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Lecture: Gondwanaland - the Transnational History of Southern Earth
26 June 2024, 5:30 pm–8:00 pm
Join us for this year’s Centre for Transnational and Global History Annual Lecture, delivered by Alison Bashford on the ancient megacontinent Gondwanaland.
This event is free.
Event Information
Open to
- All | UCL staff | UCL students
Availability
- Yes
Cost
- Free
Organiser
-
Institute of Advanced Studies
Location
-
IAS ForumG17, ground floor, South WingUCL, Gower St, LondonWC1E 6BT
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.
This event is supported by the UCL History Department and UCL Anthropocene.
About the Speaker
Alison Bashford
at University of New South Wales, Sydney
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).
More about Alison Bashford