Research highlights

Janet Copley (1926 - 2017), and her husband Merv, were tireless political activists and campaigners for social justice in Newcastle. Evidence of their contribution can be found in the Merv and Janet Copley Collection of news clippings, diaries and autobiographical writing gifted to the University of Newcastle’s Cultural Collections in 2006. The Copley Bequest Pilot Research funds projects up to $10,000 and is intended to seed research development and linkage opportunities. Projects will utilise University of Newcastle and greater Newcastle region historical archival and visual collections with a view to wider community impact for Humanities, Creative Industries and Social Sciences research.

The Copley Archives contains a wealth of material from WW2 to the late 1970s. They contain many Newcastle-specific material, but also through the numerous travel diaries and observations of Australian social life, culture, environment, economy, and industry.

Since the scheme began in 2019, it has funded 15 projects on important social justice topics through in-depth explorations of archival materials documenting period of intense social change in Newcastle. Projects are conducted with support and expertise from staff in the University Library’s Cultural Collections.

Funded projects:

• 2025/26: Effie Karageorgos, Penny Buykx, Kate Senior & Ann Hardy: Surveying alcohol use in Newcastle through the Copley collections 
• 2025/26: Elaine Xu & Belinda Bennett: Public Health Messaging and Visual Narratives of Infectious Diseases in the Hunter from 1950s to 1970s
• 2025/26: Marie-Laure Vuaille-Barcan: Tracing the History of the Alliance Française de Newcastle and Its University Connections
• 2024/25: Prof Catharine Coleborne, Dr Effie Karageorgos, Dr Ann Hardy and A/Prof Elizabeth Roberts-Pedersen – Sickness and Health in the Copley Archive: Medical Humanities Approaches to the Collections 
• 2024/25: Sacha Davis, Julie McIntyre, Jaime Hunt (in PALS) with Industry partners named as applicants: Bridie Moran (Newcastle Museum), Morgan Burgess (Cultural Collections) - German-speakers in Newcastle and the Hunter Valley: migrants, descendants and language legacies, 1849 to the present

• 2023: Dr Jeannine Baker – Women at NBN-3 Project
• 2023: Prof Vicky Haskins - Exploring and re-imagining an emerging consciousness of Indigenous rights through the Copley and Masterton Archives 
• 2022: A/Prof Elizabeth Roberts Pedersen and Dr Kate Davies - Women's Homelessness in Newcastle
• 2022/2023: Dr David Betts and Dr Justin Ellis - Mapping place and (co)use of public spaces in Newcastle by diverse groups for social organising and cohesion, Newcastle Queer Research Project
• 2021: Dr Julie McIntyre, Julia Cook & Steven Threadgold - Participation and representation: Media coverage of women’s sport in Newcastle
• 2021: Keri Glastonbury, Alexandra Lewis, and Caelli Brooker - Unbroken Records: Creating Aging and the Regional Digital Library
• 2020: Dr Justin Ellis, Dr David Betts, Professor Kate Senior – Policing perversion: Surveilling Queer Newcastle 1950-1980
• 2020: Kath McPhillips - Researching historical archives related to clergy perpetrated child sexual abuse in the Hunter region
• 2019: Professor Marguerite Johnson and Dr James Bennett – Marriage Equality in the Hunter Exhibition
• 2019: Trisha Pender and Tamara Blakemore – (i) Hunter Women’s Financial Literacy and (ii) 16 days of Activism to End Gender-Based Violence

The foundation of this important intervention in the history of Australia post-contact is the research of its leader, the late Prof Lyndall Ryan, but its online presentation as an interactive, richly documented resource has amplified its impact immeasurably.

The fifth and final stage of the Map was completed in late 2024. It appears on a UON website and as a layer on TLCMap. The full database is available for download from the Australian Data Archive.

This platform, launched in 2019, collects information about Australian history and culture linked to place. The founding aim of TLCMap was to make the digital affordances of the Colonial Frontier Massacre Map available to all researchers for their own projects. It has searchable national gazetteers and numerous user-contributed map layers. Its assembly of tools and guides aims to make it as simple as possible for researchers to create their own map layers and combine them with existing layers. UON has been the host institution for TLCMap from the beginning. Platform development has also been supported by a number of grants and co-investments from the ARC and the ARDC and by contributions by a group of partner Australian universities.

The Centre for Literary and Linguistic Computing (CLLC) was founded in 1989. Ground breaking stylometrist, the late John Burrows, was at the University of Newcastle from 1976 to 1989 when he retired but carried on significant work, collaborating with Dr Alexis Antonia, developing techniques that are now standard methods used world-wide. Emeritus Prof. Hugh Craig joined in 1989 and became director in 2001. Harold Tarrant and Wayne McKenna were other figures who went on to build DH cultures elsewhere.

CLLC methods are modelled and enabled by the Intelligent Archive workbench. The IA is a Java application which can be downloaded for use on a PC or Mac.

The Early Modern Women Research Network (EMWRN) is an Australian-based network of scholars which aims to bring the often institutionally-isolated scholars of early modern women's writing into dialogue with others in the field, both within Australia and internationally.

EMWRN represents and investigates the various material contexts which women’s writing was circulated during the early modern era in England, through manuscript, print and oral culture, exploring the production, transmission and circulation of texts from the originary moment of their production to later redactions. Now hosted by the ANU, it was created and hosted by the University of Newcastle and one of the major outcomes during that time was the Material Cultures of Early Modern Women’s Writing Digital Archive which presents online editions of women’s writing that circulated in a variety of forms in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.