DrJennifer Martin

My research explores how journalism can ignite our emotions and encourage us to live well together as a society. I have developed the 'Virtue Map' as a means of identifying how journalists use their reporting and writing skills to make us feel emotion when we read their work. I am the author of a book on the topic: 'Emotions and Virtues in Features Writing: the Alchemy of Creating Award-Winning Stories' (Palgrave, 2022).

I am currently writing a biography on Eva Sommer, who, at the age of 22, beat a field of experienced men to be named the first winner of Australia's national journalism prize, a Walkley Award. In March 2026 she was awarded the Hazel Rowley Literary Fellowship to develop her manuscript. 

Before joining the Academy in 2017, I was an award-winning journalist, beginning my career in local newspapers and working for AAP, SBS Radio, the ABC as well as freelancing for the Age, the Australian and the Herald-Sun. In 1997 I won the United Nations Association of Australia Media Peace Award for a radio feature on the role of the Indonesian Government in the deaths of the Australian journalists known as the Balibo Five.

My research is deeply concerned with issues of gender, race and power in the media and some of the questions I ask include who gets to tell our stories, what stories get chosen to be told and what do these choices reveal about who we are?

Research Centre Membership:

Deakin Home Research Centre.

Deakin Centre for Contemporary Histories.