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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…
‘Networks, Nodes, and Beacons’: New SouthHem Publication
Porscha Fermanis, ‘Networks, Nodes, and Beacons: Cultural Institutions in Nineteenth-Century Southeast Asia’, in Institutions of Literature, 1700-1900: The Development of Literary Culture and Production, ed. Jon Mee and Matthew Sangster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022), pp. 255-74. Taking as its…
‘Brexit, Settler Colonialism, and Utopia’: New SouthHem Publication
Porscha Fermanis, ‘Brexit, Erewhon, and Utopia’, Historical Reflections/Reflexions Historique (2021): https://www.berghahnjournals.com/view/journals/historical-reflections/47/2/hrrh470208.xml Abstract: Viewing Brexit as part of a longer history of Anglo-Saxon racial and cultural exceptionalism, this article reflects on what Samuel Butler’s satirical novel Erewhon, or Over the Range (1872) can tell us about the utopian…
In Conversation: Sarah Comyn, Porscha Fermanis, and Robert Aguirre, 2 June 2022
Sarah Comyn and Porscha Fermanis will be talking about hemispheric studies, southern theory, and Romantic/Victorian literature with Robert Aguirre for the Global Nineteenth-Century Society this Thursday 2 June (8pm UK time). They will also be discussing some of the wonderful…
‘Queering the Imperial Romance’: New SouthHem Publication
Porscha Fermanis, ‘Queering the Imperial Romance: Settler Colonialism, Heteronormativity, and Interracial Intimacy in Sygurd Wiśniowski’s Tikera’, Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies, 17.3 (2021): http://ncgsjournal.com/issue173/PDFs/fermanis.pdf Abstract: Building on the idea of queer studies as a ‘subjectless’ critique that has no fixed political referent,…
Southern Lives Workshop
On 6-7 December 2021, Sarah Comyn and Porscha Fermanis (UCD/SouthHem) will be presenting a paper at the Southern Lives Workshop at the Centre for Life Writing, University of Oxford. Organised by Elleke Boehmer and Katherine Collins, this workshop will bring…
‘Global Commodity Chains and Indigenous Labour’: New SouthHem Publication
Megan Kuster, ‘Global Commodity Chains and Local Use-Value: William Colenso, Natural History Collecting and Indigenous Labour’, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 22.2 (2021): https://muse.jhu.edu/article/801550 This essay explores both Indigenous responses to natural history collecting in nineteenth-century colonial New Zealand,…
UCD Empire & Ecologies Conference
Part of the UCD Environmental Humanities network, the Empire & Ecologies conference took place online on 1 & 2 July 2021, and examined transimperial, transhistorical, and transregional natures from the seventeenth to the twenty-first century. Congratulations to Dr. Sarah Comyn…
Launch of ‘Worlding the South’: New SouthHem Open Access Publication
Prof. Deirdre Coleman (U of Melbourne) will launch Worlding the South edited by Sarah Comyn and Porscha Fermanis (UCD). Please join us for this event at 6:30pm AEST on 18 June 2021. About this event Please note that this event…
‘Aboriginal Mobilities and Colonial Serial Fiction’: New SouthHem Publication
Sarah Galletly, ‘Aboriginal Mobilities and Colonial Serial Fiction’, Australian Literary Studies 36.1 (2021): https://www.australianliterarystudies.com.au/articles/aboriginal-mobilities-and-colonial-serial-fiction Abstract: This article combines Indigenous mobility studies with recent work on seriality and periodical form to examine how the structural necessities of serialised periodical fiction reinforced…
‘British Worlds, Southern Latitudes, and Hemispheric Methods’: New SouthHem Open Access Publication
Sarah Comyn and Porscha Fermanis, ‘Rethinking nineteenth-century literary culture: British worlds, southern latitudes and hemispheric methods’, Journal of Commonwealth Literature (2021): https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0021989420982013 Abstract Drawing on hemispheric, oceanic, and southern theory approaches, this article argues for the value of considering the…
Reflections on the ‘Entangled Modernities’ Conference in ‘The Modernist Review’
As co-organisers of the ‘Entangled Modernities’ conference, Lara Atkin, Michael Falk, David Stirrup, and I were asked by The Modernist Review to reflect on the what the move online has meant for conferences and how we organise, promote, and attend…
‘Domestic Settler Colonialism’ and ‘Capital, Conversion, and Settler Colonialism’: New SouthHem Publications
One of our new SouthHem publications is now available open access while others will become available on the UCD research repository in due course following the expiry of green open access embargoes. Stay tuned for further publications in the next…
Kristofer M. Ray on Cherokees, Europeans, and Empire in the Trans-Appalachian West, 1670-1774
On 26 May 2020, the SouthHem team participated in the second of two virtual online events convened by the University of Kent’s Centre for Indigenous and Settler Colonial Studies (Director, David Stirrup). This event discussed Kristofer M. Ray’s draft chapter from his new…
