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 published in the Morning Chronicle. Wakefield was, of course, nowhere…
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 case study a cluster of schools, libraries, and…
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 impulses informing Brexit’s neoimperialist ideology and hence about…
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 work done by the contributors to the edited…
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, this article considers the politics of interracial romance…
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 together writers and scholars in the oceanic humanities,…
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, and the methodological limitations and possibilities of using…
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 and Dr. Megan Kuster for organising such a…
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 is scheduled for Australian Eastern Standard Time. The…
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 representations of settler and Aboriginal mobilities for Australian…