Student Members

Jane Costessi is researching the life and work of Adelaide-born novelist Geraldine Halls (‘Charlotte Jay’). Like her biographical subject, Jane is an avid explorer of culture, ideas, and places, and has pursued a diverse career. She has worked in arts and media programming, production, training, and policy development, and has taught English (ESL) overseas.  

Jane was recently awarded the Fred Johns Scholarship for Biography to support her current MPhil research project. 

Lyn Dickens is a creative writer, academic, and PhD candidate in Creative Writing. Her creative and critical work examine themes of race, multiracial subjectivity and colonisation, and her publications have appeared in Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States. She is currently working on a novel as part of her PhD research that explores the intersections of surrealism and mixed race subjectivity in fiction through the life of Colonel William Light and his role in South Australia’s colonial history.

Lyn’s fiction writing has been shortlisted for the 2021 Write It Fellowship with Penguin Random House Australia, and the 2018 Deborah Cass Prize. She was Longlisted for the Lucy Cavendish Fiction Prize at the University of Cambridge and the Richell Prize for Emerging Writers, and Highly Commended for the Chapter One Prize. Lyn was also a 2017 Asialink Arts Resident funded by Arts South Australia and a 2017 WriteNow London participant, having been selected by Penguin Random House UK, and she is a 2021 VONA/Voices alumna. Lyn has a doctorate in Sociology from the University of Sydney and she spent a year of research at the University of Cambridge.

Glenn Diaz's first book The Quiet Ones (Ateneo Press 2017) won the Philippines' Palanca Grand Prize and National Book Award. His work, including short fiction, poetry, and criticism, has been published in the US, Australia, India, and Southeast Asia. Born and raised in Manila, he is currently pursuing doctoral studies at the University of Adelaide, where he is at work on a novel on the capture of notorious butcher of activists Gen. Jovito Palparan and urban precarity in twenty-first-century Manila, as well as research on the historical imagination in Philippine fiction.

Dylan Henderson enjoys a multi-faceted career as an emerging pianist, writer, musicologist, teacher and arts administrator. Currently a doctoral candidate at the University of Adelaide’s Elder Conservatorium of Music, his performance-based research explores the impact of period instruments on the music of Fryderyk Chopin. Dylan was recently announced as the winner of the Chopin Study Competition for Young Researchers – a prize offered by the Fryderyk Chopin Institute in Warsaw, in association with the School of Arts and Sciences in Philadelphia. His essay ‘A “Narrow-Keyed” Pleyel: The Ergonomics of Chopin’s Interface’ will be published in The Chopin Review in 2021.

Dylan has been the Communications Manager of UKARIA since October 2016, a role that sees him writing newsletters and season brochures, hosting and presenting podcasts, and managing the website. His book A Place for Dreaming (a 140-page retrospective on UKARIA’s history) was published in October 2020. His writing has also appeared in Limelight and CutCommon, and in program notes for Musica Viva and Recitals Australia. Since 2016, he has studied with Anna Goldsworthy and Eleonora Sivan (former of the Leningrad Conservatory).

Caitlin Merlin is a historian, teacher, and PhD candidate working at the intersection of many fields, including but not limited to cultural history, theatrical studies, and queer theory. Her current research investigates the responses of New York City artistic communities and connected community non-profit organisations to the HIV/AIDS crisis of the 1980s and 1990s. This work extends from their 2020 First Class Honours thesis, We Won’t Die Secret Deaths Anymore: The New York City Theatrical Community’s Response to the 1980s and 1990s HIV/AIDS Crisis, and hopes to expand the understanding of inter-community interactions through self-developed support structures, and societal reflections of isolated communities at times of duress.

When not in the archives, Caitlin is also a prolific choral singer, previously embarking on both national and international tours, representing South Australia at various festivals and competitions. They have most recently appeared as part of their ensemble Aurora in the Adelaide, Darwin, and Sydney Festivals as part of The Pulse and Macro, developed by Aurora and acrobatic troupe Gravity and Other Myths with composer Ekrem Eli Phoenix. She looks forward to getting to perform around the world again in the near future.

Jenny Molloy is a PhD candidate at The University of Adelaide and is working on a creative non-fiction novel project, "Changing South Australian perspectives 1840 – 2020: Representations of hope and loss in the art of place."

The work will closely read the art of significant South Australian places and explore how the connected motifs of hope and loss are represented within the works, along with scrutinizing how perceptions of place and ways of seeing have evolved between 1840 and 2020. The adventurous young emigrant artist, ST Gill, wide-ranging painter of the colony in the 1840s, will be the central character of the novel and contemporary Indigenous and settler-descendant artworks of the same places will be examined and contrasted so as to reflect and explore the themes. 

Benjamin is a pianist, composer, and historian currently researching the role of the piano in South Australia’s colonisation, supported by an Australian Government Research Training Program Scholarship. This work will build on his 2020 Honours Thesis, The Disruptions of the Elder Conservatorium in Colonial Adelaide, which won the Lynda Tapp Prize in Honours History. His current work is inspired by Sensory Histories and the concept of the soundscape coined by R. Murray Schafer, as well Dipesh Chakrabarty’s post-colonial book Provincializing Europe. Benjamin studied piano with Anna Goldsworthy at the Elder Conservatorium and continues to study with Eleonora Sivan privately. In 2019, his piece Prelude and Fugue was a finalist in the Kawai Composition Award and was broadcast nationally. In 2018, he won the Grace Barbara Turner Award for Excellence in Performance - Piano, at the Adelaide Eisteddfod, and received an Award of Excellence for his soundtrack to the short film My Light, directed by Rebecca Duncker.

Cheryl is Artistic Director of Various People Inc and Chair of Chamber Music Adelaide, and is a producer, director and singer. Cheryl was selected as one of the 2014 cohort of Australia Council Emerging Leaders, and is the recipient of an Australian Postgraduate Award to support her PhD studies. Cheryl also lectures in voice at the Elder Conservatorium. Cheryl has extensive performing experience in opera, oratorio and recital, within Australia and in the United Kingdom. She has performed in all of the major Adelaide festivals, and also appears regularly on the concert platform. Cheryl has produced, created and directed works for the Adelaide Festival, Cabaret, Come Out and Fringe festivals, as well as collaborative works within the community, health and education sectors. Cheryl is a sought after and highly regarded singing teacher.