Kate’s Fullagar’s ‘The Warrior, the Voyager, and the Artist: Three Lives in an Age of Empire’
On Monday 25 May 2020, the SouthHem team attended the first of two ‘Virtual Conversations in American & Indigenous Studies’ organised by the Centre for Indigenous & Settler Colonial Studies at the University of Kent. These events served as an…
Climate Fictions / Indigenous Studies Conference, Cambridge 24-25 January 2020
On 24-25 January 2020, the SouthHem team participated in the ‘Climate Fictions / Indigenous Studies’ conference, convened by organisers at the University of Cambridge and held at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities (CRASSH). With…
EVENT: Entangled Modernities: New Directions in Settler Colonial and Critical Indigenous Studies
Entangled Modernities: New Directions in Settler Colonial and Critical Indigenous Studies 25-26 May 2020, University of Kent. Keynote Speaker: Alice Te Punga Somerville (University of Waikato) In the last two decades, new methodologies have emerged for analysing the entanglements between…
SouthHem Seminar Series Feb-April 2020
SouthHem Seminar Series 2019-2021 Our seminar series for 2019-2021 has two themes: 1. Indigenous Knowledge-Brokers, Natural History Collecting, and Environment; and 2. Periodical and Media Studies Below is a list of speakers for February-April 2020. Further speakers and details will…
‘Romantic Geopolitics in Robert Southey’s “History of Brazil”‘: New Publication
British Creoles: Nationhood, Identity, and Romantic Geopolitics in Robert Southey’s History of Brazil Porscha Fermanis, The Review of English Studies, 19 July 2019 Full Text Available Here: https://doi.org/10.1093/res/hgz068 https://academic.oup.com/res/article/doi/10.1093/res/hgz068/5536347/ Abstract This essay considers the nationalist preoccupations underpinning Robert Southey’s three-volume History of Brazil (1810–1819),…
Mining Fiction in the Colonial Southern Hemisphere, 1820-1870
Mining Fiction in the Colonial Southern Hemisphere, 1820-1870 Dr. Susan Leavy Library catalogues contain a wealth of cultural information, particularly in the nineteenth century when circulating libraries were an important source of popular literature for middle and working-class readers. This…
A New Reading Public: Mechanics’ Institutes on the Victorian Goldfields
The website for Dr Sarah Comyn’s Irish Research Council-funded project, ‘A New Reading Public’, is now live. Please follow the progress of her fascinating research on mechanics’ institutes on the Victorian Goldfields here: A New Reading Public Dr Comyn’s first…
Indigenous Plant Collectors and the Making of European Natural History in Nineteenth-Century New Zealand
Indigenous Plant Collectors and the Making of European Natural History in Nineteenth-Century New Zealand Dr. Megan Kuster (UCD) This case study focuses on Indigenous knowledge brokers, natural history collecting, and the environment in nineteenth-century New Zealand. Foregrounding the ways in…
Indigenous Encounters in Colonial Periodical Fiction, 1840-1890
Indigenous Encounters in Colonial Periodical Fiction, 1840s-1890s Dr. Sarah Galletly (UCD) This case study challenges the critical assumption that Indigenous cultures are rarely represented in the popular fiction of colonial Australia. This assumption largely derives from the study of novels,…
‘Literary Sociability on the Goldfields’ and ‘South African “Children of the Mist”‘: New SouthHem Journal Publications
Some of our SouthHem journal publications are now available on the UCD research repository. Stay tuned for more journal publications following the expiry of green open access embargoes: Sarah Comyn, ‘Literary Sociability on the Goldfields: The Mechanics’ Institute in…
‘Early Public Libraries and Colonial Citizenship’: New SouthHem Open Access Publication
Access our new book for free: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007%2F978-3-030-20426-6 Early Public Libraries and Colonial Citizenship in the British Southern Hemisphere This open access Pivot book is a comparative study of six early colonial public libraries in nineteenth-century Australia, South Africa, and Southeast…
Glossing the Colonial Book Catalogue
One of the major outcomes of the first stage of the SouthHem project has been the creation of our digital archive of book catalogues from the colonial southern hemisphere. Ranging in date from 1786 to 1870, our archive now includes 444…
British Roots in Australian Soil: Forby Sutherland, Death and the Nineteenth Century Nation
The first British man to be buried in Australian soil was a Scottish sailor. Forby Sutherland was an Orcadian sailor who was part of the crew of Captain Cook’s voyage to New South Wales in 1770. A casualty of the…
Malay and Chinese Readers in Nineteenth-Century Singapore
In 1878, the President of the Straits Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, Archdeacon Hose, noted ‘a not too keen appetite for reading’ among the Malay population in Singapore, concluding that with the advent of printed books ‘manuscripts (never very…
Digital Cultures, Big Data and Society
