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ENGL428P Australia, New Zealand, and the British Empire

"This is a course on the British Empire and its presence in Australia and New Zealand. Central to our approach will be efforts to unsettle methodologies that read Indigenous histories and cultures in colonialist ways. We will be asking questions about how shifts in method allow for different perspectives, different answers, and different objects of study. One of the key challenges for English Honors students is determining what methodologies to use for the Honors theses. In centering methodology as its subject of enquiry, this course is designed to help English Honors students navigate methodology in their own projects.

Primary materials will include nineteenth-century English-language novels, essays, and poetry written from Australia and New Zealand, paired with more recent Indigenous literary works that revise or undo those earlier texts. Alongside Henry Lawson’s canonical Australian short story “The Drover’s Wife” (1892), for example, we will read Indigenous author Leah Purcell’s 2016 postcolonial, feminist play of the same title.

We will take seriously questions about archives, making extensive use, both in class discussion and written work, of the considerable digital archives available for scholars of these nineteenth-century spaces. Specifically, we will explore Trove, the remarkable digital archive of nineteenth-century Australian periodicals established by the National Library of Australia, and Papers Past, the digital repository of nineteenth-century New Zealand periodicals. Layered among these records of British colonization, we will engage with Indigenous cultural accounts, including visual media and oral culture, to resituate ourselves and our thinking in relation to colonial power structures.

Students will be given the option to write a research paper based on archival research or to work collaboratively on a research paper. Assignments specific to navigating archives will be woven throughout the semester. "