Shino Konishi

Shino Konishi is a Yawuru historian and an Associate Professor in the School of Humanities and the School of Indigenous Studies. She is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities, and the current Indigenous Studies Head of Section. 

Her research explores diverse aspects of Indigenous and colonial history, including representations of Indigenous peoples, cultures, and histories from the eigtheenth-century into the present. She is particularly interested in histories of cross-cultural encounters in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Australia, the history of European, particularly French, exploration in Australia and the Pacific, European and colonial representations of Aboriginal people and gender relations, Indigenous labour history, biography and emotions.

She is the author of The Aboriginal Male in the Enlightenment World (2012) and, with Ann Curthoys and Alexandra Ludewig, The Lives and Legacies of a Carceral Island: A Biographical History of Wadjemup/Rottnest Island (2022). She has also co-edited a number of books, including the forthcoming volume, Reframing Indigenous Biography (2025), with Malcolm Allbrook and Tom Griffiths. She is currently co-editing Volume 3: (1750-1914) of the five-volume series The Cambridge History of Colonialism and Decolonization with Elizabeth Elbourne (McGill University) and Volume 4: Skybreakers (1500-1800) of the six-volume series, The Bloomsbury Cultural History of Oceania with Kate Fullagar (Australian Catholic University) and Kailiani Polzak (University of California, Santa Cruz).

Shino is involved in a number of collaborative research projects and currently leads the Australian Research Council (ARC) Indigenous Discovery project, An Indigenous Australian Dictionary of Biography. She is the 2024 Battye Fellow (State Library of Western Australia), and in 2025 will begin the ARC Future Fellowship project, An Aboriginal History of Western Australia. 

Shino welcomes the opportunity to work with postgraduate candidates on projects concerning Aboriginal histories, Western Australian histories, histories of colonisation and settler-colonialism, and biography.

As lead CI

'An Aboriginal History of Western Australia', ARC Future Fellowship, CI: Shino Konishi, 2025-2028.

'The 1979 Sesquicentenary: Contested commemorations of Western Australia's colonial origins', State Library of Western Australia Battye Fellowship, CI: Shino Konishi, 2024.

'An Indigenous Australian Dictionary of Biography', ARC Indigenous Discovery, CIs: Shino Konishi, Malcolm Allbrook and Tom Griffiths, 2017-2023.

‘Exploring the Middle Ground: New Histories of Cross-Cultural Encounters in Australian Maritime and Land Exploration’, ARC Discovery, CIs: Shino Konishi, Maria Nugent, and Tiffany Shellam, 2011-2013.

‘Through Travellers’ Eyes: Foreign Observations of Aboriginal People and British Colonisation, 1800-1850’, ARC Discovery Indigenous Research Development, CI: Shino Konishi, 2010-2012.

‘Through Travellers’ Eyes: Foreign Observations of Aboriginal People and British Colonisation, 1800-1850’, AIATSIS Research Grant, CI: Shino Konishi, 2009.

Indigenous History Fellowship, New South Wales Ministry for the Arts, 1999-2001.

• 2021-2024: Associate Professor, Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences, Australian Catholic University
• 2014-2021: Senior Lecturer, School of Humanities and School of Indigenous Studies, University of Western Australia
• 2008-2014: Fellow, Australian Centre for Indigenous History and School of History at the Australian National Uiversity
• 2008: Research Fellow, Centre for Historical Research at the National Museum of Australia
• 2003-2008: Lecturer, Koori Centre, University of Sydney
• 2002-2003: Associate Lecturer, Aboriginal Research and Resource Centre, University of New South Wales

• INDG3300: Indigenous Research
• HIST3001: Making History
• HIST2003: Crises and Controversies in Australian History
• HIST3014: Intimate Strangers: Journeys in Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australian History
• HIST4103: Topics in Australian History, 2015
• INDG2600: Indigenous Representation, 2015-2016
• INDG3500: Indigenous Images, Representations, and Appropriations, 2014