Piers Kelly

Dr. Piers Kelly is a DECRA Fellow at the University of New England's School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences, specializing in graphic communication systems across Indigenous Australia, West Africa, and Southeast Asia. His research examines message sticks and emergent writing systems to understand the evolution of written communication. Kelly holds a PhD in Linguistics from Australian National University and an MA from Monash University.

His research focuses on linguistic anthropology, Indigenous Australian communication, writing system evolution, and grapholinguistics. Kelly's work explores how traditionally non-literate societies independently develop writing systems, offering insights into humanity's relationship with written communication.

Award highlights: Stephen Wurm Graduate Prize (2014) and Australian PhD Prize (2014). Research funded by ARC DECRA (2022-2027), DFG Forschungsstipendium (2020-2021), and ARC CoEDL grant (2019-2020).