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Professor Fiona Paisley is a cultural historian in the School of Humanities, Languages and Social Science at Griffith University, Brisbane. She researches transnational and settler colonial histories of humanitarianism and internationalism in the interwar years. Her books include The Lone Protestor: AM Fernando in Australia and Europe (Aboriginal Studies Press, 2012) which won the Magarey Medal for Biography in 2014; Glamour in the Pacific: Cultural Internationalism and Race Politics in the Women’s Pan-Pacific (University of Hawaii Press, 2009) and Loving Protection? Australian Feminism and Aboriginal Women’s Rights, 1919-1939 (Melbourne University Press, 2000). She has co-written with Jane Haggis, Clare Midgely, and Margaret Allen, Cosmopolitan Lives on the Cusp of Empire: Interfaith, Cross-Cultural and Transnational Networks (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017); with Prue Ahrens and Lamont Lindstrom, Across the World with the Johnsons: Visual Culture and Empire in the Twentieth Century (Ashgate, 2013); and with Anna Cole and Victoria Haskins, Uncommon Ground: White Women in Aboriginal History (Aboriginal Studies Press, 2005). And she has co-edited with Kirsty Reid, Sources and Methods in Histories of Colonialism: Approaching the Imperial Archive (Routledge, 2017), and Critical Perspectives on Colonialism: Writing the Empire from Below (Routledge, 2014). She has been the recipient of three Australian Research Council grants, and is currently working on: sites of everyday internationalism in Australia during the first half of the twentieth century; how anti-slavery and Indigenous rights discourses were mobilised by humanitarian and Aboriginal rights networks in Australia and Britain from the 1920s to the 1950s; and what the Pan-Pacific in the 1930s can reveal about Australia’s role in the modernisation of colonialism through educational reform. She is a fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia.

Recent Publications

Reid, Kirsty and Fiona Paisley (eds), Sources and Methods in Histories of Colonialism: Approaching the Imperial Archive, Routledge, 2017
Allen, Margaret, Jane Haggis, Clare Midgely, and Fiona Paisley, Cosmopolitan Lives on the Cusp of Empire: Interfaith, Cross-Cultural and Transnational Networks, Palgrave Macmillan, 2017
Paisley, Fiona and Kirsty Reid (eds), Critical Perspectives on Colonialism: Writing the Empire from Below, Routledge, 2014
Ahrens, Prue, Lamont Lindstrom and Fiona Paisley, Across the World with the Johnsons: Visual Culture and Empire in the Twentieth Century, Ashgate, 2013
Paisley, Fiona, The Lone Protestor: AM Fernando in Australia and Europe Aboriginal Studies, Press, 2012
Paisley, Fiona, Glamour in the Pacific: Cultural Internationalism and Race Politics in the Women’s Pan-Pacific University of Hawaii Press, 2009
Cole, Anna, Victoria Haskins, and Fiona Paisley, Uncommon Ground: White Women in Aboriginal History, Aboriginal Studies Press, 2005
Paisley, Fiona, Loving Protection? Australian Feminism and Aboriginal Women’s Rights 1919-1939, Melbourne University Press, 2000

Special Issues of Journals
‘Anti-Slavery and Australia’, History Compass, 15:5 2017
‘Anti-Slavery and its Legacies’, Australian Historical Studies, with Jane Lydon, 45:1 2014
‘Settler Colonialism and the Colonial Turn’, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, 4:3 2003
‘New Comparisons, International Worlds’, Australian Feminist Studies, 16:36 2001

