Kate Fullagar

Kate Fullagar is a historian of the eighteenth-century world, particularly the British Empire and the many Indigenous societies it encountered. Her interest in comparative indigenous history focuses on the eastern Pacific (Polynesia), the American southeast (esp. Cherokees), and the Eora of today’s Australia.

She is the author of The Savage Visit (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), which traces the dramatic rise and surprising fall of popular British fascination for indigenous visitors through the eighteenth century. Pursuing similar themes, she is also the editor of The Atlantic World in the Antipodes: Effects and Transformations since the Eighteenth Century (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012), with chapters by Alison Bashford, Iain McCalman, Simon Schaffer, Margaret Jolly, Sheila Fitzpatrick, Damon Salesa, and several of the other fabulous scholars who assembled for Sydney’s Sawyer Seminar Series.

In 2018 she published with prize-winning historian Michael McDonnell an edited collection called Facing Empire: Indigenous Experiences in a Revolutionary Age (Johns Hopkins University Press, Oct. 2018). It includes chapters by Colin Calloway, Bill Gammage, Sujit Sivasundarum, Tony Ballantyne, Daniel Richter, and many others. In 2020 she publishes her second monograph, The Warrior, the Voyager, and the Artist.

It will be with Yale University Press and is about the unlikely eighteenth-century story of a Cherokee warrior called Ostenaco, a Ra’iatean voyager called Mai, and the British artist, Joshua Reynolds, who painted them both. Kate has held visiting fellowships at the University of York, Duke, Yale, and Princeton. Kate is the Lead Chief Investigator on an ARC Linkage Project with the National Portrait Gallery.