Helen Caple

Associate Professor Helen Caple is a faculty member in the School of the Arts and Media at the University of New South Wales (UNSW), specializing in Journalism. Her academic career combines scholarly research with practical experience as a former press photographer.

Her research interests focus on discursive news values analysis (DNVA), text-image relations, multimodality, and visual storytelling. She has conducted significant research on photojournalism practices, the portrayal of women in sports media, and currently investigates the visual representation of diversity in early childhood picture books published in Australia.

Caple completed her PhD in 2010 at the University of Sydney on image-text relations in print news media, and was a Visiting Fellow at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, University of Oxford in 2013. In 2019, she completed an ARC DECRA project investigating contemporary photojournalism practices in Australian news media following significant layoffs among press photographers.

• 2019: Named in the Top 5 Early Career Researchers in Arts and Humanities in Australia
• President of ASFLA (2019-2021)
• Chair, Halliday & Hasan Archive Working Group (2021-)

She supervises multiple research students working on topics related to photojournalism, multimodal discourse analysis, and visual literacy. Her teaching includes courses such as MDIA3002: Multiplatform Media and MDIA2008: Broadcast Media Practices. Caple has participated in an ARC Linkage project investigating visual storytelling techniques at the ABC and maintains active research collaborations across media studies and linguistics.