Dr Karen Downing is a historian living and working in gratitude on Ngunnawal and Ngambri country in Canberra, Australia’s national capital.
She is currently a visitor at School of History, Australian National University, and a researcher on the Gendered Excellence in the Social Sciences project. She is a member of the Australian Historical Association and has previously served on the AHA’s executive committee and as their executive officer.
Her main research interest is the construction of personal identities – how people in the past have created a sense of themselves – and how language works to essentialise certain identities, such as those of gender and nationality. This approach does not restrict her work to a particular place or time but a confluence of circumstance and necessity has seen her delve most deeply into Britain and Australia in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
The photograph used in this website’s logo is by Berend de Kort from Pexels.