Lynette Russell AM is an ARC Laureate Professor and director of the Centre on Global Encounters & First Nations Peoples: 1000 Years of Australian History at Monash University. She is one of Australia’s leading historians and an internationally recognised expert on Indigenous histories. Russell has published over twelve books on topics as diverse as museums and museum displays, Aboriginal faunal knowledge, colonial history, and the early Australian whaling industry. Her books include Roving Mariners: Aboriginal Whalers in the Southern Oceans 1790–1870 (SUNY, 2012) and as co-editor with Ann McGrath The Routledge Companion to Global Indigenous History (Routledge, 2021).

The abstract for her keynote on “Global Encounters and Marine Spaces” is here. This event is also a PUBLIC LECTURE – free sign up to it is via eventbrite here.

Kevin Dawson is an Associate Professor of History at University of California at Merced.  His research is situated at the historiographic crossroads of Atlantic history and the Africa diaspora and examines swimming, underwater diving, surfing, canoe-making, canoeing, and fishing; expanding the terrain that scholars of Atlantic history study by tens-of-thousands of miles both above and below the water’s surface.  He is currently finishing a manuscript tentatively titled Enslaved Water People in the Atlantic World, 1444-1888. His publications include the award-winning Undercurrents of Power: Aquatic Cultures in the African Diaspora (University of Pennsylvania Press: 2018).

The abstract for his keynote, “An Atlantic Aqueous Continent: Aquatics in Atlantic Africa and the Diaspora,” is here:

Miranda Stanyon is a Senior Research Fellow in English and Theatre Studies at the University of Melbourne, where she currently holds an ARC DECRA on the Romantic-era afterlives of Andromache. Her research focuses on Enlightenment and Romantic literature in Britain and Germany and takes a comparative approach to aesthetics, music and sound, emotions and reception studies. Her publications include Resounding the Sublime: Music in English and German Literature and Aesthetic Theory, 1670–1850 (Penn, 2021) and the co-edited collection Music and the Sonorous Sublime in European Culture, 1680–1880 (CUP, 2020).

The abstract for her keynote, “The Hollow Sea: soundings in eighteenth-century marine poetics,” is here: