About

I am a professor of history at Australian Catholic University, fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, and Vice President of the Australian Historical Association. I specialise in the history of the eighteenth-century world, particularly the British Empire and the many Indigenous societies it encountered. My interest in comparative Indigenous history focuses on the eastern Pacific (Polynesia), the American southeast (esp. Cherokee), and the Darug-speakers of today’s Sydney.  I have an interest, too, in histories of art, ideas, and lives.

Raised in Canberra, Australia, I graduated from the Australian National University with a honours degree in History in 1997. I studied for my MA (2001) and PhD (2005) at the University of California at Berkeley.

I am the author of The Savage Visit: New World People and Imperial Popular Culture (Univ. of California Press, 2012); The Warrior, the Voyager, and the Artist: Three Lives in an Age of Empire (Yale University Press, 2020), and Bennelong & Phillip (Simon & Schuster, 2023). I have edited several collections including, with Michael McDonnell,  Facing Empire: Indigenous Experiences in a Revolutionary Age (Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2018).

I have held visiting fellowships at the University of York (as a British Academy Fellow); Duke University (at the John Hope Franklin Center for the Humanities); Yale University (as a Lewis Walpole Library Travelling Fellow); Princeton (as a Humanities Council Fellow); and ANU (Dobell Visiting Chair). I engage frequently with public platforms including Inside Story, Guardian, ABC radio, the History Teachers’ Assoc., and art galleries. Some recent profiles are here.

Extra random information: I am a proud member of the Canberra Bilby’s Triathlon Club (strictly swimming only); my agent is David Godwin Associates UK; I live on Ngunnawal and Ngambri land (aka Canberra) with partner Iain McCalman, son Rohan, and shoodle Bonnie.

[useable headshot 2025, by Thorson Photography]

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