proposals we received. Indeed, we received submissions from nineteen early-career scholars, which at once made clear the extraordinary health of Australasian art history writing and the need to find opportunities to have it published. A letter has been sent to all the unsuccessful applicants, suggesting ways in which they might pursue publication outside of the Program, and AAANZ will be pursuing ways to get more of the work of PhD graduates from around the region into print.
In making their selection, the Committee took several factors into consideration. In line with the original aims of the Program, there was an emphasis on the proposal addressing some aspect of the art and culture of Australia and New Zealand. The Committee also considered how easily the proposal could be turned into a published book. Finally, the Committee looked to see whether the applicant had published much since finishing their thesis, again as some way of assessing the likelihood of turning their thesis into a book. As well, given our responsibilities to our publisher, we tried to take into account the potential readership for the resulting book. Given that these would be the first two titles in a hopefully ongoing series, we were mindful that our selections appealed to as wide an audience as possible.
Our first winner is Victoria Souliman of the University of Sydney (adjunct Lecturer at the University of New England) and her proposal “The Remoteness that Pains Us”: National Identity, Expatriatism and Women’s Agency in the Artistic Exchanges Between Australia and Britain in the 1920s and 1930s. In her proposal Souliman aims to trace the careers of a number of Australian expatriate women artists and critics, such as Dora Meeson, Ethel Anderson, Edith Fry and Clarice Zander. She shows how they have been systematically excluded from the existing accounts of Australian art and speculates as to what the effects of their inclusion might be. We felt that the project was extremely timely, given the recent National Gallery of Australia exhibition Know My Name, and also noted Souliman’s considerable publishing since the completion of her thesis.
Our second winner is Brenda L. Croft of the Australian National University and her proposal Kurrwa (stone tool/axehead) to Kartak (container, cup, billycan, pannikin): hand -made/held-ground. An enduring, collaborative, practice-led research journey representing a distinct Australian First Nations Storying/Storywork and First Nations Performative Autoethnography as subalter/N/ative archive and methodology – created from the rememorying, re/imagined standpoint of a Gurindji | Malngin | Mudburra | Anglo-Australian | Chinese | German | Irish. Croft is from the Gurindji/Malngin/Mudburra peoples from the Victoria River region of the Northern Territory of Australia, and Anglo-Australian/German/Irish/Chinese heritage. She was awarded her PhD from the University of New South Wales in 2021 and her project combines writing, curating and art practice in what she calls a “cultural archaeology” or ‘performative autoethnography”, exploring both her and others’ heritage as part of the displaced Gurindji community. The Committee also noted that Croft is the 2023 Whitlam-Fraser Chair in Australian Studies at Harvard University and already a well-known artist with considerable interest in her work.
We would like to thank our fellow Committee members, Helen Ennis and Chari Larsson, for the efforts they made in assessing the numerous proposals and their commitment to seeing the best early-career Australasian art history get published. We would also like to thank Wendy Garden and Rebecca Renshaw of AAANZ for the assistance they offered and their ongoing encouragement of this worthy project.
We will be calling for applications for the next round of publication sometime next year in what we hope will be an ongoing project.
With thanks to all,
Rex Butler and Anthony White
AAANZ Early Career Publishing Program