Research projects

Explore a selection of recent Australian Research Council (ARC) and other research projects undertaken by academics in the School of Languages and Linguistics.

Literature, cinema, gender, food and cross-cultural studies

  • Popular Music and Resistance in Latin America

    Dr Mara Favoretto examines the lyrics and visual images of key popular music genres and highlights their interactions with their social, political and economic contexts.

  • Transcultural trajectories in Italian Theatre

    This project studies how the collective re-writing and mise en scène of plays by theatre companies and migrants facilitate inclusion and enhance new forms of belonging.

  • Prose Poetry and the Visual Arts

    In an interdisciplinary fashion, Dr Bertrand Bourgeois’ current research explores the interaction between prose poetry and the visual arts in 19th and 20th century French literature and culture.

  • Images of the Nation in Spanish and Catalan Cinema

    The notion of ‘country-image’ is crucial in post-identity studies of national cultures. Professor Alfredo Martinez-Exposito's project seeks to further develop this concept in order to explore an alternative methodology for the study of the cultural roots of contemporary separatism.

  • Community nutrition and education in a Havana urban farm

    A new grant from the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) is supporting community engagement in Cuba

Language dynamics, identity and social diversity

  • 1 Potato, 2 Wotatoes, 3 Otatoes: Lexical Access In Australian Languages

    This project aims to investigate how listeners use cues from the way speech sounds are produced to break the speech stream into individual, recognisable words.

  • The Daly Languages project

    From 1980 until the mid-1990s, Dr Ian Green conducted linguistic fieldwork in the Daly region in the Northern Territory. The Daly Languages project has made this incredible collection available to the families and communities of the people Green worked with.

  • A sociophonetic study of Aboriginal English

    This project looks at speech production and perception by Aboriginal people in Warrnambool (and surrounds) and now moving to Albury-Wodonga and Mildura (and surrounds).

  • The sounds of Anindilyakwa

    The Anindilyakwa language, spoken on Groote Eylandt of the eastern coast of Arnhem Land, has unique sound patterns that have caused considerable disagreement among linguists.

Language analysis, teaching and testing

Indigenous languages of Australia and the region

  • Digital Daisy Bates

    In collaboration with the National Library of Australia (NLA), this project has made accessible this extremely valuable collection of several hundred wordlists of Australian languages, originally recorded by Daisy Bates in the early 1900s.

  • Darwin prison Indigenous languages program

    Speakers of Indigenous languages are tragically over-represented in Australian prisons, including Darwin prison where almost 90% of inmates are Indigenous and around 50% speak an Indigenous language.

  • Learning Pitjantjatjara: A longitudinal study of how children learn Pitjantjatjara

    This research project looks at the linguistic development of young Indigenous children as they grow up learning the traditional Australian language Pitjantjatjara as their mother tongue.

  • Learning to tell a narrative in Murrinhpatha

    This project investigates the stories told by children who speak the traditional Australian language Murrinhpatha as their first language. Murrinhpatha is a polysynthetic language, spoken in the remote Aboriginal community of Wadeye, NT.

Explore past research