Patrons
Hon Justice Michael Kirby AC CMG
Professor Lowitja O'Donoghue AC CBE
Distinguished Fellows
Professor Ashis Nandy
Professor Marcia Langton
The Institute of Postcolonial Studies is an autonomous
scholarly institution, located in Melbourne, Australia. Established
in 1996, the Institute of Postcolonial Studies was the first institution
in the world to be specifically directed to the study of postcolonialism.
Initially the Institute’s membership was drawn mainly from
Australian universities plus a number of overseas educational institutions,
but it is now much more diverse.
Links
-
An Affiliation Agreement between the University of Melbourne
and the Institute was signed in October 2003, replacing a Recognition
Agreement of June 2000. The Institute also has a Memorandum
of Association with the Faculty of Arts, Monash University (March
2000, renewed in 2006). Overseas, the Institute has Agreements
of Association with the Department of International Relations
at Jadavpur University in Calcutta, India (July 2002), and the
Centro Interdipartimentale dei servizi Linguistici e Audiovisivi,
Instituto Universitario Orientale di Napoli in Italy (August
2002). The Institute has close relations with the International
Centre for Ethnic Studies in Colombo, the Centre for the Study
of Developing Societies in Delhi, India and the Critical Theory
Institute at the University of California, Irvine.
Publications
-
The Institute’s research efforts are underpinned by its
international journal, Postcolonial Studies. The journal publishes
original and challenging contributions from around the world
informed by a variety of theoretical perspectives including
postmodernism, Marxism, feminism and queer theory. Now published
four times a year under the Routledge imprint, the first issue
of the journal appeared in April 1998. Recent themed issues
have directed attention to the subaltern and the popular, the
trope of exceptionalism, and the time of theory.
From 1998 to 2002, the Institute’s international book
series Writing Past Colonialism was published by Continuum (formerly
Cassell Academic). The last monograph produced under the Continuum
imprint was Alison Blunt and Cheryl McEwan (eds.), Postcolonial
Geographies. The series is now published by the University of
Hawai’i Press. The first three titles in the new series
were published, more or less simultaneously, in August 2006.
They were: Boundary Writing: An Exploration of Race, Culture
and Gender Binaries in Contemporary Australia, edited by Lynette
Russell; Selves in Question: Interviews on Southern African
Auto/Biography, edited by Judith Coullie, Stephan Meyer, Thengani
Ngwenya and Thomas Olver; and Postcolonising the International:
Working to Change the Way We Are, edited by Phillip Darby.
Increasingly, the Institute is demonstrating its belief that
the fruits of scholarship should not be confined to the academy.
To this end, it has an Occasional Papers Series, which presents
a diverse selection of peer-reviewed works-in-progress, keynote
addresses, seminar and conference presentations and other materials
that have been produced by members of the Institute community
or presented at an event connected with the Institute. The first
three papers in the series are: Lowitja O’Donoghue, Australian
Postcolonial Dilemmas (2002), Margaret Thornton, Inhabiting
a Political Economy of Uncertainty: Academic Life in the 21st
Century (2002) and Phillip Darby, Devika Goonewardene, Edgar
Ng and Simon Obendorf, A Postcolonial International Relations?
(2003).
Panel Series
-
The Institute runs an interdisciplinary panel series each semester
on subjects both of academic and more general interest. Usually
of a themed nature, panels have addressed topics such as “Place,
Space and the Postcolonial”; “Decolonising Nature”;
“Race and Trope in the Settler State”; and “The
Postcolonial Comic”. In 2006/7 an innovative three-semester
programme entitled “Performance and Politics” featured
leading Australian visual and performance artists, dancers,
composers and the like.
Outreach Programme
- The Institute has a commitment to sharing its scholarship with
the broader community through its special seminar series, public
lectures and other events. Public meetings have been addressed
by Professors Henry Reynolds (award-winning Australian author),
David Fieldhouse (Cambridge), Ashis Nandy (Delhi), David Harvey
(Johns Hopkins), Gabriele Schwab (Critical Theory Institute, University
of California, Irvine), and the Hon. Anthony North (Judge, Federal
Court of Australia). The Institute’s most recent public
fora have been on democratisation and decolonisation in East Timor
and the crisis over West Papua. In July 2005, the Institute hosted
the Melbourne hearings of the People’s Inquiry into Detention.
An event of a rather different kind was a performance by Max Gillies,
in which he discussed his career in political satire and gave
excerpts from some of his stage and television entertainments.
Visiting and Other Scholars
- The Institute has established a Visiting Scholars programme
to bring leading postcolonial scholars to Melbourne for research,
teaching and public engagements. The Institute’s first Visiting
Fellow, Professor Ashis Nandy, Senior Fellow at the Centre for
the Study of Developing Societies in Delhi, took up his appointment
in March 1999. Professor Nandy also officially opened the Institute’s
building. Together with his wife, Uma, he returned for a second
visit in August and September 2003. In 2007 the Institute appointed
the anthropologist and cultural theorist John von Sturmer as Senior
Fellow and the visual and performance artist, Ruark Lewis, as
Convenor, Performance and Creative Arts. Both are based in Sydney.
|
