Staff profile
Dr Robert Kenny
Postdoctoral Fellow
Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences
School of Historical and European StudiesDMB E304, Melbourne (Bundoora)
- T: +61 3 9479 1132
- F: +61 3 9479 1942
- E: r.kenny@latrobe.edu.au
Qualifications
BA (La Trobe), PhD (La Trobe).
Area of study
Australian Studies
History
Brief Profile
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.
Research interests
European History
- Early modern British history
Religion and Society
- History of science and religion
Recent Publications
- Kenny, R (forthcoming) Tricks or Treats?: the case for Kulin knowledge in Batman’s Treaty. History Australia.
- Kenny, R 2007, The Lamb Enters the Dreaming: Nathanael Pepper & the Ruptured World. Melbourne: Scribe Publications.
- Kenny, R 2007, ‘The Moravian Charles Joseph La Trobe: The 2006 AGL Shaw Lecture’. La Trobeana, 6(3): 7-16.
- Kenny, R 2007, ‘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): 367-388.
- Kenny, R 2003, ‘La Trobe, Lake Boga and the "Enemy of Souls": The First Moravian Mission in Australia’. The La Trobe Journal. 71: 97-113.
- Kenny, R 1998, ‘In These Last Dayes: The Strange Work of Abiezer Coppe’. The Seventeenth Century, 13(2): 156-184.
- Kenny, R 1987, ‘Gerald Murnane’s Travels into Regions Assumed to be Known’, in Gerald Murnane: Footprint New Writers 2, ed. John Hanrahan and John McLaren. Melbourne: Footprint.
- Kenny, R 1985, ‘A Secret Australia: On the Poetry of Ken Taylor’ in A Secret Australia: New and Collected Poems, ed. Ken Taylor. Melbourne.
Research projects
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 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.
