Hosted by the Arts and Health Research Group at the School of the Arts & Media, UNSW Sydney, this one-day forum brings together artists, researchers, healthcare professionals and community partners to explore how creativity is transforming health and wellbeing. Through inspiring presentations, practical case studies and discussions, discover innovative, evidence-based approaches across mental health, dementia care, paediatric palliative care and community wellbeing.

Whether you’re an artist, clinician, researcher, policymaker or community practitioner, you'll gain fresh ideas, practical insights and valuable connections in Arts and Health.

Experience a night of exhilarating experimentation in solo performance.

Join our solo performance makers as they plunge us through the looking glass and into strange waters that reflect, distort, and even transform us.

In this series of live encounters UNSW’s emerging artists excavate what lies beneath… the mesmerising, the mystifying, the things that have been bubbling away for centuries, and those that are conjured into existence right before your eyes.

5 - 10 August

Join UNSW's music cohort to experience incredible performances from this terms music ensembles. This term across three nights, experience Jazz Ensembles, Pop-fusion & Gamelan ensemble, and Chamber & Handbells ensemble. 

Michael Griffiths | Thursday 6th August | 4PM | Robert Webster Rm 327 

This talk is drawn from my book, The Death of the Author and Anticolonial Thought, which promises to transform a decades-old debate in literary studies about the relation between structure and agency, form and intention by giving a detailed account—previously unstudied—of the way colonized writers have responded to, learned from, and critiqued the death-of-the-author postulate declared by Roland Barthes in 1967. The book is a cultural history of these debates—with a particular focus on two crucial two key case studies: Martinican poet and thinker Édouard Glissant and Palestinian literary and cultural critic Edward Said. This book, then, examines the immediate emergence and intensification of such responses to the postulate of the author’s deathly absence from the text, in order to suggest that metropolitan literary theory drew critique and engagement from scholars of black, decolonial, and Global South background both before Barthes’s declaration and in its wake. This talk will draw on the case of Glissant, in particular, as a study in the kind of complications in theories of authorship that were in circulation immediately after Barthes’s provocation. I will then close by turning to the futurity of the debate with an examination of anticolonial critical theory’s uses of the notion of the storyteller and of storytelling in the latter part of the twentieth century.

Russell Smith | Wednesday 16th September | 3PM | Venue TBC

This talk aims to do three things. First, for those who have had the good sense not to have read James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (1939), it will provide a brief primer in the principal characters and events of the novel, as well some of its experiments with language. Second, it will make an argument for considering the Wake as what I will call a ‘technography of the first media age’. ‘Technography’ is a term developed by David Trotter, James Purdon, Sean Pryor, and others to describe, in Purdon’s words, ‘cases of writing which calibrate their formal processes with particular precision to the affordances and resistances of a specific environment of technological mediation’. In this case, the environment is what Trotter calls the ‘First Media Age’, characterised by the increasingly dominant role of media and communications technologies in everyday life in Western countries over the period 1927-1939, a timespan that coincides almost exactly with the writing of the Wake. It is well known that Joyce features and parodies a range of communications technologies in the Wake, from telegraphy and telephony to broadcast radio and television (then still in its infancy). My argument is that the Wake encodes a much broader and deeper engagement with both the history and theory of communications. In a nutshell, the heart of the Wake’s plot concerns the whereabouts and contents of a letter. Written by one of the Wake’s warring twin brothers, Shem the Penman, this letter has been entrusted to his brother, Shaun the Post, to deliver, and it has, of course, gone astray. In other words, the Wake dramatizes one of the cardinal distinctions of communications theory: between the message and the medium, the content and the carrier, the Penman and the Post.

In the third section, the talk will illustrate the Wake’s ‘technography’ by examining Book III, Chapter 3, known as ‘Yawn’, which takes the form of a séance. Shaun the Post has fallen asleep next to his mailbag and in his unconscious state is interrogated by the Wake’s four old men about the events of the book to this point. The sleeping Shaun becomes a kind of spiritual medium through which the voices of the Wake’s principal characters speak in turn. But this séance also features telegrams, phone calls, and radio broadcasts, not to mention excerpts from letters in the mailbag. My argument is that, although Joyce was invariably mocking of the claims of spiritualism, the séance in this chapter explores a grey zone between spiritualist mediums and electronic media, and that what it suggests is that similar structures of fantasy lie behind both modern spiritualism and what John Durham Peters calls the ‘dream of perfect communication’ that powered the emerging global industries and empires of media and telecommunications. 

Jared Shurin and Axel-Nathaniel Rose | Tuesday 1st September | 5PM | Robert Webster Rm 327

Join us to celebrate the launch of The Elements of Dark Academia (Penguin Vintage), curated by award-winning anthologist Jared Shurin (ed. The Djinn Falls in Love; The Big Book of Cyberpunk). This anthology responds to the web-borne phenomenon of Dark Academia, a visual aesthetic, subculture, and now publishing niche which centres educational institutes as touched by Gothicism.

Jared Shurin and contributor Axel-Nathaniel Rose discuss Dark Academia from its campus novel roots to its digital birth, the significance of anthologies, and the work of the anthologist, drawing from Shurin’s curation of over two dozen anthologies and Rose’s six years of research on Dark Academia.

For two electrifying weeks, Studio One at UNSW’s Esme Timbery Creative Practice Lab transforms into Sydney's hottest incubator for artistic innovation.

Step into the mesmerizing First Nations contemporary movement piece Sitting Ganaay; experience the profound physical and spatial storytelling of Tell Distance; dive into the hauntingly atmospheric, sound-heavy musical world of Plain Bad Heroine; and cap it all off with The Sleepover, a highly immersive encounter that tests the boundaries of interactive space.

The 31st Annual Australasian Association of Writing Programs Conference: “Voicing Our Worlds”, University of New South Wales, Sydney, 2–4 December 2026.

Hosted by the Literary Provocations Hub, the 31st Australasian Association of Writing Programs (AAWP) conference will be held in-person at the UNSW Kensington campus, situated on unceded Bidjigal lands. The conference is a cross-institutional collaboration between UNSW Sydney, Macquarie University, University of Sydney, University of Technology Sydney, and Western Sydney University. The theme of this year’s conference is “Voicing Our Worlds”.

In our contemporary world, the multifaceted terms, “voices”, “voicing” and their many conjugations and articulations are intertwined with key considerations in our discipline of Creative Writing. First Nations writers have been leading discussions about the real-life consequences of the amplification of some writerly voices and the silencing of others. We hear writers say that they are “giving voice to the voiceless” in their work, a formulation famously critiqued by the writer Arundhati Roy who said “There’s really no such thing as the “voiceless”. There are only the deliberately silenced or the preferably unheard.”