Another book review from me. This time on Naomi Parry Duncan's Musquito. In Inside Story. It begins: Less famous than Aboriginal leaders like Bennelong and Pemulwuy and less notorious than later Aboriginal outlaws like Jimmy Governor, Musquito (c.1778–1825) was a First Nations man who yet deserves more historical attention than he has received. Naomi Parry … Continue reading The Worlds of Musquito
Readers of Stephen Gapps’s work will be delighted to see this latest instalment of his quest to highlight the reality of Australia’s internal wars from 1788. Gapps’s first major contribution to this literature was The Sydney Wars (2018), which detailed the military conflicts between the Darug-speaking peoples of Sydney Harbour and the British newcomers from the First … Continue reading Reviewing Uprising by Stephen Gapps
Another review for Inside Story, this one allowed me to let off some steam about what is happening in the US right now, what I always worry about for the humanities, and what I think of people who lean into profiteering arguments. Nussbaum reissued her 2010 book Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities … Continue reading On the Humanities, Profit, and Martha Nussbaum
Published in Journal of American History, a short review of a book that traversed some similar ground to my first book. "When the Italian historian Peter Martyr observed in Spain in 1519 a group of visiting Totonacs from Mexico, he was struck by two things....." Continue reading in the file below. pennockDownload
Another review for wonderful Inside Story. Here I am reviewing a new book on Gauguin that coincides with a new show on Gauguin, controversies and all. "Nicholas Thomas’s latest book offers a provocative perspective on two of Paul Gauguin’s most abiding themes — women and Polynesia." To continue reading, head on over to the piece … Continue reading Reframing Gauguin
Another book review ... and reflection on the present. Writing for my favourite mag, Inside Story, this is about Richard Whatmore's new work—eight enlightenment thinkers and the meaning of their ideas today. "The resonant experience that Whatmore notes at the close of his book is that of a set of ideas for peaceable settlement coming … Continue reading The End of Enlightenment
Double review of: Maeve E. Kane, Shirts Powdered Red: Haudenosaunee Gender, Trade, and Exchange across Three Centuries (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 2023). Pp. 366; 12 b/w illus., 5 maps, 15 charts. $64.95 cloth. AND Mairin Odle, Under the Skin: Tattoos, Scalps, and the Contested Language of Bodies in Early America (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, … Continue reading Double Review for 18th-Century Studies
As ever, enjoyed writing for Inside Story. Here is a review of a new book on the eighteenth-century intellectual women who called themselves bluestockings. 'In my usual manner, I began this book by reading the conclusion. There, Susannah Gibson closes her new book on eighteenth-century intellectual women, The Bluestockings, by quoting Virginia Woolf. “It is the masculine … Continue reading Bluestockings review
A new review in Journal of British Studies. "Williamson is less concerned with virtue as a personal category of analysis and more with virtue as a political idea. This is a preference heartily welcomed in eighteenth-century British studies, which has not taken late twentieth-century debates about civic humanism nearly far enough out of their home … Continue reading Orienting Virtue
It's been a wild month here; just as my new book was released, my employer ACU suddenly announced a change plan that saw me and 40 other academics be 'disestablished.' I don't know what the future holds, but in the meantime I carry on with my writings. Here is a book review that I was … Continue reading Western Civilisation and its Discontents
Kate Fullagar 