History Matters

Dr. Roberto Chauca was one of nine early-career researchers who were awarded Travelling Fellowships by the Australian Academy of the Humanities to conduct projects addressing issues of national and international significance, such as the impact of political mis/disinformation on social platforms, historical attitudes towards women’s work & how Pacific communities respond to climate interventions.

Humanities Travelling Fellowships enable early-career researchers to undertake research overseas, where they may access materials otherwise inaccessible, connect with international organisations, researchers and forge new networks.

For a list of all recipients and their project, click the link above.

Unearthing Indigenous Voices from Early Modern Amazonia 1560-1561 

Across 1560 and 1561, Spanish captains Pedro de Ursua and Lope de Aguirre charted the second European voyage along the Amazon River. Dr Chauca Tapia’s project aims to unearth, for the first time, a complete edition of two anonymous accounts of that expedition—which alludes to a search for the mythical city of El Dorado, and the murder of Ursua.

Under the Fellowship, Dr Chauca will travel to Madrid, Spain, to access documents at the National Library of Spain and the Royal Academy of History, and develop a monograph-length manuscript for publication.

“This fellowship will provide me with the opportunity to challenge the conventional interpretation of Spanish explorations along the Amazon River in the early modern period, generally portrayed as events of heroism and discovery. Instead, the documents I seek to transcribe and translate from the Madrid archives will reinforce my research profile as a historian who has sought to position Indigenous knowledge as the foundation that enabled Europeans to learn about the human and natural landscapes of the Americas.”

You can find more information here about Dr Roberto Chauca

 

Creative Histories: A Conversation

With Shauna Bostock, Andre Dao, Katerina Teaiwa, and Sophie Loy-Wilson

 Wed, 27 Aug, 5:30pm – 7:30pm AEST 

Chau Chak Wing Museum

Camperdown NSW, Australia

In this Wood Memorial Lecture/History Now event, Dr. Sophie Loy-Wilson from the discipline of History at the University of Sydney will sit down with three extraordinary scholars who have drawn on lived experiences and different methodologies to produce creative histories that have made an impact on how we think about and do history. Shauna Bostock, André Dao, and Katerina Teaiwa will discuss their past and future projects, and challenge us to imagine new ways of approaching, practicing and presenting history in Australia today.  

 The Wood Memorial Lecture is funded by a generous endowment to the discipline of History in the School of Humanities to facilitate a public Lecture in Australian History.

Please join us for a reception following the lecture.

This event is in the 2025 History Now series. History Now is presented by the History Council of NSW in conjunction with the Chau Chak Wing Museum and the Vere Gordon Childe Centre and the Powerful Stories Network. History Now 2025 is supported by Create NSW.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS:

Shauna Bostock is currently the Indigenous Australian Research Editor at the National Centre of Biography at ANU. A former primary school teacher, Shauna Bostock’s curiosity about her ancestors took her all the way to a PhD in Aboriginal history, which turned into a book entitled Reaching Through Time: Finding my family’s stories(Allen & Unwin). The book was awarded the NSW Community and Regional History Prize in 2024, and praised as a ‘compelling blend of Indigenous history, community history and the history of colonial settlement.’

André Dao is an author and researcher from Naarm/Melbourne, Australia. His debut novel, Anam, won the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Fiction, the NSW Premier’s Literary Award for New Writing, and was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award and the Voss Literary Award. In 2024, he was named a Sydney Morning Herald Best Young Australian Novelist. André was awarded the 2024 Pascall Prize for Cultural Criticism for essays published in The Saturday Paper, Meanjin and Liminal. He is a postdoctoral fellow with the ARC Laureate Program in Global Corporations and International Law at Melbourne Law School, where is working on a history of how the computing company, IBM, travelled to the Global South.

Katerina Teaiwa is Professor of Pacific Studies in the School of Culture, History and Language at the Australian National University. She is a scholar, artist, activist and nationally award-winning teacher of Banaban, I-Kiribati (Tabiteuean) and African American heritage born and raised in Fiji. Her exhibition “Dance Protest” is currently showing at the Chau Chak Wing Museum at the University of Sydney.

Images: courtesy of Katerina Teaiwa

Register Now

Register here.