Journal Articles
‘Sexuality, Nationalism, and ‘Race’: Humanitarian Debate about Indian Indenture in Fiji, 1910-1918’, Labour History (113, November 2017).
Paisley, Fiona, ‘The Italo-Abyssinian Crisis and Australia Settler Colonialism in 1935’, History Compass Special Issue on Anti Slavery and Settler Colonialism in World History. 15:5 (2017). http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/hic3.12363/full
Paisley, Fiona, ‘The Spoils of Opportunity: Janet Mitchell and Australian Internationalism in the Interwar Pacific’, History Australia, 13:4 (2016): 575-591.
McLeod, Julie and Fiona Paisley, ‘The Modernization of Colonialism and the Educability of the “Native”: Transpacific Knowledge Networks and Education in the Interwar Years’, History of Education Quarterly, 56:3 (2016): 473-502.
Paisley, Fiona, ‘Applied Anthropology and Interwar Internationalism: Felix and Marie Keesing and the (White) Future of the ‘Native’ Pan-Pacific, Journal of Pacific History 50:3 (2015): 304-321.
Paisley, Fiona, ‘An Echo of Black Slavery: Emancipation, Forced Labour and Australia in 1933’, Australian Historical Studies 45:1 (2014): 103-125.
Paisley, Fiona, ‘Arrested in St Peter’s Square: Anthony Martin Fernando, Aboriginal Rights and Fascist Italy’, Indigenous Modernities: Cultural and Social History 9:4 (2012): 569-588.
Finnane, Mark and Fiona Paisley, ‘Policing on a Colonial Frontier: the “Borroloola Case” and the limits of rule of law in 1930s Australia’, with Professor Mark Finnane (Centre of Excellence in Policing and Security, Griffith), Law and History Review 28:1 (2010): 141-171.
Paisley, Fiona, ‘Death Scene Protest: Aboriginal Rights in 1920s London’, South Atlantic Quarterly 110:4 (2011): 867-883.
Paisley, Fiona, ‘From Nation of Islam to Goodwill Tourist: African American Women at Pan Pacific and South East Asia Women’s Conferences, 1931-1955’, Women’s Studies International Forum, 32 (2009): 21-28.
Paisley, Fiona, ‘Australian Aboriginal Activism in Interwar Britain and Europe: Anthony Martin Fernando’, History Compass 7:3 (2009): 701-18.
Paisley, Fiona, ‘Mock Justice: World Conservation and Australian Aborigines in Interwar Switzerland’, Transforming Cultures eJournal, 3/1 (2008).
Paisley, Fiona, ‘Glamour in the Pacific: Cultural Internationalism and Maori Politics at Pan-Pacific Women’s Conferences in the 1950s’, Pacific Studies 29:1/2 (2006): 54-81.
Paisley, Fiona, ‘Performing “New Zealand”: Maori and Pakeha Delegates at the Pan-Pacific Women’s Conference, Hawai’i, 1934’, New Zealand Journal of History 38:1 (2004): pp. 22-38.
Paisley, Fiona, ‘White Settler Colonialisms and the Colonial Turn: An Australian Perspective’, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 4:3 (2003): 1-12.
Paisley, Fiona, ‘Introduction’, New Comparisons/International Worlds, Australian Feminist Studies, Special Issue on Comparative History, Australian Feminist Studies 36:16 (2001): 271-77.

Book Chapters
Paisley, Fiona, ‘Looking with Their Eyes and Feeling with their Hearts: The Permanent Mandates Commission and Education in the Mandates’ in Patricia O’Brien and Joy Damousi (eds), League of Nations: Histories, Legacies and Impact. Melbourne University Press, forthcoming 2018
Paisley, Fiona, ‘Living Empire’, in Sources and Methods in Histories of Colonialism: Approaching the Imperial Archive, edited by Reid and Paisley, Routledge, 2017: chapter 10.
Paisley, Fiona, ‘Cosmopolitan Modernity and Post-Imperial Relations: Dominion Australia and Indian Internationalism in the Interwar Pacific’, in Allen et al, Cosmopolitan Lives on the Cusp of Empire: Interfaith, Cross-Cultural and Transnational Networks, Palgrave Macmillan, 2017: 85-105.
Paisley, Fiona, ‘History Lessons in Hyde Park: Embodying the Australian Frontier in Interwar London’, in Critical Perspectives on Colonialism: Writing the Empire from Below edited by Fiona Paisley and Kirsty Reid, Routledge 2014: 85-101.
Paisley, Fiona, ‘Resistance in Exile: Anthony Martin Fernando, Australian Aboriginal activist, internationalist, and traveller in Europe’, in Transnational Lives: Biographies in Global Modernity, edited by Desley Deacon, Penny Russell and Angela Woollacott, Palgrave Macmillan, 2010: 183-194.
Paisley, Fiona, ‘Performing Interracial Harmony: Maori Delegates, the New Zealand Delegation and Cultural Internationalism in the Pan-Pacific’, in Tony Ballantyne and Antoinette Burton (eds), Moving Subjects: Mobility, Intimacy and Gender in an Age of Global Empire, Duke University Press, 2009: 127-146.
Paisley, Fiona, ‘An education in white brutality: Anthony Martin Fernando and Australian Aboriginal rights in transnational context’, in Annie Coombes (editor), Rethinking Settler Colonialism: History and Memory in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa (Manchester University Press, 2006): 209-226.
Paisley, Fiona, ‘Race Hysteria: Darwin 1938’, in Tony Ballantyne and Antoinette Burton (editors), Bodies in Contact: Rethinking Colonial Encounters in World History, Duke University Press, 2005: 234-252.

Media Coverage

http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/latenightlive/the-story-of-am-fernando/4028536

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Country Focus

Expertise by Geography

Australia, England, Pacific

Expertise by Chronology

20th century

Expertise by Topic

Colonialism, Gender, Human Rights, Indigenous Peoples, Race, Women