Postdoctoral Fellows
Dr Miranda Johnson
BA (Wellington); MA (Auckland); PhD (Chicago)
Postdoctoral Research Fellow
Room K6.04, Quadrangle A14
+61 2 9351 4933
Dr Johnson is an historian of indigenous peoples and settler colonialism in the Anglophone post/colonial world, most specifically in North America and the Pacific. At the University of Sydney, she holds an appointment as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the School of Philosophical and Historical Inquiry, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences and in the Centre for Values, Ethics and the Law in Medicine, Faculty of Medicine, as part of Professor Warwick Anderson’s ARC Laureate Fellowship project, “Race and Ethnicity in the Global South”. She has previously taught at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Michigan.
Dr Johnson's work engages questions of race, culture and rights in legal, political and social contexts. She is currently completing a book manuscript, "Re-Founding the Settler State: Indigenous rights in Australia, Canada and New Zealand, 1967-2000", that asks why the demand for and recognition of indigenous rights came to such national prominence in the three Commonwealth settler states in the closing decades of the twentieth century. It describes how indigenous rights activists made compelling arguments for their political difference within a broader context of geopolitical and economic shifts in and across the three countries. She argue that indigenous activism was in part so successful because it engaged with a broader project of "re-founding" the settler state as Australia, Canada and New Zealand sought out new identities in a postcolonial Asia-Pacific.
Research areas
comparative indigenous history
settler colonial history
Australian and New Zealand history
postcolonial theory and race
legal history
Publications
Books
Re-founding the Settler State: indigenous rights in Australia, Canada and New Zealand 1967-2000 (in progress)
Articles & Chapters in Books
"Reconciliation, indigeneity and postcolonial nationhood in settler states", Postcolonial Studies, 14, 2 (2011): 187-201
"Burdens of Belonging: indigeneity and the re-founding of Aotearoa New Zealand", New Zealand Journal of History, 45, 1 (2011): 102-112
"The Gove Land Rights Case and the Problem of History in a Decolonising Australia", in Race, Nation, History, Bain Attwood and Tom Griffiths, eds (Melbourne, 2009)
"Making History Public: Indigenous Claims to Settler States", Public Culture, 20, 1 (2008): 97-117
"Honest Acts and Dangerous Supplements: Indigenous Oral History and Historical Practice in Settler Societies", Postcolonial Studies, 8, 3 (2005): 261-76
""The Land of the Wrong White Crowd": anti-racist organizations and Pakeha identity politics in the 1970s", New Zealand Journal of History, 39, 2 (2005): 137-57
Dr Ricardo Roque
Postdoctoral Research Fellow
K6.05 Quadrangle A14
Click to email
Dr Roque holds an appointment as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the School of Philosophical and Historical Inquiry, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences and in the Centre for Values, Ethics and the Law in Medicine, Faculty of Medicine, as part of Professor Warwick Anderson’s ARC Laureate Fellowship project Southern Racial Conceptions. Currently, he is also affiliated with the University of Lisbon, as a Research Fellow of the Institute of Social Sciences (ICS-UL).
Dr. Roque works on the history and anthropology of colonialism, human sciences, and cross-cultural contact in the Portuguese-speaking world, from 1800 to the twentieth-century. He has published widely in both Portuguese and English on the history of physical anthropology and colonial encounters in East Timor, Goa (India), and Angola. Additionally, he has written on the history of Portuguese colonial medicine.
Dr. Roque received his Ph.D. in History from the University of Cambridge in 2007 after studying sociology and historical sociology in Lisbon (BA, MA, New University of Lisbon). Before coming to Sydney, he was an Assistant Professor at University of Azores and a Research Fellow at University of Lisbon. In Lisbon, he was awarded grants from the Foundation for Science and Technology (Portugal) as a Chief Investigator of research projects on history of anthropology and anthropology of colonialism in the late Portuguese empire. He has held visiting researcher appointments in Australia (ANU), Brazil (FIOCRUZ), Papua New Guinea (PNG National Museum & Galleries), and the US (Brown University). In October 2012 he will be a guest Visiting Scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin.
Research areas
History of human sciences
Anthropology of colonialism
History of racial thought
History of human biological collections
Research projects
History of Portuguese colonial anthropologies in East Timor
Click here for the project website
Colonial mimesis in Lusophone Asia and Africa
Click here for the project website
The sciences of ‘race-mixing’ in the Portuguese-speaking Global South
Selected publications
Books
[Edited, with K. A. Wagner], Engaging Colonial Knowledge: Reading European Archives in World History. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan (Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series), 2012.
[i||Headhunting and Colonialism: Anthropology and the Circulation of Human Skulls in the Portuguese Empire, 1870-1930]]. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan (Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series), 2010.
[Edited, with J. Arriscado Nunes], Objectos Impuros: Experiências em Estudos sobre a Ciência. Porto: Afrontamento, 2008.
Antropologia e Império: Fonseca Cardoso e a Expedição à Índia em 1895. Lisbon: Imprensa de Ciências Sociais, 2001. [Winner of the Special Commendation of the Sedas Nunes National Prize for Social Sciences (Portugal) in 2002]
Articles
‘Mountains and black races: anthropology’s heterotopias in colonial East Timor’. The Journal of Pacific History, 12, forthcoming 2012.
‘Os Portugueses e os reinos de Timor no século XIX/The Portuguese and the kingdoms of Timor in the nineteenth century’. Oriente, 20 (2011): 91-110.
‘Stories, skulls, and colonial collections’. Configurations, 19, 1 (2011): 1-23.
‘The unruly island: colonialism's predicament in late nineteenth-century East Timor’. Portuguese Literary and Cultural Studies, 17/18 (2010): 303-330.
‘Skulls without words: the order of collections from Macao and Timor, 1879-82’, HoST - Journal of History of Science and Technology 1, 1 (2007).
‘Sementes contra a var'ola: Joaquim Vás e a tradução cient'fica das pevides de bananeira brava em Goa, Índia (1894-1930)’. Manguinhos - História, Ciências, Saúde, 1, 11 (2004): 183-222.
‘The razor's edge: Portuguese imperial vulnerability in colonial Moxico, Angola’. The International Journal of African Historical Studies, 1, 36 (2003): 105-124.
‘Equivocal connections: Fonseca Cardoso and the origins of Portuguese colonial anthropology’. Portuguese Studies, 19 (2003): 80-109.
Book chapters
‘Marriage traps: colonial interactions with indigenous marriage ties in East Timor’, in F. Bethencourt and A. Pearce (eds.), Racism and Ethnic Relations in the Portuguese-Speaking World. London: Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2012.
[With K. A. Wagner], ‘Introduction: engaging colonial knowledge’, in R. Roque and K. A. Wagner (eds.), Engaging Colonial Knowledge: Reading European Archives in World History. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, pp. 1-32.
‘Entangled with otherness: military ethnographies of headhunting in East Timor,’ in R. Roque and K. A. Wagner (eds.), Engaging Colonial Knowledge: Reading European Archives in World History. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, pp. 254-278.
‘The colonial command of ceremonial language: etiquette and custom-imitation in nineteenth-century East Timor’, in L. Jarnagin (ed.), Culture and Identity in the Luso-Asian World: Tenacities and Plasticities. Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2012, pp. 67-87.
‘A antropologia colonial portuguesa (1911-1950)’, in D. R. Curto (eds.), Estudos de Sociologia da Leitura em Portugal no Século XX. Lisboa: Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, 2006, pp. 789-822.