Monash Arts is well known for high quality research in the humanities and social sciences. Our research is innovative, fully engaged with diverse communities and international in its scope and recognition. Monash Arts excels in the following areas of Research Strength:
Cultural heritage is about the preservation of culture, through collecting and protecting the texts, artefacts and stories that shape our societies and identities. Our researchers focus on our Australian heritage, writing biographies of influential figures and saving the stories of ordinary people for future generations. Indigenous anthropologists are using digital technology to make traditional knowledge accessible ... Read more
Environmental sustainability is about finding ways to manage and improve our environment, so that human life and society, as well as other animal and plant species and our natural resources, are able to exist and flourish into the future. Our innovative researchers work at the forefront of their fields, engaging in interdisciplinary research that combines both ... Read more
Much of our research revolves around the quest to critically interrogate and understand our world and crosses the fields of literature, linguistics, languages and cultural studies. With expertise in modern and ancient European and Asian languages, our researchers are well-placed to examine movements and moments that define both our own and other cultures. Our linguists and ... Read more
Research into philosophy and bioethics illuminates the fundamental questions of human existence and behaviour: from ethical issues to the relation between minds and bodies, from the history of philosophy to logic and metaphysics. Our researchers are compiling histories of Australian philosophy and women’s political thought, bringing important works to wider attention. In ethics, our scholars investigate ... Read more
Researchers in social and cultural theory consider how the political becomes personal: how the space that we like to think of as our private lives is traversed and shaped by history, values and ideology. In an age of global connectedness and rapidly changing technologies, we seek to understand how established social and political systems are ... Read more
In order to understand Australia’s place in the world and develop policy to maintain stable relationships within our region, we need to know how global forces intersect with local environments. Through researching regional identity and the roles of ideology and religion in politics and society, our researchers advance debate about the effect of global changes ... Read more
Our researchers are working to improve the quality of life in our community by investigating the social facets of health and wellbeing in new theoretical frameworks. Tackling contemporary issues such as addiction, obesity, reproduction and hepatitis C, a range of projects develop our understanding through the prisms of gender, age, ethnicity and citizenship and contribute ... Read more
Our performance research has a strong theory-practice nexus, including traditional scholars, scholar-practitioners, performers and creative artists in theatre and music. In theatre, our researchers have a specialist focus on indigenous cultural performances, from Indigenous Australian and Maori performing arts to India and Japan. Our ethnomusicologists contribute important cultural recordings to archives to preserve and understand other ... Read more
