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.”
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.
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
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 sfisher1@nd.edu or Michael McDonnell at michael.mcdonnell@sydney.edu.au.
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 50th Anniversary of Papua New Guinean Independence.”
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 SessionCelebrating 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 andSovereignty (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.
In the third issue of the reestablished journal Souffles Monde/Anfas al-‘alam – which continues the trajectory of the pioneering Maghrebi intellectual journal of the same name that first published in the late 1960s – we introduced the concept of “collaborative ontologies” as a methodology for re-empowering a praxis-based critical theory. Our premise is that any viable 21st century critical theory needs to be grounded in engaging with, learning and taking the lead from Indigenous ways of knowing and being (epistemologies and ontologies) as being developed and practiced today by Indigenous scholars, activists and practitioners in both post-settler colonies of the Global North (Australasia and North America) as well as Global South (Africa, Latin America, South and Southeast Asia). Our work builds on the genealogies and trajectories of critical theory, postcolonial studies, and decolonial studies, in particular the feminist streams across them. We argue that engaging with the histories, experiences, ideas and practices of Indigenous scholars and activists based on Indigenous research principles and methodologies is crucial to developing new forms of collective knowledge production, solidarity and action in a world increasingly – literally – on fire, with multiple polycrises that have rendered most theories and strategies for social change more or less inoperative today.
In this seminar, we apply the concept of collaborative ontologies to our work with grassroots communities of artists in Port Harcourt (Nigeria), Ezbet Khairallah (Cairo, Egypt), and the Kakuma Refugee Camp in Kenya, to explore new ways of writing history from below, and building “counter-archives,” which feminist scholars describe as collective record keeping of radical and unauthorized stories (Salime, 2022; Dakhli, 2020). We argue that this is not a merely theoretical exercise. In fact, our argument is that only through sharing our most basic experiences of being-in-the-world can we develop authentically collaborative ways of knowing and acting in it, and through these activities finally move away from an increasingly necrocapitalist modernity, and towards a global political, economic, cultural, and discursive system that heals rather than destroys our world.
ABOUT THE SPEAKERS
Mark Le Vine is Professor of modern Middle Eastern and African histories and cultures at UC Irvine and founding director of the Program in Global Middle East Studies. A 2020-21 Guggenheim Fellow, he is the author and editor of a dozen books, most recently We’ll Play till We Die: Journeys Across a Decade of Revolutionary Music in the Muslims World (California, 2022), Altered States: The Remaking of the Political in the Arab World (Routledge 2023), and Art Beyond the Edge: Creativity and Conflict in a World on Fire (California, 2025)
Lucia Sorbera is Senior Lecturer and Chair of Discipline of Arabic Language and Cultures at the University of Sydney. She published widely in history of Egyptian feminism, women’s political activism, and cultural productions in the Arab world, among them, the book Sex and Desire in Muslim Cultures. Beyond Norms and Transgression from the Abbasids to the Present. Day (with Serena Tolino and Aymon Kreil, I.B. Tauris, 2021). Her forthcoming book, Biography of a Revolution. The Feminist Roots of Human Rights in Egypt, is published by University of California Press.
Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences School of Humanities History at Sydney
History on Wednesday
Listening to Australian-Oceanic histories: Indigenous performance cultures at Pacific Arts festivals since 1970
Wed, 21 August 2024 12:10 – 1:30 | Hybrid event Dr Amanda Harris (Sydney) and Nardi Simpson
In the early 1970s, delegations of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander performers travelled across the Pacific Ocean to cultural festivals in Papua New Guinea, Fiji, Japan and Hong Kong. Exploring networks across the Asia-Pacific, these acts of performance were entangled in momentous shifts in Indigenous rights and new politics of representation. Bringing new mobilities of the post-referendum era into dialogue with old practices of cultural performance, these exchanges of performance both signalled a modern post-colonial era and a reaching back into what Damon Salesa (2014) has characterised as the “deep and resonant past”. In this presentation we move between historical and recent experiences of festivals of Pacific Arts. We collaboratively bring together first-person accounts of involvement in festivals of Pacific Arts and Culture and campaigns for an Indigenous Voice to Parliament, with historical efforts by key cultural and political leaders such as Oodgeroo Noonuccal and George Winunguj to establish annual festivals of the Black Pacific. Moving between past and present, we contemplate how approaches to Oceanic histories that centre song, dance and story may offer methodological insights for Australian history.
ABOUT THE SPEAKERS
Amanda Harris is a musicologist and cultural historian who works collaboratively to explore histories of musical encounter in Australia’s Oceanic location and colonial history. Amanda is an ARC Future Fellow at Sydney Conservatorium of Music, University of Sydney and Director of the Sydney Unit of digital archive PARADISEC.
Nardi Simpson is a Yuwaalaraay musician, composer, author and culture keeper from the freshwater floodplains of New South Wales. Nardi’s second novel ’the belburd’ will be released by Hachette Australia in October 2024.
Hybrid Event: Places to attend in-person are limited, so please register as soon as possible to reserve your place.
Vere Gordon Childe Centre F09, Level 4, Madsen Building.
Phone +61 2 9351 2222 ABN 15 211 513 464 CRICOS Number: 00026APlease add soh.events@sydney.edu.au to your address book or senders safe list to make sure you continue to see our emails in the future.
Thank you so much for registering and/or attending one or all of our events in the “Powerful Stories” series on March 14 and March 15. We were amazed at the turn-out and felt so lucky to have such an extraordinary group of presenters and audience-members to make the events memorable – in both powerfully emotional and intellectual ways.
Quite a few of you asked about keeping in touch and/or follow-up events. In that spirit, we invite you to leave your contact details so we can stay in touch about building on the workshop especially and think together about where we might be able to go from here. We think it is important that people ‘opt-in’ to this, so we created a google form. We invite all participants from within and outside the University to join us, and those who were not able make it in the end but want to stay connected.https://forms.gle/byx9vfcQ19EVYfhy6
On this form, if you like, and have not already done so by email, etc., you can also leave some feedback if you want (entirely optional!). If you don’t want to opt-in to future discussions, you can also just leave feedback and do this anonymously. Just leave the name and email blank.
And if you did not get a chance to watch the documentary, there’s a spot on the form to let us know and we will send you a free link to watch it.
Thanks so much,
Niro Kandasamy
Michael McDonnell
Photo: Georginia Sappier-Richardson sharing her story at a TRC community visit. Photo by: Ben Pender-Cudlip. Courtesy: Upstander Project, from the movie Dawnland (https://upstanderproject.org/films/dawnland)
History on Wednesday
