The School of Communication and Arts is pleased to announce the 2026 S.W. Brooks Public Lecture, to be delivered by Professor Porscha Fermanis of University College Dublin.
Professor Fermanis will present a paper titled Beyond the Pocahontas Perplex: Intimacy, Sex, and Grief in the Australian Interracial Romance, exploring how representations of Indigenous women in nineteenth and twentieth-century Australian fiction have been shaped by the enduring cultural myth of the Native American princess. Drawing on settler fiction from both Australian and transnational contexts, the lecture examines how interracial romance narratives have both reflected and reinforced colonial constructions of personhood, intimacy, and grief before turning to contemporary novels by Anita Heiss, Melissa Lucashenko, and Richard Flanagan as counterpoints that move beyond these inherited frameworks.
Professor Fermanis is an internationally recognised scholar of nineteenth-century literature. From 2016 to 2021, she was principal investigator of the European Research Council-funded SouthHem project and is co-editor of the Bloomsbury Academic book series The New Nineteenth Century. Her latest monograph, Settler Fiction from the Southern Hemisphere, 1820–1890, was published by Oxford University Press in 2026.
This lecture is supported by the S.W. Brooks Visiting Fellowship. All are welcome to attend. The event is free.
Date: Wednesday 1 July 2026
Time: 5:30pm for a 6pm start, followed by light refreshments from 7-8pm
Venue: Room 227, 308 Queen Street, UQ Brisbane City
Register at events.humanitix.com/2026-sw-brooks-public-lecture
Enquiries: engagement@hass.uq.edu.au
