RAHS Day Lecture – The Antipodean Laboratory: Re-reading the colonial archive

Event Date & Time: Wednesday, 6 November 2024 @ 1.00 pm – 2.00 pm

Event Location: Online via Zoom

Cost: Free

Event Description:

What if the Australian colonies, far flung and usually considered peripheral to nineteenth-century Europe, were in fact central to the period’s philosophical, ethical, and scientific developments? This talk explores this provocative idea, showing how Australia was a key colonial field where British ideas could be trialled in experimental sites that transformed and distilled them before returning them as textual and material artefacts through circuits of correspondence and print culture.

About the speaker:

Anna Johnston is Professor of English at The University of Queensland. Anna has held ARC Queen Elizabeth II and Future Fellowships at UTAS and UQ, and she was the 2022 John Oxley Honorary Research Fellow, State Library of Queensland. Her major books include The Antipodean Laboratory: Making Colonial Knowledge, 1770–1870 (CUP, 2023); Eliza Hamilton Dunlop: Writing from the Colonial Frontier (SUP, 2022, edited with Elizabeth Webby); The Paper War: Morality, Print Culture, and Power in Colonial New South Wales (UWAP, 2011); and Missionary Writing and Empire, 1800–1860 (CUP, 2003).