The project aims to place visions of the future from Britain, America, and Australia since 1800 alongside each other, comparing the anxieties and preoccupations that have produced them. 1800 marks a key shift. New ideas about time emerged, in which past, present, and future constituted separate entities. This same period, the dawn of western industrialization, is also a candidate for the beginning of the Anthropocene, around which contemporary anxieties about the future have clustered. The collaboration will be centred on a series of staged outputs: a co-authored monograph Visions of the Future Since 1800, a digital exhibition, student creative responses, and an archival reading group.
Researchers: Hannah Murray, William Tullett (Anglia Ruskin), Ruth Morgan (Australian National University)
Other information: this project is funded by a British Academy Seed Fund, following the British Academy and Australian Association of Humanities Knowledge Frontiers Forum held in Brisbane, November 2019.
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