Dr Piers Kelly

DECRA Fellow - School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences

Piers Kelly

Email: pkelly26@une.edu.au

Biography

Dr Piers Kelly’s research is on graphic codes in small-scale societies. His focus is on Australian message sticks: marked wooden objects used for long-distance communication across Indigenous Australia. As an ARC DECRA fellow, Dr Kelly is examining rare message sticks in world collections and conducting fieldwork with senior knowledge holders in Arnhem Land and the Tiwi Islands.

The Australian Message Stick Project website can be viewed here: https://messagesticks.com.au/.

Dr Kelly’s research also encompasses the isolated creation of new writing systems in traditionally non-literate societies of West Africa, Southeast Asia and the Pacific. He maintains that these rare inventions reveal important insights into our relationship with the written word, and have the potential to shed light on the origin and development of writing itself, arguably the world's most transformative yet misunderstood technology.

In 2013, Dr Kelly completed a PhD in linguistics at the Australian National University. Later, as a postdoctoral researcher, he worked at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena, Germany, and as a Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft fellow at the University of New England. Dr Kelly has since taken up a DECRA project on message sticks within the university's Department of Archaeology, Classics and History.

Qualifications

PhD (Australian National University), MA (Monash University)

Awards

  • Stephen Wurm Graduate Prize for Pacific Linguistic Studies (2014)
  • Australian PhD Prize for Innovations in Linguistics (2014)

Grants

  • ARC DECRA (2022-2027)
  • DFG Forschungsstipendium (2020-2021)
  • ARC CoEDL Language Documentation Grant (2019-2020)

Primary Research Area/s

Linguistic anthropology ; Indigenous Australia; Writing systems

Publications

Research publications available on my Google Scholar profile.

My book is The Last Language on Earth: Linguistic Utopianism in the Philippines.

A selection of my seminars can be viewed here.

Media:

"Most assume writing systems get simpler. But 3,600 years of Chinese writing show it’s getting increasingly complex." The Conversation. https://theconversation.com/most-assume-writing-systems-get-simpler-but-3-600-years-of-chinese-writing-show-its-getting-increasingly-complex-194732.

“Are you writing a grant application or announcing the Second Coming?”, Times Higher Education, 25 February 2020.

“Anthropologists do well in movies, indigenous peoples not so much”, The Conversation, 18 May, 2015.

Memberships

Australian Linguistic Society

Affiliations

ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language, Canberra

Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, Jena

Centre for Australian Studies, University of Cologne

Related Links

Brave new worlds (a blog about writing systems, linguistic creativity and quirky manuscripts)

Mastodon: @pierskelly@aus.social