11am, 19th April 2023
Burwood: C2.05.01
Waurn Ponds: IC2.108
Zoom link here.

The British Royal Biographer as Palace Courtier

This discussion offers a brief survey of how the field of British royal biography has developed over the last 120 years to encompass a community of official and approved royal biographers, a community that operates within and in close proximity to the royal court. The select group of biographers that I’ll be focussing on will be shown to have been vetted for acceptance into royal enclosures by generations of royal courtiers who apply a complex system of Palace codes to determine status and access rights. Similarly, it will chart the biographers’ own ordering of a range of symbolic exchanges, both between themselves and with senior royal officials, that has developed into a carefully delineated system of royal patronage that both creates and supports the ‘top tier’ biographers as a discrete cohort.

Giselle Bastin is Associate Professor of English at Flinders University. Giselle’s research focuses on the field of ‘royalism’ and biographies, biopics and histories about the British Royal Family, and representations of the upper-middle class and aristocracy in heritage film and English literature. Giselle is a regular media commentator about British royalty.