About Professor Cassandra Pybus
Professor Cassandra Pybus has published extensively on Australian, American and Transatlantic history. Her interests span as broadly as Australian social history, colonial history in North America, South East Asia, Africa and Australia, slavery and the history of labour, and the history of Tasmanian Aborigines. She has won numerous awards, most recently the Adelaide Festival Prize for Non Fiction in 2001 for her controversial book The Devil and James McAuley.
Current projects
- Recovered Lives as Windows on the Anglo Colonial World, 1750-1850 - An Australian Research Council Professorial Fellowship to research the stories of each of three obscure individuals of the African Diaspora, recovered from the vast colonial archives of North America, West Africa and Australia, and construct their life narratives in multiple colonial settings. By providing a unique insight into the complexity of the colonial world during the long eighteenth century, these narratives will unsettle orthodox interpretations of colonial experience and speak to the legacy of slavery throughout the British empire.
- Race and the Construction of Racial Identity at the Antipodes of Empire - In this groundbreaking project, Professor Pybus heads up an international team of historians and literary scholars to interrogate discourses about and empirical evidence of racial interaction in the early antipodean colonies, which have been largely ignored by scholars working on race and empire. The main focus of the research is the early penal colonies, but the project will also engage with the Cape Colony, which was brought into the British imperial fold soon after New South Wales was founded and a decade before Van Diemen’s Land. The formative experiences of these British colonies in the antipodes have major implications for research on race and empire because they were established at the very time the malleable and contingent concept of race was being transformed into a fixed notion of innate difference. The intention is to provide a more nuanced understanding of Australia’s colonial beginnings that will inject scholarly complexity into the current dispute about race relations as well as providing a corrective to the Atlantic bias in the scholarship on race and empire.
Selected publications
Books
Other Middle Passages, ed. (with Marcus Rediker and Emma Christopher), University of California Press, Berkeley, 2007
Epic journeys of freedom: Runaway slaves of the American Revolution and their global quest for liberty (Boston: The Beacon Press, 2006).
Black Founders: The unknown story of Australia's first black settlers (University of New South Wales Press, 2006).
The woman who walked to Russia: a writer's search for a lost legend (2004)
(with Hamish Maxwell-Stewart) American Citizens, British Slaves: Yankee Political Prisoners in an Australian Penal Colony, 1839 -1850 (Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2002)
Book Chapters
'From Chesapeake Bay to Botany Bay', in Robert Dessaix, (ed.) Best Australian Essays, Black Inc Books, Melbourne, 2004
'The World is All of One Piece: The African Diaspora and Transportation to Australia', in Ruth Hamilton, (ed.) Routes of Passage: Rethinking the African Diaspora, Michigan State University Press, East Lansing, 2005
'A Return to Bondage: African-American Convicts Transported to Australia', in Dawne Curry, Eric Duke, et al, (eds.) Global Conversations: New Scholarship on the History of Black People, Illinois University Press, Urbana, (in press) 2007
'A Founding Fathers Slave in Sierra Leone', in Beatriz Gallotti Mamigonian and Karen Racine (eds.) The Human Tradition in the African Diaspora, Scholarly Resources, New York, (in press) 2007
'A Self Made Man', in Anna Johnston and Mitchell Rolls, (eds.) The Companion to the Friendly Mission, Quintus Press, Hobart (in press) 2007
Other Middle Passages, ed. (with Marcus Rediker and Emma Christopher), University of California Press, Berkeley, 2007
Epic journeys of freedom: Runaway slaves of the American Revolution and their global quest for liberty (Boston: The Beacon Press, 2006).
Black Founders: The unknown story of Australia's first black settlers (University of New South Wales Press, 2006).
The woman who walked to Russia: a writer's search for a lost legend (2004)
(with Hamish Maxwell-Stewart) American Citizens, British Slaves: Yankee Political Prisoners in an Australian Penal Colony, 1839 -1850 (Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2002)
Book Chapters
'From Chesapeake Bay to Botany Bay', in Robert Dessaix, (ed.) Best Australian Essays, Black Inc Books, Melbourne, 2004
'The World is All of One Piece: The African Diaspora and Transportation to Australia', in Ruth Hamilton, (ed.) Routes of Passage: Rethinking the African Diaspora, Michigan State University Press, East Lansing, 2005
'A Return to Bondage: African-American Convicts Transported to Australia', in Dawne Curry, Eric Duke, et al, (eds.) Global Conversations: New Scholarship on the History of Black People, Illinois University Press, Urbana, (in press) 2007
'A Founding Fathers Slave in Sierra Leone', in Beatriz Gallotti Mamigonian and Karen Racine (eds.) The Human Tradition in the African Diaspora, Scholarly Resources, New York, (in press) 2007
'A Self Made Man', in Anna Johnston and Mitchell Rolls, (eds.) The Companion to the Friendly Mission, Quintus Press, Hobart (in press) 2007