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. Her dissertation, “Savages and Moderns: The New World in Britain, 1710-c.1800” analysed a series of diplomatic visits by indigenous peoples of the New World to Britain throughout the eighteenth century. She has published articles on various Native American and Pacific Islander 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.

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

I am currently preparing for publication a manuscript entitled Savages and Moderns: Native Americans and Native Oceanians in Britain, 1710-1795. The work studies a series of visits by indigenous peoples from the New World to Britain throughout the eighteenth century. It will be the first to investigate together visits by Native Americans, Pacific Islanders, and Australian Aborigines. It will also be the first to concentrate on the question of why there was a rise and then a fall in popular fascination for New World peoples in this era. My argument engages with popular political thought in Britain as it responded to the multiple threads of the period’s specific expansionist push.

Other projects include a study of the modernity of the eighteenth-century British painter Joshua Reynolds, and a study of Bennelong – the first key indigenous personality in the establishment of the Port Jackson colony in New South Wales.

“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)