History Program
Staff Profiles
Dr Robert Kenny
 |
ARC Research Fellow
Room: David Myers Building E304
Tel: (61 3) 9479 1132
Fax: (61 3) 9479 1942
Email: r.kenny@latrobe.edu.au
Qualifications: BA, PhD La Trobe |
Robert Kenny is a scholar and writer with a broad and cross-disciplinary approach and interests. He completed his PhD in History at La Trobe University. In 2006 he was Peter Blazey Fellow at the Australian Centre, University of Melbourne. His prime area of interest as an historian is the social history of ideas, particularly the interconnection of religion and science.
His The Lamb Enters the Dreaming: Nathanael Pepper and the Rupture World was winner of both the 2008 Australian Historical Association’s W. K. Hancock Prize and the 2008 Victorian Premier’s Award for First book of History. It was also Short-listed in the Adelaide Festival Award for Literature (non-fiction) and Commended in the Victorian Community History Awards. As at work in progress it won the Peter Blazey Prize and Fellowship. Robert also received an Arts Victoria Creative Development Grant in 2006. In 2008 he returned to the History Program at La Trobe as an ARC Post-Doctoral Fellow. He has also been awarded the Religious, Church and Mission Fellowship from the Mitchell Library, Sydney.
Robert’s research interests include the history of science; history of religion; identity and culture; early modern British history; the meeting cosmologies; and the idea of the unconscious. As well as his scholarly publications he has published several small volumes of poetry and fiction.
Awards inlcude:
2009 Prime Minister's Prize for Australian History for The Lamb Enters the Dreaming: Nathanael Pepper and the Ruptured World (joint winner with Tom Griffiths)
2008 Victorian Pemier's Literary Award for The Lamb Enters the Dreaming: Nathanael Pepper and the Ruptured World
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.)
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.
|
Books
- The Lamb Enters the Dreaming: Nathanael Pepper & the Ruptured World, Scribe Publications, Melbourne, 2007.
Winner of the Australian Historical Association’s W. K. Hancock Prize 2008;
Winner the Victorian Premier’s First Book of History Award 2008
Short-listed, the 2008 Adelaide Festival Literature Award (non-fiction) Commended in the Victorian Community History Awards
Articles and Papers
- 'Tricks or Treats?: the case for Kulin knowledge in Batman’s Treaty', forthcoming History Australia.
- 'The Moravian Charles Joseph La Trobe', The 2006 AGL Shaw Lecture, 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. |
Robert has recently received an ARC three year research grant of $255,000* for Psychoanalysis, Anthropology, and the Pacific: the Revaluing of Myth in the Twentieth Century
He has also received the $40,000 RCM Fellowship at the Mitchell library Sydney to research the changing attitude to race as evident in the Religious and missions collections of the Mitchell Library
|
