Australia Studies Institute

King's-Australia Partnership Seed Fund

The King’s-Australia Partnership Seed Fund aims to to foster research collaboration between King’s academics and their counterparts in Australian universities.

In late 2023, the Australia Studies Institute awarded 11 research grants through the fund in areas such as equity in healthcare, climate change, and governance.

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L to R - Emma Kowal, Anne Pollock and Tanisha Spratt at a talk on 'Haunting Biology

Researching Global Australia

Australia has long been connected to its region and the world beyond. Before colonisation, Yolŋu people from north-eastern Arnhem Land traded with sailors from nearby Makassar (now in Indonesia) and connected Indigenous Australians with supply chains stretching to China. Settler colonialism heralded widespread institutional and personal links with Britain as well as other parts of Europe, Asia, the United States and beyond.

These links inspired a great deal of travel and mobility, and today, Australians are among the world’s most voracious travellers and significant numbers of Australian expats can be found around the world, including in London.

Leverhulme Fellow at the Australia Studies Institute

In 2025, Dr Rosa Campbell will begin a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship with the Australia Studies Institute. Rosa is a global historian of feminism with a PhD from the University of Cambridge.

She will work on the project, ‘Globalising sisterhood: Global South feminism at the United Nations 1975–2000’.

Learn more about the project

The Richard Gunter Scholarships

The Richard Gunter Scholarships are travel bursaries awarded annually to facilitate Australia-focused research. They are funded through the generous support of the Estate of Richard Gunter.

In 2025, the Australia Studies Institute is offering three bursaries of up to £3,500 for King's students to do research in Australia and for researchers in other British or European universities to do research at King's.

Graphic of Australia on the globe with light paths connecting it to other parts of the globe

The Annual Menzies Lecture

The Menzies Lecture is delivered by a distinguished person, of any nationality, to reflect on a subject of contemporary interest affecting Britain and Australia.

The 2025 lecture titled 'The Life of Emily Kam Kngwarray' was delivered on 22 October at Tate Modern by Kelli Cole, Australian First Nations Curator. Kngwarray was a pivotal figure in the artistic revolution that redefined contemporary Aboriginal art with her unique style and powerful creative vision, earning her worldwide attention. This talk explored the life of one of the most significant painters to emerge in the late 20th century.

The Annual Reese Lecture

The Reese Memorial Lecture is given in honour of Dr Trevor Reese, a distinguished historian of the British Commonwealth and Australia and Reader at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, the Institute’s home from 1982 to 1999. The lecture is given by an emerging scholar in the disciplines of history or political science.

The 2025 Reese Lecture titled 'Courting: An Intimate History of Love and the Law', was presented Dr Alecia Simmonds. She examined how vernacular understandings of romantic objects came to have official legal status and how medical and psychiatric knowledge intersected with law’s epistemology, or how law knows what it thinks it knows.