Draft:Kate Fullagar

Kate Fullagar FAHA (born 1973) is an Australian historian and professor at the Australian Catholic University, noted for her work on imperial and Indigenous history. She has been recognised especially for her writings on the eighteenth-century British empire and its impact in Native America, the Pacific Islands, and Australia.

Early Life and Education

Fullagar was born in Canberra to English migrant parents. She gained her honours degree in History from the Australian National University in 1997, and her PhD in History from University of California at Berkeley in 2005.

Career

Fullagar worked briefly at the Australian Academy of the Humanities before taking up a postdoctoral position at the University of Sydney (2007–2010). She then held a continuing position in history at Macquarie University for ten years. She has been a professor at the Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences at ACU since 2020. In 2024 she was the Sir William Dobell Visiting Chair in Art History at ANU. Fullagar was editor of History Australia, the journal of the Australian Historical Association, 2018-2024. She was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities in 2023.

Writings

Fullagar's early research was in the field of British imperial history, investigating the political and cultural impact of Indigenous visitors from North America and the South Pacific to Britain through the eighteenth century. Her first book The Savage Visit was shortlisted for the NSW Premier's General History Award in 2013 and has been described as important in "recovering" a neglected debate over empire in eighteenth-century Britain.

Subsequent books have moved more towards centring Indigenous people in the history of empire. Her edited collections on The Atlantic World in the Antipodes (2012) and Facing Empire (2018, with Michael A. McDonnell) have been recognised as advancing a new way of understanding "histories of empire with Indigenous peoples as the main subject."

Her book, The Warrior, the Voyager, and the Artist: Three Lives in an Age of Empire (Yale, 2020), was about the Cherokee warrior Ostenaco, the Raiatean voyager Mai and the British painter Joshua Reynolds. It was awarded The NSW Premier's General History Award, the Douglas Stewart Prize for Non-Fiction, the British Historians of Art Prize, and was shortlisted for the James Tait Black Prize for Biography.

She published Bennelong & Phillip: A History Unravelled with Simon & Schuster in 2023 – a history of the Wangal leader Bennelong and the first governor of NSW, Arthur Phillip. It took the unusual approach of reverse narration, and has been shortlisted for the Ernest Scott Prize and the Age Book of the Year.

Select Publications

Bennelong & Phillip: A History Unravelled (Simon & Schuster Australia, 2023)

The Warrior, The Voyager, and the Artist: Three Lives in an Age of Empire (Yale University Press, 2020)

Co-editor with Michael A. McDonnell, eds., Facing Empire: Indigenous Experiences in a Revolutionary Age, 1760-1840 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018)

The Savage Visit: New World People and Popular Imperial Culture in Britain, 1710-1795 (University of California Press, 2012)

Editor, The Atlantic World in the Antipodes: Effects and Transformations since the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012)

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)