Winner of the 2019 Bill Cowan Barr Smith Library Fellowship
The Barr Smith Library and the Cowan Grant are pleased to announce that Camille Roulière is the successful applicant for the 2019 Bill Cowan Barr Smith Library Fellowship.
The purpose of the award is to assist research postgraduates financially with uninterrupted time to work with the Library’s collections.
Camille completed her Doctor of Philosophy in December 2018 and was awarded a Dean’s Commendation for Doctoral Thesis Excellence and a Doctoral Research Medal for her work entitled ‘Visions of Water in Lower Murray Country’. This was a jointly-awarded degree between the University of Adelaide and the University of Caen-Normandie, France. She currently works part-time as a Research Support Officer for the J M Coetzee Centre for Creative Practice.
Camille will now be working on two book projects based on her PhD research and thesis which centred on spatial poetics. Given our time of environmental crises (and particularly in light of the most recent ecological disaster in the Murray-Darling Basin), it seems more urgent than ever to disseminate her research, which promotes alternative ways of perceiving and constructing bodies of water in Australia – and more generally, an alternative poetics of place based on sound and forms of sonority. Each book will build on a different facet of this research. One book will focus on human and more-than-human voices along the Murray River to offer a musical tale of Australian waters – exploring a range of acoustic manifestations and sonic interventions around and within waters in Australia. The second book will centre on the harsh dialectics of wet and dry around the Murray Mouth, exploring the historical, ecological and engineered basis of such dialectics simultaneously to develop and compose a sound-based dramaturgy of place-making practices in the region.
Camille will be using the extensive material held within the Barr Smith Library collections on the colonial experience around water in Australia, the material on Ngarrindjeri people and culture, and historical and scientific material on water in Australia.
Camille is currently in discussion with a leading French academic publisher, Editions L’Harmattan.