You are here: University of Sydney / Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences / Department of History / Staff / Academic Staff

Dr Kate Fullagar

University of Sydney Postdoctoral Fellow
Room 624 Brennan Building


Dr Kate Fullagar completed her PhD in History at the University of California at Berkeley in 2004. She is currently completing a manuscript for publication entitled The Savage Visit: Native Americans and Native Oceanians in Britain 1710-1795. She has published articles on various New World travellers to eighteenth-century Britain. She was Assistant Editor of The Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age: British Culture, 1776-1832 (Oxford, 1999). Her primary research field is eighteenth-century Britain with an interest in Atlantic and Pacific exchange in the modern era. She has taught in the field of Modern European History and a specialty subject on the history of death and dying. From 2004-2006 she worked as Senior Project Officer at the Australian Academy of the Humanities.

Research Areas

  • British History
  • Modern Imperial History
  • Early Atlantic History
  • Pacific History
  • Cross-Cultural History
  • Visual Cultures
Back to top

Current Project

I am currently preparing a manuscript for publication entitled The Savage Visit: Native Americans and Native Oceanians in Britain 1710-1795. It analyses a series of visits by New World indigenes to eighteenth-century Britain, focusing especially on the experience of indigenous travel and the impact of the visits on imperial popular thought. It argues for the importance of studying the “eighteenth-century New Word” in its historic entirety as well as the necessity of considering familiar terms like “savagery” in their generic (and not just intellectual) context.

Other projects include a group biography of three unlikely figures of imperial significance – the canonical British painter Joshua Reynolds, the Cherokee warrior-diplomat Ostenaco, and the young Polynesian adventurer Mai – which both tells the story of their strangely linked destinies and reflects on the broader historical problems of imperial connection and biographical status.

I have an ongoing interest in the furtherance and promotion of the history of Bennelong, the first key indigenous personality of the Port Jackson colony in New South Wales.

Back to top

Selected Publications

“Woollarawarre Bennelong: Rethinking the Tragic Narrative,” Aboriginal History 33 (forthcoming 2009)

“Bennelong in Britain,” Aboriginal History 33 (forthcoming 2009)

“Reynolds’ New Masterpiece: From Experiment in Savagery to Icon of the Eighteenth Century,” The Journal of Cultural and Social History (forthcoming 2009)

“‘Savages that are come among us’: Mai, Bennelong, and British Imperial Culture, 1774-1795,” The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 49: 3 (2008)

Assistant Editor, An Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age: British Culture, 1776-1832, gen. ed. Iain McCalman (Oxford University Press, 1999; rev. ed. pb. 2001)

Conference Activity

I have helped to convene numerous international conferences during my various stints in academic administration. At Sydney I convened the 15th Conference of the Australasian Modern British History Association (AMBHA), entitled “Visual Cultures of the British World,” in 2007. I have also served as central committee member in the raising and organization of a Sawyer Seminar grant from the Mellon Foundation for a series on The Antipodean Laboratory: Humanity, Sovereignty, and the Environment in Southern Oceans and Lands, 1700-2009.

Back to top