Strategic preparation can increase a researcher's chances of receiving a prestigious fellowship, as was the case for English and writing researcher Dr Dashiell Moore. In 2025, the Australian Research Council (ARC) awarded Dr Moore a Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) Fellowship, one of only two literary projects funded nationally that year. For him, the award was not something that always felt within reach. "It certainly didn't seem possible in July 2021," he says. In fact, it took a lot of planning with the funding body in mind to get there.

We spoke to Dr Moore about how he built the path towards achieving a DECRA and what other researchers might learn from his experience.

Make the time to apply

Not every researcher will obtain a post-doc after finishing their PhD and continue their research while working towards their goals. For his PhD at the University of Sydney, Dr Moore looked at the relationship between Aboriginal Australian and Caribbean writing and how writers from these literary cultures imagined the other's world. That interest in connection, community, and what links people across distance continued to shape his work into what eventually has become his DECRA project, which examines islands of confinement, a term he uses to describe imagined and physical places used to detain particular groups of people across Australian and Pacific history. These include convict transportation sites, reserves, stations and missions connected to the reserve management system impacting Aboriginal peoples, plantations, quarantine stations, and detention centres.

After finishing his doctorate during COVID, Dr Moore took a role as an educational designer in the University of Sydney's Learning Hub, working to develop learning tools for students across the University. It was a professional role with no research component, and no funding attached to any research goals. But while doing that, he kept writing. "I was working full-time and frantically trying to write the monograph, get all the revisions in, be research-active," he says. 

That period lasted around four years. Dr Moore describes it as hard but also clarifying. He learned to be disciplined about time, to save everything he wrote, and to look for ways to make each piece of work count toward more than one goal. Material he had written as an honours student, for instance, eventually found its way into a published journal article that strengthened his DECRA application.

Build your track record

The DECRA did not become a realistic goal until certain milestones were in place, and Dr Moore worked patiently towards these. His project had to demonstrate not just scholarly merit but also a strong track record of publication and engagement. "I finished my PhD and tried to be as ambitious as possible with the material that I had," he says.

"I targeted what I saw as the most prestigious presses I could and worked down my list. I came across some fantastic editors at Oxford University Press, which is among the presses people often work their entire careers to publish with. For them to have faith in me and the work after the PhD was enormously gratifying. And it wasn't until my monograph was accepted by Oxford that a Category 1 Grant like a DECRA became a real possibility."

Alongside the book, Dr Moore co-edited an essay collection that was under contract two months before the submission of his DECRA application. Together, these outputs helped demonstrate sustained research activity and international recognition within and beyond the field of literary studies and beyond the university. They also gave Dr Moore a clear story to tell in the application about where his work had come from and where it was heading.

Dr Moore also drew on the support of colleagues who had been through the process, attending workshops run through the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Research Accelerator and seeking advice from researchers in his school who had applied for competitive grants, whether successfully or not. He credits Professor Mark Byron and colleagues he consulted for practical guidance during that period.

Design your work around the national interest

One of the particular challenges applicants with a literary studies background face is making the case for a literary project within a grant framework that asks applicants to demonstrate national interest. Dr Moore's approach was to ground the project in genuine community engagement from the start, rather than treating it as something added on to meet a requirement. The project was structured around interviews with writers and descendants of communities connected to the histories he was researching, alongside planned public events and digital outpputs that promoted a more nuanced understanding of those histories.

He has since developed a close working relationship with the Australian South Sea Islanders Port Jackson Association, a partnership that he says has shaped not just the reach of the project but also the nature of the research itself.

"That's where my work has maybe changed the most," he says. "It has drawn me toward collaborative practice, toward interviews, reading history against the grain in ways that community actually makes possible."

Move forward with purpose

Since getting the DECRA, Dr Moore has been able to pursue archival research in ways that were not previously possible. He has travelled to community and tertiary archives in places like Fiji and Vanuatu, where materials on Pacific plantation labour histories offer perspectives that differ from those held in major Australian collections such as the Australian National University and the Fryer Library in Queensland. "It often tells one side of the story," he says of archival collections. Travelling to where the other materials are held has brought new layers to his interpretation of those histories.

The fellowship has also given him time to think across multiple projects, to build longer-term relationships with communities and institutions, and to approach the research in a more sustained way than was possible while working full-time as an educational designer. He describes the difference in practical terms: the DECRA has allowed him to plan two and three years ahead, something that simply was not available to him before.

Dr Moore is currently on a fixed-term contract and is candid about that reality. The fellowship does not automatically resolve questions of long-term job security, which remain a feature of the academic landscape for many early career researchers. But he says that with a DECRA and a monograph with Oxford University Press, he is now competitive for roles that would not previously have been within reach.

Sustaining the field

Dr Moore is direct about the fact that his own path was made easier by people who gave their time. He benefited from colleagues who shared grant applications, offered direct feedback on his work, and were honest about what had and had not worked for them. He now tries to offer the same to others.

As a supervisor of postgraduate and honours students, as secretary of the International Australian Studies Association, and through his previous role as an EMCR representative in his school, he has tried to pass on practical support in ways that go beyond formal mentoring. "That's how fields sustain themselves," he says, "particularly in times of precarity." He has also proposed peer sessions where early career colleagues can sit together and map out three-year research plans, think through how teaching workload fits around writing commitments, and share knowledge about the grant application process in an open and concrete way. 

He is also thoughtful about what sustaining a field actually requires at a human level. The milestone he says he is most looking forward to is not another publication or award, but watching a PhD student he is supervising reach graduation. "It wasn't so long ago that I was in that position," he says.

Dr Moore's current research will eventually become a second monograph, and he is already thinking about collaborative grants that build on what the DECRA has made possible. "Hopefully 2028 will be a good year for that," he says.

photo in header: Dr Dashiell Moore speaking at the launch of his coedited essay collection, Lionel Fogarty in Poetry and Politics, in August, 2025.