UNSW anthropologist joins Australian Academy of the Humanities

Professor Jennifer Biddle has been recognised for her outstanding contributions to the humanities.

UNSW Professor Jennifer Biddle’s decades of research have led to her election as one of 30 new Fellows of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. Fellows are recognised as being among the country’s most influential thinkers for advancing knowledge and offering insights vital to Australia’s social, cultural and democratic life.

“It is an honour to be elected a FAHA (Fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities) and stand alongside so many esteemed scholars, activists and artists,” Prof. Biddle says. “I am humbled and excited to join the critical work the Academy does during this sober period of global disparity, inequity and injustice.

“This recognition is due to life-long relationships I’ve had with Warlpiri in the Central Desert, as well as First Nations and Indigenous colleagues, artists and friends, whom I would like to acknowledge and thank directly for this award.”

For more than 30 years, Prof. Biddle has worked collaboratively with northern Warlpiri in Lajamanu in Central Australia on contemporary art, heritage and performance. Her research follows women artists and the art activism of the Western Desert art movement and recent experimental aesthetics. She has collaborated with select desert-based art and media centres, and with Turtle Island First Nations artists on transnational projects in immersive new media.

Her decades-long journey began with the study of linguistics. As an undergraduate, she enrolled in one of the few courses then offered on an Aboriginal language of Central Australia, Alyawarr – “the most difficult course I have ever taken”, she recalls.

Later, as a PhD student, she studied Warlpiri language in Alice Springs and Yuendumu through the Institute of Aboriginal Development (IAD).

“The early IAD courses were extraordinary, not only about Warlpiri language but taught by Warlpiri people, speaking Warlpiri, on Warlpiri Country. To learn to speak vernacular Warlpiri as an outsider was inseparable from engaging with Warlpiri people on Warlpiri Country as sovereign experience and expression.”

Dean of UNSW Arts, Design & Architecture Professor Claire Annesley commended Prof. Biddle on her election as a Fellow.

“Prof. Biddle’s pioneering work in visual anthropology and Indigenous languages, art, culture, and aesthetics has not only advanced scholarship but also highlights the enduring importance of the humanities in shaping our understanding of the world,” Prof. Annesley says.

“I congratulate her on this prestigious and well-deserved recognition.”

Research director and mentor

Prof. Biddle is the Director of emLAB (the Ethnographic Media Lab) at the Big Anxiety Research Centre – an international program specialising in Indigenous and Asia Pacific research. It is one of only a few programs in Australia that supports ethnographic and practice-led research as a foundation for critical innovation in the arts. An ARC Future Fellow, she has mentored PhD students and other ARC Fellows on projects including the remote art economy, counter archive and national memory, global south, diasporic and migratory aesthetics, as well as climate crisis and resurgence.

She held the Gough Whitlam and Malcom Fraser Chair in Australian Studies at Harvard University (2022-2023) and is an elected member of the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS). She also served on the Australian Research Council (ARC) College of Experts (2019-2021) and is an active member of the ARC MRAG (Medical Research Advisory Group).

“Mentoring is a privilege and collaborative commitment, working with women and First Nations research scholars across parallax and diverse high-level public engagement platforms,” Prof. Biddle says, reflecting on her experiences.

Prof. Biddle is currently engaged in co-designed research on living heritage, drawing on critical Indigenous theory, feminist and decolonial methodologies. A key long-term project, with Lajamanu Warlpiri and Tracks Dance Company, funded by an ARC Linkage grant, is on Milpirri, a biennale experimental ceremony, founded by Creative Director Wanta Pawu Jampijinpa.

Since 2005, every two years, four generations of Warlpiri perform Milpirri, combining traditional Yawulyu and Purlapa dance ceremonies with originally composed and choreographed bilingual hip-hop. Milpirri is an explicitly intergenerational initiative, inaugurated by Wanta Pawu Jampijinpa to re-engage young people in ceremony, in response to youth suicide.

“For sovereign peoples to live on Country, in place, in self-determined terms is greatly challenged today,” Prof. Biddle says. “The work that art does in these contexts is critical, not only as cultural reproduction but as highly strategic forms of survival shaped by legacies of colonialism.”