Public Lecture and Symposium

A Symposium Hosted by the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies, University of Notre Dame, and the History Department of the University of Sydney.

Symposium Organiser: Professor Samuel K. Fisher, Visiting Scholar, University of Notre Dame

Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences School of Humanities  History at Sydney Refugees, Migrants, and Visitors:  A long history of Indigenous Mobility Elizabeth Ellis | Princeton  Tuesday 3 June 2025, 3:00-5:00pm  followed by a reception  What does a deep historical view reveal about Indigenous migration and movement in North America? And what can North America’s Mississippian past tell us about how Native people confronted colonial empires in the eighteenth century? This talk will focus on the patterns and practices of Indigenous migration, naturalization, and refugee acceptance that helped Native peoples along the Mississippi river survive imperial invasion. By examining both forced migration and voluntary relocation, we can see how early modern Indigenous nations confronted the new American empire in the age of Revolutions.   Elizabeth Ellis is an associate professor of history at Princeton University where she teaches early American and Native American history as well as Indigenous studies. Her first book is “The Great Power of Small Nations: Indigenous Diplomacy in the Gulf South.” She is currently researching early Native American iconography and working on a collaborative project on eighteenth-century painted deer hides (minohsaya). Liz also writes about contemporary Indigenous issues and political movements. She is a citizen of the Peoria Tribe of Indians of Oklahoma, and she serves as the tribal history liaison for her nation. Venue: The Chau Chak Wing Museum,  University Place, Camperdown Campus Click here for map All welcome. Please follow the registration link below. Registration via Humanitix A History and Powerful Stories Network Event, sponsored by the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies, University of Notre Dame (USA) and the Vere Gordon Childe Centre. This event is part of a three day symposium on Indigeneity, Mobility and the Age of Revolutions sponsored by the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies, University of Notre Dame (USA). For more information about the symposium, please contact Sam Fisher at Samuel Fisher [email protected] or Michael McDonnell at [email protected].

Symposium Program Schedule

Events take place in the Chau Chak Wing Museum (CCWM) at the University of Sydney unless otherwise noted.

Tuesday, June 3

9:30 – Pasifika Sydney Walking Tour with Talei Magioni (optional – details to come)

12:00-1:00 pm – 50 years of Papua New Guinea’s independence (optional)

Dame Meg Taylor speaks with Professor Ben Saul in “Looking back and looking forward: 50 years of Papua New Guinea’s independence.” Room TBC, New Law Building (F10), Eastern Avenue, University of Sydney, Camperdown campus. Free, but separate registration required. Click here for more information and registration.

3-4:45: Keynote Address: “Refugees, Migrants, and Visitors: A Long History of Indigenous Mobility”

Professor Elizabeth Ellis, Princeton University

With a response by Leila Blackbird

5:00: Reception

6:30: Dinner, Camperdown Rydges Hotel Restaurant

Wednesday, June 4

9:30-10:30: Australian Association for Pacific Studies Plenary Session (co-sponsored by the Keough Naughton Institute for Irish Studies, University of Notre Dame): “Stori and Sovereignty: Marking the 50^th Anniversary of Papua New Guinean Independence.”

Featuring Mercy Masta, Wendy Mocke, Tetei Bakic Tapim, and Mahealani Delaney

Business School, Belinda Hutchinson Building, Abercrombie Street, Lecture Theatre 1040

11-12:00: Exhibition Visit (CCWM): Dance Protest, Project Banaba.

12:00-1:00: Lunch

1:00-2:30: Panel 1, “Conceptualizing the Age.”

Ann McGrath, “The Ages of Deep History”

Miranda Johnson, “Revolution, Rupture, and Resurgence: Concepts in Indigenous and Other History-Writing”

2:30-3:00 – Coffee

3:00-5:00: Panel 2, “Expanding the Age.”

Samuel K. Fisher, “Good Foreigner, Bad Foreigner: Gaelic Contexts for the Age of Revolutions in Ireland”

Claudia Haake, “Writing as Witnessing: Sioux Leadership after Displacement to Reservations, 1860s to 1890s”

Victoria Bonilla-Báez, “Desnudando Uruguay: Survival through the death of the Indio and the appropriation of El Gaucho”

5:30-7:00: Dance Protest: Project Banaba Exhibition and Cocktail Event – CCWM. Hosted by the Australian Pacific Studies Association

7:30: Dinner: Glebe (tbd)

Thursday, June 5

9-10:30: Panel 3, “Travelling through the Age.”

