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Humanities fellowships go to Monash academics

13 December 2006

Associate Professor Bain Attwood.

Dr Michael Ackland.

Two Monash University academics have been elected as Fellows of the Australian Academy of the Humanities.

They are Dr Michael Ackland, School of English, Communications and Performance Studies, and Associate Professor Bain Attwood, School of Historical Studies.

They were elected at the Annual General Meeting of the Academy on 18 November.

Fellows of the Academy are residents of Australia who have achieved the highest distinction in scholarship.

The Academy's profile of Associate Professor Attwood, who is also the Adjunct Professor at the Centre for Cross-Cultural Research at the Australian National University, states that he is a "leading historian of Aboriginal-white relations in Australia".

"His work is distinguished by a combination of comparative expertise, theoretical sophistication, independence and acuity of judgement and intellectual courage," it states.

"Taken as a whole, his work constitutes perhaps the most sustained critical commentary on the debates over Aboriginal history during the past two decades."

Associate Professor Attwood said it was a "great honour" to be elected to the Academy.

"Several of my colleagues in the School of Historical Studies are Fellows of the Australian Academy of Humanities, and this reflects the high regard in which the School is held," he said.

The Academy's profile of Dr Ackland states that he has "contributed to international scholarship in the fields of Romanticism, American Literature and Postcolonial Studies".

"The majority of his monographs and published research papers deal, however, with Australian literature from the founding settlement to the contemporary period, and here his achievement has been truly outstanding," it states.

Dr Ackland described his election as a "great honour" and "a recognition of many years' work in the field".

"Sometimes one feels that Australian studies receives insufficient recognition in its own land, and so it is very heartening when research with this focus is recognised in this way."