Professor Penny Edmonds

Penny Edmonds is Matthew Flinders Professor of History in the College of Human Sciences and Culture, Flinders University, Adelaide. She is an elected Fellow of the Australian Academy of Social Sciences (2024).

An internationally recognised historian, Penny has over two decades of interdisciplinary research spanning Australian and British imperial history, settler–Indigenous relations, postcolonialism, transnational history, critical race theory, and gender. Her work examines themes of reconciliation and redress, humanitarianism, antislavery, and Australian and Pacific histories and politics. She is Honorary Professor in the College of Asia and the Pacific, Australian National University.

Penny holds a PhD in History from the University of Melbourne and is a former Australian Research Council (ARC) Future Fellow. She served on the ARC College of Experts (Humanities and Creative Arts, 2013–2015) and the ARC Engagement and Impact Panel (2018). Her book 'Settler Colonialism and Reconciliation: Frontier Violence, Affective Performances, and Imaginative Refoundings' (Palgrave, 2016) was shortlisted for the Ernest Scott Prize.

Penny has extensive executive leadership experience across higher education, the arts, social sciences, and the cultural heritage sector. As Dean (Research) in the in the College of Humanities Arts and Social Sciences Flinders University (2020–2023), she provided strategic leadership to strengthen research excellence, led the establishment of the Assemblage Centre for Creative Arts, and developed a new quality assessment framework for Non-Traditional Research Outputs, improving recognition and equity across creative and traditional research. https://www.flinders.edu.au/assemblage

Penny held senior leadership roles in museums nationally and internationally, including as Andrew Mellon Fellow in Advanced Heritage at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, and as Senior Conservator, Head of Conservation, and Curator at Museum Victoria. Her experience includes policy development, collection strategy, curation, research, exhibitions, stakeholder engagement, project leadership, and working closely with Indigenous communities. She contributed to the development of Melbourne Museum's Bunjilaka Aboriginal Cultural Centre and worked for seven years with Indigenous staff and Kulin knowledge holders through the Museum's Keeping Place Support Program.

In 2021, as a Trustee of the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Penny was part of the leadership group that delivered the first formal apology by an Australian state or federal museum to Tasmanian Aboriginal peoples.