Associate Professor David Hansen from the ANU Centre for Art History and Art Theory is a Chief Investigator on a research project announced as one of 61 successful recipients of Australian Research Council (ARC) Linkage Projects Scheme funding.

Projects funded by Linkage Projects Scheme involve collaboration and significant partnerships between researchers and other entities in areas such as government, community organisations, business and industry.

Dr Hansen will be a Chief Investigator on a Facing new worlds: comparative histories of Australasia and North America, led by Dr Katharine Fullagar from Macquarie University and carried out in partnership with the National Portrait Gallery.

The project, which will centre on a major exhibition, aims to develop comparative research into Indigenous and settler experiences in Australasia and North America in order to discover new connections or distinctions between the two regions for both public and academic audiences. The outcomes will promote a deeper appreciation of Australia’s place in a Pacific world with as yet unexplored links to the Americas, and will also model new ways for art history and socio-cultural history to come together to explicate a shared, complicated past. More information about the project can be found here.

Dr Hansen’s work in the field of Australian colonial art includes important essays on paintings and sculptures of Indigenous Australian leaders Bungaree and Truganini. Last month he published on an Augustus Earle portrait of Elizabeth Barnes, the artist’s only known pastel and possibly his first commission in the Australian colonies. An exhibition curated by Dr Hansen, Dempsey’s People, which features a folio of watercolours of the British Regency poor, opens at the National Portrait Gallery in July.

Image: Augustus Earle, Portrait of Bungaree, a native of New South Wales, c.1826, oil on canvas, 68.5  x 50.5 cm. Image courtesy Rex Nan Kivell Collection, the National Gallery of Australia and the National Library of Australia.