Professor Penny Edmonds
Professor
College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences
Professor Penelope Edmonds is Matthew Flinders Professor, History, in the College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences. She is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Social Sciences in Australia.
Penny's research is distinguished by over two decades of creative and interdisciplinary work in the areas of 19th century British empire and setter colonialism in the Australian and Pacific region, transnational and postcolonial histories, heritage and museums. She seeks to bring a critical theory perspective to questions of colonialism, race, reconciliation and redress, humanitarianism, slavery and unfreedom in the Australian and Western Pacific region.
The new website 'Eyewitness to Empire - Reform in the Antipodes' is based on Penny's ARC Future Fellowship, which examined the early histories of humanitarianism, slavery, and colonialism in the Antipodes, by tracing three key Quaker journeys of investigation to Australia, South Africa and the Pacific in the 19th century. The project resituates important Australian and antipodean histories back into the larger, global story of human rights.
Penny was awarded a PhD in History from the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies, University of Melbourne, in 2006. She is a past editor of Australian Historical Studies.
Penny has significant experience in University governance and research leadership. She served as Dean of Research in the College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences, 2020-2022 (three years) at Flinders University, where she led the strategic development of the college's research centre Assemblage Centre for Creative Arts. She served as a member of the Australian Research Council (ARC) College of Experts Humanities and Creative Arts panel (2013-2015), and the ARC Engagement and Impact panel for Humanities and Creative Arts (2018).
She has broad industry and professional experience in the field of history and the arts and cultural heritage sector, and has worked in museums both nationally and internationally, at the Australian Museum, Sydney, Museum Victoria, Melbourne, and as Andrew Mellon Fellow in Heritage, National Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C, 1991–1994. As a Trustee of the Board of the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Penny was a member of the working group that wrote and delivered the landmark apology to Tasmanian Indigenous peoples on behalf of the organisation in February 2021. Acknowledging 200 years of colonisation and genocide, the apology was the first ever to given by a state or federal museum in Australia. See Apology TMAG
Recent:
2025 'Digital Technologies Prize', History Council of South Australia, for 'Martindale Stories' website: martindalestories.org
2024 Fellow, Australian Academy of Social Sciences in Australia (ASSA)
2018 Inaugural Theory Race and Colonialism Essay (TRACE) Award, Australian and New Zealand Law and History Society, for ‘Emancipation Acts on the Oceanic Frontier? Intimacy, Diplomacy, Colonial Invasion and the Legal Traces of Protection in the Bass Strait World, 1832’, Law and History (2017).
2017 Shortlisted Ernest Scott Prize, University of Melbourne /Australian Historical Association, Settler Colonialism and (Re)Conciliation: Frontier Violence, Affective Performances and Imaginative Refoundings, (Palgrave UK, 2016).
British imperial and settler colonial histories; transnational, Australia in the Pacific world; Australian history and political culture;comparative postcolonial and Indigenous histories; critical race theory; reconciliation and redress; 19thc British humanitarianism and human rights; slavery and unfreedom in the Australian and the Western Pacific region; gender and history; gender and empire; heritage, museums and public history; visual culture; history and media; history and memory.
- History - Australian
- History - British
- Australin colonial history, empire, humanitarianism, gender
- Reconciliation
Sturt Rd, Bedford Park
South Australia 5042
South Australia | Northern Territory
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