Tony Hughes-d'Aeth

Biography

Tony Hughes-d’Aeth is the Chair of Australian Literature, and Professor of English and Literary Studies, at the University of Western Australia. He is the author of Like Nothing on this Earth: A Literary History of the Wheatbelt (UWAP, 2017), which won the Walter McRae Russell Prize for Australian literary scholarship, and Paper Nation: The Story of the Picturesque Atlas of Australasia (MUP, 2001), which won the Ernest Scott and WK Hancock prizes for Australian history. Hughes-d’Aeth  has published over 40 scholarly articles and chapters, mainly on Australian literature and culture. In 2022, his essay ‘Kim Scott’s Taboo and the Extimacy of Massacre’ was awarded the John Barrett Prize by the International Australian Studies Association (InASA) for the best essay in the Journal of Australian Studies during the previous calendar year.

Hughes-d’Aeth serves as the Deputy Head of School (Research) in the School of Humanities. He is also the Director of the Westerly Centre, which publishes the journal Westerly that was founded in 1956. In 2021, he was appointed to Chair the Publishing Board of UWA Publishing, and he also chairs the judging panel of the Dorothy Hewett Award for an unpublished manuscript, which attracts over three hundred submissions. In 2019, he convened the national conference of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature (ASAL).