Professor Helen Klaebe

Background   Helen Klaebe is Assistant Dean, Research, Commercialisation and External Relations in QUT’s Creative Industries Faculty. From 2008-2011 Helen was the Head of Postgraduate Studies (Coursework) in QUT’s Creative Industries Faculty. Her PhD examined new approaches to participatory public history using multi-art form storytelling strategies, including oral history and digital storytelling. Her Master of Arts (research) project included producing an oral history collection for Outward Bound Australia (OBA) — recording its challenges and achievements over the past 50 years. Helen is also a Chief Investigator on one current Research Council Linkage project Digital Storytelling and co creative media: the role of community arts and media in propagating and coordinating population- wide creative practice (LP110100127). This work develops on from her work examining new approaches to participatory public history using multi art form storytelling strategies to engage the community with their local history, and her previous ARC Linkage Remembering the Past, Imagining the Future: Embedding Narrative and New Media in Urban Planning (LP0882274) 2008-2010. Her public history work pioneered new development methods towards the application of using digital storytelling in community history projects, as part of a socially sustainable approach to urban development. Her other contributions to research are in the areas of creative writing, copyright and ethical considerations regarding public participation and multiple stakeholders and blending traditional and social history together, building on her reputation for implementing creative ways of writing popular historical non-fiction for organizations and collaborative partnerships between tertiary institutions and industry. Klaebe regularly consults as a public historian particularly focusing on engaging communities, and regularly designs and manages co-creative media workshops for a range of commercial and public sector organisations. Klaebe’s particular strengths lie in:

• organising, working, training and talking with communities and industry
• identifying synergies
• initiating and managing partnerships.

She has used these skills for an array of project management and community undertakings during the last twenty years, most recently as the social historian/curator of the Kelvin Grove Urban Village Sharing Stories and the Mill Albionhistory projects. She is the author of:

• Onward Bound: the first 50 years of Outward Bound Australia (2005)
• Sharing Stories: a social history of Kelvin Grove (2006).

Academic achievements

• 2011    Queensland Smithsonian Fellowship
• 2011    Dean’s Award (Academic Management)
• 2010    Vice Chancellors Performance Award (research)
• 2010    Dean’s Award (leadership)
• 2007    Dean’s Award (commercial research)