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Ian Henderson was born in Canberra and grew up in Melbourne and Tasmania. He completed his PhD at the University of Sydney in 2001, before lecturing at Griffith University in Brisbane. He began work at the King’s College London in 2004 and now conducts teaching and research within the Department of English Language and Literature while remaining associated with the College’s Menzies Centre for Australian Studies. 

Dr Henderson’s research has three strands: colonial Australian literary cultures in the long nineteenth century with a particular interest in representations of Aboriginality; the history of nineteenth-century British reading; and Australian film. Between 2007-2010 he was foundation editor of 'Studies in Australasian Cinema'.

• Australian literature 
• Victorian literature and drama
• History of reading
• Australian film

Dr Henderson’s PhD thesis (2001) focused on reading history, specifically the European and colonial Australian reception of Jacques-Herni Bernardin de Saint-Pierre's Paul et Virginie (1788), in the nineteenth century when the novel achieved its most wide-spread fame. He has an abiding interest in the colonial culture of Van Diemen's Land.

His current research approaches Victorian literature via the Antipodes to begin tracing the modernisation of British novel-reading in the latter half of the nineteenth century, a process which entailed a new acknowledgement of the loss of physiological and psychological control in reading but also its ‘management’ as understood in racialist terms. His research articulates this process by bringing together specific scientific, aesthetic, technological and social domains of historical inquiry.

Dr Henderson also publishes regularly on Australian literature and literary criticism, most recently on Miles Franklin’s My Brilliant Career (1901), Jack Davis’s 1982 play The Dreamers, and A. A. Phillips’s ‘classic’ essay ‘The Cultural Cringe’ (1958). His article on the latter is to be re-published in The Best Australian Essays 2010 edited by Robert Drewe.

Ian Henderson (2010) '"Gee, Head Stockman!": Prospects and Professionals in Charles Chauvel's 'Jedda' (1955) and Tracey Moffatt's 'Night Cries' (1989)', in Antipodean Childhoods: Growing up in Australia and New Zealand pp. ?-? [Chapter]

Ian Henderson (2010) 'Noongar Modernity and Jack Davis's 'The Dreamers' (1982)', in Modern Australian Criticism and Theory: A Critical Guide pp. ?-? [Chapter]

Ian Henderson (2009)  '"Freud has a name for it": A A Phillips's 'The Cultural Cringe' (1950)' Southerly, 69 (2), pp. 125-145. [Article in print Journal]

Ian Henderson (2009)  'Homophobia: An Australian History.' AUSTRALIAN HISTORICAL STUDIES, 40 (3), pp. 385-386. [Book Review (Print)]

Ian Henderson (2009)  'Stranger Danger: Approaching Home and 'Ten Canoes' (2006)' SOUTH ATLANTIC QUARTERLY, 108 (1), pp. 53-70 [Article in print Journal]

Ian Henderson (2009) 'The Body of an Australian Girl: Sexuality and Style in Miles Franklin's 'My Brilliant Career'', in Feminism and the Body: Interdisciplinary Perspectives pp. 116-133 [Chapter]

Ian Henderson (2009)  'Writing Never Arrives Naked: Early Aboriginal Cultures of Writing in Australia' Journal of Australian Studies, 33 (4), pp. 498-499. [Book Review (Print)]

Ian Henderson (2008)  'Stranger Danger: Approaching Home and Ten Canoes' SOUTH ATLANTIC QUARTERLY, 108 (1), pp. 53-70. [Article in print Journal]

Undergraduate

• 4AAEA003 Reading Poetry
• 4AAEA002 Writing London 
• 5AAEB035 Australian Literature and Film
• 5AAYCL09 Postcolonial Literature and Theory
• 5AAH2013 History of Australia 1788-present
• 6AAEC054 Modernism in Australia
• 7AAEM656 Victorian Sensation
• 7AAYCL03 Comparative Theories

Postgraduate

• 7AAQS585 Australian Film
• 7AADM016 Colonial Modernity-Australian Modernism 

Dr Henderson received a School of Arts and Humanities award for Excellence in Teaching for 2006-7.

Current PGR students

Ms Alison Clark, ‘From Past to Present: the Many Lives of the British Museum’s Indigenous Australian and Torres Strait Islander Collections’;

Ms Aruna Wittman, ‘Violence, Delinquency and Perversion in the Novels and Short Stories of Peter Carey’.

Previous PGR students

Dr Timothy Causer, ‘Only a place fit for angels and eagles’: the Norfolk Island penal settlement, 1825-55’.