Colonialism and its Aftermath

In February 1999 Lucy convened an international interdisciplinary conference, ‘The Colonial Eye’, supported with funds from her Chair Establishment Grant.

Out of that conference came the International Centre for Convict Studies, bringing together scholars across a range of disciplines from the Universities of Barcelona, Bristol, Edinburgh, Leicester, and Tasmania. That Centre subsequently sponsored conferences at Leicester (1999), Tasmania (2003), and Barcelona (2004). In July 2005 it is sponsoring ‘Landscapes, Exiles, Belonging, Home’, a symposium to be held at the New Norcia Monastery and hosted by the University of Western Australia.

In 2000, Lucy and Professor Michael Bennett (History and Classics) convened a group which included academics and postgraduate students who had participated in ‘The Colonial Eye’, and proposed the development of on-going collaborative ties through the structure of a research cluster. After much debate, it was decided to call the cluster ‘Colonialism and its Aftermath’. During the next three years, the cluster held work-in-progress seminars to showcase the research of individual scholars, and it developed a number of collaborative research projects. Late in 2004, the University’s Research College agreed that the cluster—which has brought in some 2 million dollars in research funding—should now become a Centre. For more about the Centre and its activities, go to http://colonial.arts.utas.edu.au/