Sarah Comyn and Porscha Fermanis, “The Fugitive Lives of David Stuurman”, Life Writing and the Southern Hemisphere: Texts, Spaces, Resonances, ed Elleke Boehmer and Katherine Collins (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2024), 239-56. Focusing on the plural and fragmented lives of the Indigenous Khoi resistance leader David Stuurman, this chapter…
Instead of studying the book as an individual author’s work, book historians pay attention to its materiality, architecture, and the processes of book production and reception. They also focus on publication and other contexts that might impact the meaning contained in the book. On 3 October 2024, Dr…
Porscha Fermanis, ‘Scientific Periodicals, Numerical Inscriptions, and Indigenous Lifeworlds in Nineteenth-Century Southeast Asia’, Victorian Periodicals Review 56, no. 4 (2023): 538-67. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/937150/figure/fig03 Abstract: Focusing on scientific periodicals produced in nineteenth-century Southeast Asia, this article considers the representational significance of numerical inscriptions in ethnographic accounts of the Orang Asli…
My review of Anna Johnston’s important new book, The Antipodean Laboratory: Making Colonial Knowledge, 1770-1870 (Cambridge, 2023), was recently published online in the Journal of Australian Studies. In the review, I argue that Johnston’s book ‘reveals in impressive archival detail the complex processes by which data is transformed…
The Cambridge Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition: The 1830s edited by John Gardner and David Stewart has just been published. Congratulations to John and David! Porscha Fermanis has written a chapter in the collection entitled ‘Suffering, Sentiment, and the Rise of Humanitarian Literature in the 1830s’. The chapter focusses on…
The Oxford Handbook of Romantic Prose, edited by Robert Morrison, has just been published. Congratulations to Robert and all the contributors! Porscha Fermanis has a chapter in the Handbook on ‘Latin America’. The chapter explores three key ideas about Latin America in nineteenth-century British prose writing: first, the medievalisation…
Congratulations to former SouthHem postdoctoral fellow, Sarah Galletly, on her new publication, co-authored with Katherine Bode and Carol Hetherington: ‘Beyond Britain and the Book: The Nineteenth-Century Australian Novel Unbound/ed’, in The Cambridge History of the Australian Novel, ed. by David Carter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023), pp. 44-62….
I was delighted to be asked to speak at the 2023 Daniel O’Connell Summer School in Kerry: https://danieloconnellsummerschool.com. My talk on ‘Irish Humanitarians, Indigenous Australians, and Daniel O’Connell’s Legacy in Settler Australia’ drew on scholarship by Mark Tedeschi, Anna Johnston, and others. A slightly extended version of the…
Organised by Sarah Comyn and Porscha Fermanis (UCD), the ‘Un/Disciplining Reading’ symposium was held on 15-16 September 2023. As part of the UCD ‘Thresholds of Knowledge’ research strand, the symposium was generously supported by the UCD College of Arts and Humanities and the UCD Humanities Institute. Thank you…
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. Porscha Fermanis (UCD), the workshop investigated how ideas…