ABOUT THE LECTURE:
There are few place/times like the ancient megacontinent Gondwanaland, that once connected a planetary south: South Asia, Southern African, South America, Australasia and Antarctica. It can simultaneously enchant a plate tectonics modeller, an Indigenous theologian, a historian of Tamil origin-stories, a Gond artist, and a UNESCO world heritage committee seeking to conserve ancient rainforest remnants.
Alison Bashford is leading a collaborative project that explores the modern history of Gondwanaland, incorporating and layering knowledge of its deep geological histories into imperial, settler-colonial and Indigenous histories of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In this lecture, she explores how we might consider the history of Gondwanaland as an idiosyncratic transnational history, a history and geography that has been nationalised, colonised, and mythologised since c.1800.
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Alison Bashford FBA is Scientia Professor of History at University of New South Wales, Sydney, and Director of the Laureate Centre for History & Population. Previously she was Vere Harmsworth Professor at the University of Cambridge. Her recent books are An Intimate History of Evolution (Allen Lane, 2022), shortlisted for the Cundill History Prize, winner of the Nib Literary Prize, and New Earth Histories: Geo-cosmologies and the Making of the Modern World (Chicago, 2023), edited with Emily Kern and Adam Bobbette. She is currently writing Secrets Disclosed: A History of the Hand (Chicago).
