Reimagining the collection: State Library Victoria's 2026 fellows announced

Each fellowship is awarded $15,000, office space in the Dome annulus for 12 months and one-on-one support from a liaison librarian to assist research. 

State Library Victoria Interim CEO Alistair Mytton said: 

'Since 2003 the Library has supported more than 300 artists, writers, researchers and creators through the Fellowships Program. This year, we welcome 13 leading academics and creatives, from Australia and overseas, to make novel discoveries within the State Collection. Each fellow, distinguished within their fields including history, literature, fine art and performance, will generate new knowledge and creative experiences that reflect Victoria’s rich cultural heritage, enriching the Library and the community that we serve.' 

The successful fellows were selected from a pool of 212 applications and share in a total of $180,000 in funding. Since its launch in 2003, State Library Victoria’s Fellowships Program has delivered over $3 million to support more than 300 researchers and creatives, producing career-defining works.  

The full list of 2026 Fellows: 

2026 Redmond Barry Fellow: A/Prof Michelle Smith 
Fantasising Australia: Children’s Literature, People, and Place, 1870-2020 

Associate Professor Smith will draw on rare historical children's fantasy fiction to engage with the history of Australian children's literature and generate insights into how these works have influenced collective understanding of the environment, Australian people and the country's past and future. 

2026 John Emmerson Fellow: Prof Marie-Louise Coolahan 
Early Modern Ireland in the Emmerson Collection; The Reception and Circulation of Early Modern Women’s Writing 

Professor Coolahan will examine the Emmerson Collection's holdings regarding early modern Ireland – a key theatre of the mid-17th century civil wars. She will also look at the Collection's holdings of female authors and explore women's book ownership in the early modern period. 

2026 Asian Australian Foundation Fellow: Dr Timothy Kendall 
The Cantonese in Colonial Victoria 

Dr Kendall will draw on the Library's extensive Asian Australian collections to explore how early Chinese settlers shaped colonial Victoria, documenting the experience of key community leaders and Cantonese migrants and their contributions to present-day Victoria. 

2026 La Trobe Society Fellow: Dr Laura Jocic 
The colonial settler experience in the Port Phillip District: Sarah and Hanmer Bunbury 1841-1857 

Dr Jocic will focus on the letters and artworks documenting Sarah and Richard Bunbury’s residence in the Port Phillip District from 1841 to 1857 to provide an enriched understanding of the early years of the Port Phillip District and highlight women’s role in the newly founded colony.  

2026 UNESCO Cities of Literature Fellow: Rina Teske 
Children’s Books, their Readers and the Formation of Australian Regional Identity, 1841–1930 

UK-based children's literature researcher, Rina Teske will look at the dissonance between the British stories offered to children in colonial Victoria and their lived experience growing up in the Victorian bush landscape. Her research will highlight the Library's collection of rare Australian children's fiction produced in the late 19th century where local authors increasingly rooted their work in the bush and the outback. 

2026 Marion Orme Page Fellow: Kgshak Akec  
To Skin a Fish - Manuscript Development 

Kgshak Akec will draw on the Library's archival newspapers, photographs, oral histories and local records relating to coastal communities in Victoria to help inform character, setting, and intergenerational experiences as she develops her next literary novel. 

2026 Patricia O’Donnell Creative Fellow: Mwaffaq Al-Hajjar 
Unlayering Manuscripts: Ink, Space and the Art of Play 

Mwaffaq Al-Hajjar will explore Islamicate manuscripts as works of art, to create a series of text-based visual artworks that reimagine non-Western manuscript traditions beyond exclusively textual modes of interpretation and artistic practice. 

2026 Tate Adams Memorial Fellow: Sophie Westerman
What is left 

Sophie Westerman will engage with the Library's collection of sketchbooks, photo albums and autograph books as the foundation for a new artist’s book exploring the personal archive. 

2026 Georges Mora Fellow: Zoe Meagher aka Zoe Mars 
Space Tuber 

Zoe Meagher will research and respond to Robin Boyd's ‘Space Tube’ (part of the Australian Pavilion at the 1970 Osaka World Expo) to create a new work in the form of projection, audio or performance lecture looking at how the past persists in the present. 

2026 Kerri Hall Fellow: Angus Cerini 
MAISIE 

Angus Cerini will explore the life of ecologist Maisie Fawcett to create a work of theatre that dramatises her experience undertaking groundbreaking work in the 1940s that ultimately saw the cessation of cattle grazing in Victoria's fragile alpine high country.   

2026 Russell Beedles Fellow: Dr Myfanwy Doughty and Alisdair Gurling 
Hocus Focus: Prestidigitation and Print in the Alma Collection 

Dr Myfanwy Doughty and Alisdair Gurling will examine the Library's WG Alma Conjuring Collection to develop a series of creative prototypes asking: how do you build a world of wonder? 

2026 State Library Victoria Creative Residency Fellow: Dr Benjamin Woods 
Sound score for the Dome 

Dr Woods will develop a participatory sound and sculpture project that treats the Library’s Dome as both architectural instrument and psycho-spatial constraint. It will include ceramic wind instrument building and spatial live sound composition.