Postgraduate Research in the School of Philosophical and Historical Inquiry

SOPHI is a research intensive School in a research-intensive Faculty and University. Our ambition is to be one of the leading research centres in the Humanities and Social Sciences in Australia and in the world. For more details about individual academic projects and profiles, check our Academic Staff pages.

SOPHI has a wide range of Postgraduate students in Archaeology, Classics and Ancient History, Gender and Cultural Studies, History and Philosophy.

We offer comprehensive postgraduate training from MA to PhD, including an extensive array of attractive postgraduate research options and programs. Here are just a few of our Postgraduates.

PhD student, Department of Gender and Cultural Studies

My research interests include gender, sex and sexuality in modern China, identities and subjectivities in socialist and post-socialist eras, as well as China’s social and cultural changes in the transnational context. My research project mainly focuses on the articulation of queer identities in Chinese cyberspace. I am interested in the emergence of queer identities in post-socialist China, the construction of queer identities in China’s online public sphere, how China’s history and present impact on these identities, and how these identities are related to post-socialist China’s project of (re)making subjectivities and (re-) imagination of modernity. China’s tremendous social transformation in the past decades offers fascinating topics to researchers from different fields. This project serves as my effort to understand what is happening in China and what has happened to Chinese people who live through this unfolding history.

PhD student, Department of History

The working title for my PhD thesis is How Turtle Island Sounded: Native North American Soundways from Creation to Re-Creation. The main aims of my research include bringing the oppressed geography or "cosmography" of Turtle Island (Native North America) to the surface of the mainstream along with the sacred history of this forgotten place, submerged beneath European maps and histories for centuries. Often these histories have created a mythology in which the sounds of Christian European modernity drowned out and subdued the howling primitive wilderness of indigenous America. By shifting our own focus from the eye to the ear we can come to know Turtle Island on its own terms and learn that, far from being silenced by Europeans, Turtle Island's acoustemology and accompanying soundways not only survived contact with Europeans, but got louder over time. By studying the multiple ways of hearing indigenous soundways, we can also obtain a better appreciation for why the cultural conflict between Europeans and indigenous communities was often volatile. The thesis draws on theories of neuroscience, musicology, psychoacoustics, and anthropology to generate a narrative that simultaneously spans, in a material sense, from pre-contact to the present-day Powwow and, in a spiritual sense, from creation to re-creation.

PhD student, Department of Classics and Ancient History

Murray’s PhD research explores the ideologies associated with Roman camps including discipline, aggression, protection, Romanitas and Providentia. A wide range of literary sources as well as archaeological and numismatic evidence have been examined to establish continuity and change in these ideologies throughout the Roman period. Murray has had previous research published on various aspects of Greek and Roman didactic military literature and Roman historiography as well as ‘campgate’ bronzes. His most recent research into the interpretation of Late Geometric Greek art, ‘Not Twins at All: The Agora Oinochoe Reinterpreted’, came out in the 75th anniversary edition of Hesperia.

PhD student, Department of Archaeology

I am interested in archaeology as a discipline, what it is, what it has been and what it may become. My work looks at theories of archaeology with a particular emphasis on how visual forms of communication intersect with them. My current PhD research follows on with concerns raised through my fourth year thesis, continuing to examine theory relating to the structure and form of visual languages within an archaeological context, but examining this specifically in relation to the history of mapping use in archaeology. Mapping is a tool that has been utilised for a number of ends throughout the history of archaeology. By examining the types of maps constructed over time for archaeological mapping I seek a semiotic understanding of this ‘language’.

PhD student, Department of Archaeology

Erna is a member of an interdisciplinary research team looking at how producers of material culture have responded to the collecting activities of outsiders. The formation of museum collections has often been explored from the perspective of the collecting society. This project, supported by an ARC Linkage Grant, seeks to build upon artefact-centred research that suggests many early museum objects were made speci cally for exchange. Erna will focus on material culture from Central Province, Papua New Guinea, including grass skirts, feather headdresses and string bags (billums) held in museums in Australia, UK, Italy and PNG. She holds an APAI with this project.

PhD student, Department of Classics and Ancient History

I am an Ancient History PhD student, supervised by Dr Kathryn Welch. My thesis examines attempts to reform provincial government during the Late Republic and their political context. I hope to show that Romans in this period were genuinely interested in improving the way Rome treated her subjects, and that figures traditionally seen as combatants could in fact be collaborators in this project. Some aspects of my research include the lex repetundarum, the virtue-vocabulary of the good governor, and the politics of the 50s BC, with a particular focus on Pompey the Great and Cato the Younger.