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Helen Gardner

Helen is an historian of the broader Oceania, including Australia and the Pacific Islands through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Following her undergraduate and postgraduate studies at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Helen was awarded her PhD in 2000. Helen’s book Gathering for God: George Brown in Oceania was shortlisted for the Ernest Scott prize. Over a twenty-year career at Deakin University, Helen has taught on twentieth-century world history and the history of race, anthropology, and colonialism in Australia and the Pacific Islands. Helen’s long focus on the history of anthropology in Oceania has expanded to an exploration of the global intellectual forces on Pacific peoples, including theology, particularly in the era of decolonisation. Helen has a longstanding interest in anthropological archives and she is the Chief Investigator of a large Australian Research Council Linkage Grant on Aboriginal materials in South Eastern Australia. When Helen is not puzzling over historical conundrums with her historian partner, or chairing the Journal of Pacific History, she is learning how to draw and unsuccessfully teaching her dog not to bark at the possums.

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