Digital Studio

Tyne Daile Sumner is Research Associate on an ARC Discovery Project Literature and the face: A critical history led by Professor Stephanie Trigg and Dr Joe Hughes (SCC) and Professor Guillemette Bollens at the University of Geneva and on an ARC LIEF project led by Professor Rachel Fensham (SCC/Digital Studio), Australian Cultural Data Engine for Research, Industry and Government designed to interconnect cultural heritage datasets around Australia, as well as a researcher and consultant with expertise in digital skills training, community engagement, and Digital Humanities. Her doctoral research examined the intersection between Literature, surveillance and big data; and her monograph, Lyric Eye: The Poetics of Twentieth-Century Surveillance, was published with Routledge in 2021. On Twitter she is @tynedaile.

Mia Martin Hobbs is an early career oral historian, with a research focus on transnational histories and memories of war and conflict, trauma, and reconciliation. She has been developing a digital mapping project, ‘Return to Vietnam: Mapping Combat Tours and Post-War Tourism of Australian and American Veterans’ with Emily Fitzgerald and Daniel Russo-Batterham from the Melbourne Data Analytics Platform. Based on her PhD which interviewed Australian and American Vietnam veterans who returned to Việt Nam after the War, the map will exhibit the spatial-temporal dynamics of veterans' return journeys. Users will be able to watch the trajectory of veterans' return journeys across time, and the map will include clips of interview data for users to open and listen to. The plan is for completion by October 2021 to coincide with the publication of her book Return to Vietnam: An Oral History of American and Australian Veterans' Journeys (Cambridge, 2021).

She completed her PhD in History at the University of Melbourne in 2018, where she teaches American and Southeast Asian history. She has published on veteran memories and war narratives in The Australian Journal of Politics and History and Oral History Review, and written on contemporary issues surrounding veterans’ returns to Vietnam for The Conversation and Australian Policy History (twice). Mia tweets @miamhobbs.

Reuben Brown is an ethnomusicologist with expertise in Indigenous Australian performance traditions from northern Australia, and digital environments for accessing, locating, and recirculating archival recordings of song and related metadata. Reuben enjoys research affiliations with the Research Unit for Indigenous Language (RUIL), Research Unit for Indigenous Arts and Cultures (RUIAC), and the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language (CoEDL).

With a postdoctoral 2020 ARC DECRA, he is developing a project on modern diplomacy that involves understanding ceremonial exchange at Indigenous festivals. This project aims to investigate how ceremonial performance – between Indigenous and non-Indigenous participants, and between different clan and language groups – generate diplomacy and intercultural dialogue at Indigenous festivals in northern Australia enacts diplomacy. Expected outcomes include a mobile song library of archival recordings. Expected benefits include strengthened community efforts to sustain Indigenous song traditions into the future.

For his PhD research based at PARADISEC, Reuben returned archival recordings of song from the 1948 American Australian Expedition to Arnhem Land to communities in the Northern Territory. He collaborated with ceremony leaders of manyardi in western Arnhem Land to document and analyse these recordings as part of a living and multilingual song tradition performed at funerals, diplomacy ceremonies, festivals and public celebrations; as well as working with an interdisciplinary team of linguists, musicologists, historians, archivists and song specialists in the Pilbara and western Arnhem land to build online and offline platforms for accessing archival song recordings linked to community-enriched metadata. Reuben tweets at @ReubenJayBrown.

Henry Reese is a historian, researcher and musician. He completed his History PhD at the University of Melbourne in 2019. Entitled ‘Colonial Soundscapes’, this thesis was the first cultural history of early sound recording in Australia. Using a novel methodology that combines the material and the cultural, this project knits the sensory, social, business and economic histories of sound recording in a modern settler society into a cohesive whole. He is currently working as a sessional tutor and research assistant on various projects including the history of museum exchanges, urban history and podcasting. He is also a research assistant on Dr. Reuben Brown’s DECRA project.

Hannah Gould is a socio-cultural anthropologist and research fellow (SSPS), and a member of the DeathTech Research Team at the University of Melbourne. For the DeathTech project, she works on questions of discarding and disconnection, religion, and material culture, through interconnected research projects on ‘the stuff of death’ and ‘the death of stuff’. Her doctoral research, for which she received the Japan Foundation Fellowship, investigated the Japanese funeral industry, showing how cultural traditions around death can themselves ‘die’, be replaced, or transformed. Hannah’s ethnography of the production, consumption, and disposal of domestic Buddhist altars reveals how people creatively use material objects to forge intimate relationships with the dead.

Nat Cutter is a PhD candidate (SHAPS) at the University of Melbourne, researching the experiences of British expatriates in the Ottoman Maghreb, 1660-1714, and their influence on diplomatic, economic, military, and cultural relations between Britain and the Maghreb. Nat has published prize-winning research on representations of Maghrebi diversity and Anglo-Maghrebi relations in early British newspapers, news transmission between Britain and the Maghreb, and British social life and isolation in Tunis and Tripoli. He is a founding contributor to Medieval and Early Orients, an AHRC-funded digital project for the study of premodern exchanges between England and Islamic worlds, and is affiliated with the Enlightenment, Romanticism, and Contemporary Culture Research Unit at the University of Melbourne.

From 2017-19 Nat served as Acting Project Officer in the Digital Studio and then as Project Manager on the ARC Linkage project Creative Convergence: Enhancing Impact in Regional Theatre for Young People. He will be returning as Research Assistant on the ARC LIEF project led by Professor Rachel Fensham (SCC/Digital Studio), the Australian Cultural Data Engine for Research, Industry and Government, designed to interconnect cultural heritage datasets around Australia. Nat teaches in medieval-early modern history, history of piracy, and economic history, and tweets @NatCutter.

Andrew Fuhrmann is a PhD candidate in the School of Culture and Communications at the University of Melbourne. He is currently researching the work of Melbourne-based contemporary dance choreographer Lucy Guerin AO. He also has a research interest in performing arts archives and curates the Theatre and Dance Platform with Rachel Fensham, an archival project initiated by the Digital Studio at the University of Melbourne.

Sam Holleran’s PhD examines public participation in the reimagination of urban burial sites and he is a member of the DeathTech Research Team at the University of Melbourne. He is also an interdisciplinary artist and writer whose work examines the power and politics imbued in urban design, and in particular, the use of everyday objects in cities, like street furniture, parks, and signage. He has worked as an art director, researcher, and educator in the field of civically-engaged design with the Center for Urban Pedagogy (CUP) in New York City and the Chair for Architecture and Urban Design at ETH-Zürich. He tweets @sam_holler.

Tom Keep is a PhD candidate in Archaeology, under the supervision of Dr Gijs Tol and Associate Professor Andrew Jamieson of the University of Melbourne, and external supervisor Dr Rhodora Vennarucci at the University of Arkansas. He is interested in how the value of archaeological research can be most widely, equitably, and engagingly distributed in the digital era. He has previously worked as a research assistant at LithodomosVR under University of Melbourne alumnus Dr Simon Young.