The Antipodean Laboratory: Re-reading the Colonial Archive - Prof. Anna Johnston

Описание: On Wednesday, 6 November 2024, Professor Anna Johnston was the guest speaker for our monthly lecture series. Anna spoke about how colonial knowledge from Australia influenced global thinking about convicts, natural history and humanitarian concerns about Indigenous peoples.

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.

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).