Welcome to SouthHem
Based at University College Dublin, SouthHem is a comparative and transnational study of the wide range of literary outputs and mediating institutions produced in the colonial southern hemisphere in the nineteenth century. This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No. 679436 – SouthHem).
Latest Posts
‘Subjects of Empire’ Workshop
On 28-29 August 2023, a wonderful group of scholars gathered in Rome for a workshop entitled: ‘Subjects of Empire: Testing Subjecthood in the Nineteenth-Century British Anglosphere’. Co-hosted by Prof. Amanda Nettelbeck (ACU Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences) and Prof….
Review of Nikki Hessell’s ‘Sensitive Negotiations’
My review of Nikki Hessell’s wonderful book, Sensitive Negotiations: Indigenous Diplomacy and British Romantic Poetry (SUNY Press, 2021), has recently been published in Studies in Romanticism 62, no. 2 (2023), 320-325. In the review I note that Hessell’s ‘carefully argued…
‘Reading Across Colonies’: New SouthHem Publication
Karen Wade and Porscha Fermanis, ‘Reading Across Colonies: Fiction Holdings and Circulating Libraries in the British Southern Hemisphere, 1820-1870’, Book History 26, no. 1 (2023): 71-112. This study analyzes the fiction holdings of thirty library catalogues from twenty-three discrete circulating…
‘Ports, Past and Present’ Closing Event: ‘The Imperial Port as Cultural Entrepôt’
Last week I was lucky enough to be part of the closing event for the ‘Ports, Past and Present’ project led by Prof. Claire Connolly at University College Cork. Alongside academic papers by Gillian O’Brien, Isabel Hofmeyr, Finola O’Kane, and…
‘Emigration’ and ‘Surveillance’ in the 1820s: New SouthHem Publication
Porscha Fermanis has recently published two keyword essays on ‘Emigration’ and ‘Surveillance’ in the collection Remediating the 1820s, edited by Jon Mee and Matthew Sangster (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2022). On the southern hemisphere, see also Lara Atkin’s chapter ‘(Re)settling…
‘Serial Representations of First Nations Peoples’: New SouthHem Open Access Publication
Sarah Galletly, ‘Serial Representations of First Nations Peoples and Settler Belonging in The Queenslander‘, JASL 22, no. 2 (2022). This article examines serial representations of Indigenous peoples in colonial periodical fiction to explore settler anxieties around colonisation and the fragile…
Reflections on SouthHem
As I submit the final report for the SouthHem project, I have taken some time to reflect on the opportunities and problems that have arisen during the project’s lifetime. It is my hope that SouthHem has produced a fuller picture…
‘Pedestrian Touring, Racial Violence, and Bad Feeling’: New SouthHem Publication
Porscha Fermanis, ‘Pedestrian Touring, Racial Violence, and Bad Feeling in Trans-Tasman Settler Fiction’, The Making and Remaking of Australasia: Mobility, Texts, and ‘Southern Circulations’, ed. by Tony Ballantyne (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022), 217-32. Published in The Making and Remaking of…
Wakefield’s Systematic Colonisation and Cultural Improvement in the ‘New World’
In 1829, while still incarcerated in Newgate Goal for abducting an underage heiress, the political economist and social reformer Edward Gibbon Wakefield anonymously published his speculative Letter from Sydney, The Principal Town of Australasia, a compilation of eleven anonymous letters previously…