[Anthropgrad] Work-in-Progress Seminar - 10 July - Deirdre Coleman

[Sharon Komidar]

The Research School of Humanities presents,
 Work-in-Progress Seminar Series 

1- 2.30 pm, Friday 10 July, Theatrette, Old Canberra House

THE LETTERS AND JOURNALS OF HENRY SMEATHMAN: CUTTING A FIGURE IN WEST
AFRICA AND THE WEST INDIES IN THE 1770S Associate Professor Deirdre
Coleman, 

Robert Wallace Chair of English, University of Melbourne 

 

Henry Smeathman's departure for West Africa in 1771 was shaped by the
excitement surrounding the return of the Endeavour from the Pacific, an
excitement tinged with some uncertainty. Was Joseph Banks a dilettante
motivated by licentious curiosity, or a serious man of science and agent
of empire? Smeathman's Shandy-esque letters to the wealthy collectors
who equipped and financed his voyage, men such as Banks and the
silversmith Dru Drury, shed light on gentlemanly networks and the
uncertain status of natural history, early forms of abolitionism, and
the link between collecting and the slave trade. 

 

Deirdre Coleman holds the Robert Wallace Chair of English at the
University of Melbourne. Her research centres on eighteenth-century
literature and cultural history, focussing in particular on racial
ideology, colonialism, natural history, and the anti-slavery movement.
She is also the chief investigator on an Australian Research Council
Linkage project, 'Minds, Bodies, Machines', with the software developer
Constraint Technologies International. She has published in ELH,
Eighteenth-Century Life and Eighteenth-Century Studies, and is the
author of Romantic Colonization and British Anti-Slavery (Cambridge
University Press, 2005). She is currently writing a biography of the
flycatcher Henry Smeathman.

 

Convenors: Ken Taylor and Stephen Foster
For general enquiries please contact: 
Phone: 6125 2434
Email: administration.rsh at anu.edu.au 
Web: http://rsh.anu.edu.au/
All Welcome