Humanities and Social Sciences

History Program

Staff Profiles

Research interests

Robert Kenny is a writer and scholar with a broad and cross-disciplinary approach and interests. His major areas of research are the social history of ideas, particularly of religion and science; issues of identity and culture; early modern British history; the meeting of European and indigenous cosmologies; the idea of the unconscious. In addition to his scholarly publications he has published several volumes of poetry and fiction.

Current Research Project

Psychoanalysis, Anthropology, and the Pacific: the Revaluing of Myth in the Twentieth Century. This ARC funded project explores how much the importance given to myth by psychoanalysis —and via psychoanalysis into the broader Western culture— combined a Romanticist “longing for myth” with an evolutionary anthropology that had as its major subject Australia and the Pacific, and how this anthropological knowledge fundamentally influenced the nature of the revaluing of myth through-out the twentieth-century.

Selected Publications

Book
The Lamb Enters the Dreaming: Nathanael Pepper & the Ruptured World, Scribe Publications, Melbourne, 2007.

Articles
'Tricks or Treats?: the case for Kulin knowledge in Batman’s Treaty', forthcoming History Australia.
'The Moravian Charles Joseph La Trobe', La Trobeana, 6:3, November 2007, 7-16.
'From the Curse of Ham to the Curse of Nature: the Influence of Natural Selection on the Debate on Human Unity before the publication of the Descent of Man', The British Journal for the History of Science, 40:3, September 2007, 367-388.
'La Trobe, Lake Boga and the "Enemy of Souls": The First Moravian Mission in Australia', The La Trobe Journal, 71, 2003, pp. 97-113.
'"In These Last Dayes": The Strange Work of Abiezer Coppe', The Seventeenth Century, XIII.2 1998, pp. 156-184.
' “Gerald Murnane’s Travels into Regions Assumed to be Known' in John Hanrahan and John McLaren, eds, Gerald Murnane: Footprint New Writers 2, Melbourne 1987 pp. 23-41.
'A Secret Australia: On the Poetry of Ken Taylor' in Ken Taylor, A Secret Australia: New and Collected Poems, Melbourne 1985, pp. 85-96.

An overview of Robert’s literary publications can be found under his listing on the AustLit database.

Awards and distinctions

2008 Short-listed for the Adelaide Festival Award for Literature—Non-fiction (for The Lamb Enters the Dreaming)
2006 Peter Blazey Fellowship, Australia Centre, University of Melbourne
2005 Arts Victoria Creative Development Grant
1983 Highly Commended, FAW ANA Literary Award (for The Last Adventures of Christian Doom: Private I.)