I have just received notification that I am this year’s winner of the the Australian PhD Prize for Innovations in Linguistics! Feeling very pleased with myself.

Piers Kelly is the winner of the second Australian PhD Prize for Innovations in Linguistics for his thesis entitled ‘The word made flesh: An ethnographic history of Eskayan, a utopian language and script in the southern Philippines’. The thesis was submitted to ANU in December 2012 and was an outstanding piece of innovative and creative linguistic scholarship.

The Australian PhD Prize for Innovations in Linguistics is a $500 prize awarded to the best PhD (judged by the Panel) which demonstrates methodological and theoretical innovations in Australian linguistics (e.g. studies in toponymy, language and ethnography, language and musicology, linguistic ecology, language identity and self, kinship relationships, island languages, spatial descriptions in language, Australian creoles, and language contact.).

A lite version of my thesis (abstract-contents-intro) can be downloaded here.