Harold White Fellows Announced
The National Library of Australia offers annual fellowships to established researchers and writers. Established by the Council of the National Library of Australia in 1983 as the National Library Fellowships, the first Fellows commenced their research at the Library in 1984. The fellowships were renamed in honour of Sir Harold White CBE (1905–1992), the first National Librarian, in 1985.
The fellowships scheme aims to promote the Library as a centre of scholarly activity and research, encourage scholarly and literary use of the Library’s collections and production of publications arising from that scholarship, and to promote the Library’s rich and varied collections.
Four to seven fellowships, of periods from three to six months, are awarded annually. The following fellowships have been awarded for 2010:
- Dr Lynne McCarthy is an environmental historian and Research Fellow at the National Museum of Australia’s Centre for Historical Research. Prior to joining the Centre, Lynne worked at the National Museum as Exhibitions Coordinator and Acting Manager, Research and Development Unit. At the National Museum Lynne also worked as a Curator in the People and the Environment section, and as a Senior Curator in environmental history. Lynne’s research interests are plant ecology, environmental history, land resource management and ethnobotany, and her doctoral research was on environmental science and palaeoecology in the Flinders Rangers. Lynne’s Harold White Fellowship project is titled, ‘The Botany and Plant Ecology of Arnhem Land, Northern Australia: Cultural and Scientific Ways of Knowing’.
- Dr Bronwen Douglas is a Senior Fellow at the Australian National University in the Division of Pacific and Asian History. Her research interests centre on the history of race in Oceania, since the late Enlightenment. Bronwen has worked as a lecturer, Visiting Fellow and Senior Fellow at a variety of universities in Australia, France and the United Kingdom. Her Harold White Fellowship project is called ‘Racial Geography, Local Knowledge and the Naming of Oceania, 1750–1850’, and during her fellowship she will utilise the National Library’s Maps Collection. Bronwen is also in the process of completing a monograph called Indigenous Presence and the Science of Race, and co-editing a book of essays, Foreign Bodies: Oceania and the Science of Race, 1750–1940.
- Dr Sheridan Palmer is an Honorary Fellow at the University of Melbourne’s Australian Centre. Her current research is on the cultural background of art history and art historians in Australia. In 2008, she published Centre of the Periphery: Three European Art Historians in Melbourne, on Ursula Hoff, Franz Philipp and Sir Joseph Burke. Sheridan has worked at the National Gallery of Australia, Ballarat Fine Art Gallery and at several commercial galleries. She obtained a PhD from the University of Melbourne and has curated a number of exhibitions, including ‘The Goddess Grins: Albert Tucker and the Female Image’, at Heide Museum of Modern Art, 2007. Sheridan’s research project for her Harold White Fellowship is ‘The Antipodean: The Life and Work of Bernard Smith’.
- Dr Priscilla Roberts is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Hong Kong. Her research expertise is diplomatic history and international affairs, and her recent research includes Anglo-American foreign relations with Asia between 1940 and 1980, the development of 20th–century US foreign policy and the life of Frank Altschul. Priscilla obtained her Masters and PhD from King’s College, Cambridge, and she has edited a number of books, including, Sino-American Relations Since 1900 (1991). Priscilla’s Harold White Fellowship project relates to Anglo-American ‘think tanks’ and Chinese policy.
The Library also offers an annual fellowship to researchers in Japanese studies. The Japan Fellowship is intended to encourage research based on the Library’s Japanese collections. Established by the Library in 2006, the Japan Fellowship is supported by the H.S. Williams Trust Fund. Harold Stannett Williams (1898–1987) donated his personal collection on Japan and the West to the Library in 1978.
The 2010 Japan Fellowship has been offered to Dr Donna Weeks, Lecturer in Japanese Studies and International Relations, University of the Sunshine Coast. She obtained a PhD from the University of Queensland and her major research areas includes Japan–Australia relations and foreign policy, the Australian Senate, Japanese language, Japanese political culture and security issues in north-east Asia. She has been a visiting fellow at a number of institutions, including Griffith University’s Centre for Governance and Public Policy, the Australian National University’s ARC Centre of Excellence in Policing and Security and at Waseda University, Japan. Donna’s Harold White Fellowship project is titled ‘Resource Security and Japan’s Regional Security Trajectory’.
Gianoula Burns
Manager, Divisional Support