On 15-16 February 2018, the SouthHem team attended a conference on “Digital Cultures, Big Data and Society” organized by Prof. Emilie Pine, UCD School of English, Drama and Film. Industrial Memories Before raising some of the ideas that emerged from…
Cultural Geographies of the Colonial Southern Hemisphere: Thoughts and Reflections
by Dr. Fariha Shaikh The ‘Cultural Geographies of the Colonial Southern Hemisphere’ conference was a stimulating two days of rigorous discussion: the carefully curated programme meant that papers spoke both to each other and across panels, allowing us to explore productively the analytical…
Cultural Geographies of the Colonial Southern Hemisphere: Closing Remarks
Some brief and informal notes of my closing remarks delivered with thanks to a fantastic group of participants at the recent “Cultural Geographies of the Colonial Southern Hemisphere” conference at UCD. Southness Elleke Boehmer opened the conference by thinking about…
Institutions of Literature: Networks
The SouthHem team recently participated in a two-day workshop on the subject, “Institutions as Networks” held by the AHRC-funded ‘Institutions of Literature, 1700-1900’ research network. The diverse range of papers and the productive closing roundtable raised numerous questions of pertinence to…
De-territorializing Britishness In Colonial South Africa
In his landmark study of the idea of ‘Greater Britain’ in imperial discourse, Duncan Bell identified three different meanings ascribed to the term by nineteenth century political thinkers after 1870. In some conceptions, it included the ‘totality of the…
A report from the Victorian gold fields
How do you establish the existence of a literary institution’s collection when none of the early records have survived? How can you trace the circulation of books without a catalogue or accession records? How do you determine the way an…
Colonial Capital and Imperialist Time: Harry Harootunian on the Ontology of the Historical Present
Harry Harootunian’s fascinating article ‘Remembering the Historical Present’ (2007) is a blistering critique of the banalities of modernization theory; the poverty of spatial configurations for understanding the global world order; and the problems of national borders and methodologies in historical…
Due South: New Directions in Southern Thinking
In his 2008 article for the Australian Humanities Review ‘Keys to the South’, Kevin Murray offers three frameworks for thinking about ‘Southness’: the Southern Hemisphere, the Global South, and the Colonised South. Most obviously, the Southern Hemisphere refers, in a…
The Southern Colonies and Political Economy
For economic critics of empire, the cost of acquiring and maintaining colonies far exceeded their benefits. An emphasis on the priority of the domestic over the foreign market, for example, is central not only to Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations…
Interrogating Commodity Cultures: Exploring Global Connections
On Friday 5 May the SouthHem team attended a fascinating inter-disciplinary conference on commodity cultures organised by Dr. Fariha Shaikh at University College Dublin. The plenary paper was given by Michael Niblett, Assistant Professor in Modern World Literature at the…
Newspaper poetry and Anglophone Print Culture in the Cape colony
This case study focuses on the literary culture of the Cape Colony during the 1820s. Cape Town in the 1820s was establishing an Anglophone ‘bourgeois public sphere’ that accompanied the socio-economic transformation that followed the departure of the Dutch in…
‘Zoning in’ on Geographies of Empire
In Culture and Imperialism (1993), Edward Said argues that empire rests on crucial spatial and geographical mappings that involve a ‘hierarchy of spaces’. For Said, the struggle over space is ‘complex and interesting because it is not only about soldiers…
Library Catalogue Glosses
The Book Catalogues of the Southern Hemisphere (BCSH) database aims to provide an explanatory gloss on each of the nearly 500 surviving auction, bookseller, and library catalogues pertaining to the British-controlled Southern Hemisphere and Straits Settlements. These brief glosses will…
A New Reading Public: The Mechanics’ Institute in the Colony of Victoria
Discussing the merits and importance of establishing a Mechanics’ Institute in Melbourne in 1839, an article in the Port Phillip Gazette argued for the “great practical benefit” of the mechanics’ institutes, in particular for “the working classes of these colonies,…
The Singapore Library, 1845-1873
The Singapore Library forms just one small part of our larger, cross-regional study of how the holdings of libraries in the colonial southern hemisphere and Straits Settlements changed over space and time, but this case study is especially important for…
SouthHem Library Catalogue Database
In order to examine how the nature of book holdings changed over space and time in the colonial Southern Hemisphere and Straits Settlements in the nineteenth century, we are creating a database of Book Catalogues in the Southern Hemisphere (BCSH)….