Kate Fullagar, “Coming Home to the Age of Revolution”

Bruce Buchan, “The Enlightenment’s Enslavement of the Indigenous Dead: The Mobility of Human Remains in the Early Colonisation of Australia”

10:30-11: Coffee Break

11-12:30: Panel 4: “Life and Deathways in the Age”

Annemarie McLaren, “‘Something mysterious and sacred’: Catholic Baptism and Aboriginal People in Early Colonial New South Wales, Australia”

Lyndon Fraser, “Reflections on Mobility, Death, and Cross-Cultural Encounters in Nineteenth-Century Aotearoa/New Zealand”

12:30-1:30: Lunch

1:30-3: Australian Association for Pacific Studies Session Celebrating Pacific Lives and Voices in Australia. Featuring Katerina Teaiwa, Kate Fullagar, Solstice Middleby, Talei Mangioni, and Victoria Stead.

Location: Business School, Belinda Hutchinson Building, Lecture Theatre 1090.

3:30-5: Concluding Discussion

5:15-7: Book Launch (optional) for Lisa Ford, Kirsten McKenzie, Naomi Parkinson, and David Andrew Roberts, Inquiring into Empire: Colonial Commissions and British Imperial Reform, 18-19-1833, published by Cambridge University Press.

To be launched by Zoë Laidlaw, University of Melbourne, at the Vere Gordon Childe Centre, University of Sydney.

7:30: Dinner: Newtown (tbd).

Participants

Leila K. Blackbird née Garcés (Louisiana Creole, unenrolled adoptee of Apache and Cherokee descent) is the Pozen Family Human Rights Doctoral Fellow of U.S. & Atlantic History at the University of Chicago.

Victoria Bonilla-Báez is an Uruguayan and Indigenous Pampeana woman of Black-Indigenous and Iberian decent and a PhD candidate at the University of Sydney. She is also the recipient of the Indigenous Knowledges, Health and Sustainability Scholarship tied to the Australian Research Council’s Discovery Project ‘Planetary Health Histories: Developing Concepts’ led by Prof Warwick Anderson, Prof Jakelin Troy, Prof Anthony Capon, and Prof Sverker Sörlin. Currently her research looks at silenced Indigenous and Afro-Indigenous knowledges on caring for land, waterways, and non-human species that are embedded and ‘hidden in plain sight’ within Uruguay’s rural areas. Her research is tied to the lands of her own ancestors, which are under threat due to monoculture farming and deforestation.  As an emerging anthropologist and Indigenous woman she has both a cultural and academic duty to ensure that her peoples and her lands stories are told. This unearthing of knowledges and stories are part of broader cultural duty as an Indigenous women to add to the Gran Quillapí del Oyendau, a metaphysical memory keeper, where women weave (re)emerged knowledges and (re)assemble the memories that have been scattered throughout time.

Bruce Buchan is an intellectual historian whose work traces the entanglement of European political thought with the experience of empire and colonisation, focussing on the Early Modern and Enlightenment periods. Bruce’s research seeks an understanding of concepts by bringing different fields of historical enquiry into productive conversation, most notably colonial history, histories of sound and noise, the history of science and medicine, and the history of ideas and political thought. His previous research on European perceptions of Indigenous government, the conceptual history of asymmetric warfare, and the meanings of civility, savagery and civilisation have appeared in a wide range of journals.

Elizabeth Ellis is an associate professor of history at Princeton University where she teaches early American and Native American history as well as Indigenous studies. Her first book is “The Great Power of Small Nations: Indigenous Diplomacy in the Gulf South.” She is currently researching early Native American iconography and working on a collaborative project on eighteenth-century painted deer hides (minohsaya). Liz also writes about contemporary Indigenous issues and political movements. She is a citizen of the Peoria Tribe of Indians of Oklahoma, and she serves as the tribal history liaison for her nation.

