Bronwen Douglas, BA (Hons)(Adelaide), PhD (ANU)
Senior Fellow, Division of Pacific and Asian History

Email: bronwen.douglas@anu.edu.au

Biographical Statement

My major research interest at present is the history of race in Oceania since the late Enlightenment. Specifically, I am chief investigator in a collaborative ARC project on 'European Naturalists and the Constitution of Human Difference in Oceania'; I am co-editing a collection of essays entitled Foreign Bodies: Oceania and the Science of Race 1750-1940; and I am completing a monograph called Indigenous Presence and the Science of Race. This book examines the interplay of metropolitan racial discourse and personal experience in the representation and classification by European voyagers of Indigenous people encountered in Oceania, including Australia.

Research Interests

Apart from the history of race, I have a longstanding interest in the history of Melanesian Christianities and in the intersections of Christianity, gender, and community in postcolonial Melanesia. My major theoretical and methodical concerns are the identification of traces of local agency in colonial and élite representations of actual encounters, including visual materials.

Key Publications

• Across the Great Divide: Journeys in History and Anthropology, Harwood Academic Publishers, 1998.
• 'Encounters with the Enemy? Academic Readings of Missionary Narratives on Melanesians', in Comparative Studies in Society and History, 43:1, 2001.
• 'From Invisible Christians to Gothic Theatre: the Romance of the Millennial in Melanesian Anthropology', in Current Anthropology, 42:5, 2001.
• 'Seaborne Ethnography and the Natural History of Man', Journal of Pacific History, 38:1, 2003.
• (ed.) Women's Groups and Everyday Modernity in Melanesia, special issue, Oceania, 74:1-2, 2003.
• (ed. with Anna Cole and Nicholas Thomas) Tattoo: Bodies, Art and Exchange in the Pacific and Europe, Reaktion Books, London, 2004.
• 'Slippery Word, Ambiguous Praxis: "Race" and Late 18th-Century Voyagers in Oceania', Journal of Pacific History, 41:1, 2006.

Career Highlights

Senior Lecturer, La Trobe University (1979-96); Visiting Fellow, Comparative Austronesian Project, ANU (1991); Visiting Professor, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris (1995 and 2007); Humanities Research Centre Fellow, ANU (1996); Fellow/Senior Fellow, Australian National University (1997-present); Caird Fellow, National Maritime Museum, UK (2001).