Felicity Meakins

I am a Professor of Linguistics in the School of Languages and Cultures. I am also a Fellow in the Academy for Social Sciences Australia (ASSA), a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities (AAH) and an Australian FulbrightSenior Scholar 2025-2026. I was also the Deputy Director of the UQ node of the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language which finished in 2022.

Some of my research focuses on language evolution and contact processes across northern Australia where I have worked for the past two decades. In 2021, I won the Eureka Award for Interdisciplinary Scientific Research together with Cassandra Algy, Lindell Bromham and Xia Hua for this work. My new ARC DP Project 'Dingo Lingo' with Myf Turpin and Linda Barwick (U-Syd) is looking at canine words across northern Australia to understand their spread across the continent and their relationship with First Nations Peoples. My interests are also in the relationship between Indigenous Knowledges and Western Science. One place this exploration plays out is in my co-authored book 'Tamarra: A Story of Termites on Gurindji Country' (Hardie Grant, 2023) which won the 2024 Prime Minister's Literary Award for Children's Literature.

I have co-compiled four dictionaries (Gurindji, Bilinarra, Ngarinyman and Mudburra) and two grammars (Bilinarra and Gurindji) and two ethnobiologies (Bilinarra/Gurindji/Malngin and Jingulu/Mudburra). I am also the author of Case-Marking in Contact (Benjamins, 2011), co-author of Understanding Linguistic Fieldwork (Routledge, 2018) and Songs from the Stations (Sydney University Press, 2019) and co-editor of Loss and Renewal: Australian Languages since Colonisation (Mouton, 2016) and Yijarni: True Stories from Gurindji Country (2016, Aboriginal Studies Press). I have also authored over 55 papers on language contact and change in academic volumes and journals. In 2021, I also won the Linguistic Society of America (LSA)'s Kenneth L Hale Award for linguistic fieldwork.

I studied at the University of Queensland between 1995-2001. Between 2001-04, I worked as a community linguist at Diwurruwurru-jaru Aboriginal Corporation facilitating revitalisation programs for Bilinarra and Ngarinyman people. I joined the Aboriginal Child Language project (University of Melbourne) in 2004 as a PhD student. I completed my PhD in 2008 and continued documenting Gurindji, Bilinarra and Gurindji Kriol as a part of the Jaminjungan and Eastern Ngumpin DOBES project, then with my own ELDP grant at the University of Manchester and finally returned to UQ with an ARC APD, DECRA and Future Fellowship. I have also held an ARC DP with Rob Pensalifini which studied contact between Mudburra and Jingulu and Mudburra and Kriol.