Samuel K. Fisher is Associate Professor of History at the Catholic University of America and a Visiting Faculty Fellow at the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies. He is the author of The Gaelic and Indian Origins of the American Revolution: Diversity and Empire in the British Atlantic, 1688-1783 and co-editor of Cnámh agus Smior/Bone and Marrow: An Anthology of Irish Poetry from Medieval to Modern.

Lyndon Fraser is an anthropologist and historian who works at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand, and as a Research Fellow in Human History at Canterbury Museum. Lyndon co-edits The New Zealand Journal of History, serves on the Editorial Advisory Board for Irish Historical Studies, and is a member of the Executive Committee of the Association of Social Anthropologists of Aotearoa/New Zealand.

Kate Fullagar FAHA FRHistS is Professor of History at Australian Catholic University andVice President of the Australian Historical Association. She is the author of The Savage Visit: New World Peoples and Popular Imperial Culture (Univ. of California Press, 2012) and The Warrior, the Voyager, and the Artist: Three Lives in an Age of Empire (Yale Univ. Press, 2020). Her most recent book is Bennelong & Phillip: A History Unravelled (Simon &Schuster, 2023). She is General Editor, with Katerina Teaiwa, of a forthcoming six-volume Cultural History of Oceania (Bloomsbury, 2027).

Claudia Haake is Principal Research Fellow in History at La Trobe University. Her primary research interest is Native American History from the 19th century onward. She is especially interested in North American Natives from Mexico and the US. Her major areas of interest in Native American Studies are ethnicity, identity and culture. Her work for her first book has focused on identity issues in a transnational comparative framework, investigating the cases of the Mexican Yaquis and the United States Delawares.

Miranda Johnson is Associate Professor of History at the University of Otago. She is a historian of colonialism and decolonisation, focusing on issues of settler identity, race, indigeneity, citizenship, and the politics of writing history. Her research focuses on Anglophone settler societies of the South Pacific and North America. Her first book, The Land is Our History: Indigeneity, Law and the Settler State (Oxford University Press, 2016) examined the wide-ranging effects of legal claims of Indigenous peoples in the settler states of New Zealand, Australia, and Canada in the late twentieth century. It won the W. K. Hancock Prize in 2018 from the Australian Historical Association. Miranda is currently president of the New Zealand Historical Association.

Michael McDonnell is Professor in Early American History at the University of Sydney. He is the author of Masters of Empire: Great Lakes Indians and the Making of America (2015) and numerous other publications on the Age of Revolution.

Ann McGrath has led the Kathleen Fitzpatrick Laureate Program on Deep History for the past seven years. Based at the Australian National University, she is the WK Hancock Distinguished Chair of History and currently serves on the Council of the National Museum of Australia. Her publications include Illicit Love: Interracial sex and marriage in the United States and Australia (2015) which won the NSW Premiers History Prize, and Born in the Cattle (1987), awarded the inaugural Hancock Prize. Along with Laura Rademaker and Jakelin Troy, she co-edited Everywhen: Australia and the language of Deep History (NewSouth Publishing 2023) and with Jackie Huggins, edited Deep History: Country and Sovereignty (NewSouth Publishing 2025). Ann has co-directed and produced various films, including A Frontier Conversation (2006), Message from Mungo (2014) and Japarta (2025). Her work has been recognised by the Human Rights Award for non-fiction, the John Barrett Prize, and the Archibald Hannah Junior Fellowship at the Beinecke Library, Yale. She has been awarded Membership of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, of is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Social Sciences and the Australian Academy of Humanities. She has gained memberships of the Institute of Advanced Study, Durham and Fellowships at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton as well as two Rockefeller Foundation Scholarly Residencies at Bellagio.

Annemarie McLaren is an historian of the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century world and the British empire, with a particular interest in the Indigenous societies encountered and how intercultural exchange took place. In 2020, her doctoral thesis was awarded the biennial Serle award for best postgraduate thesis in Australian history by the Australian Historical Association. She has also been the recipient of national and international research and essay prizes. She has held research fellowships at the Museum of Anthropology & Archaeology (Cambridge), the Omohundro Institute & Jamestown Rediscovery Center (Virginia) and Griffith University (Brisbane). She is review editor and board member of the journal Aboriginal History and a board member of the History Council of Western Australia.