Professor Kama Maclean
Honorary Professor

Professor Kama Maclean

BA PhD La Trobe, Grad Dip L & T UNSW

Arts,Design & Architecture
School of Humanities & Languages

Dr Kama Maclean is Associate Professor of South Asian and World History in the School of Humanities (FASS)  and editor of South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, published by the South Asian Studies Association of Australia. 

Kama's first book, Pilgrimage and Power: the Kumbh Mela in Allahabad, was published in New York by Oxford University Press in 2008, and was awarded an Honorable Mention in the Kentish Anand Coomaraswamy Prize, by the Association of Asian Studies in the USA.

In 2009, Kama took up a one year appointment as Professorial Research Fellow at the United Arab Emirates University in Al Ain, where she began to research and write about anticolonial activism in interwar India, a project which focuses largely on the ways in which the actions of what the British called 'the violence movement' impacted on the broader nationalist movement. She has written several articles on this topic and her book, A Revolutionary History of Interwar India: Violence, Image, Voice and Text was published by Hurst & Co (London) and Oxford University Press (New York), 2015 and Penguin (New Delhi, 2016). 

In 2012, Kama was awarded an ARC Discovery Grant to complete a project on the extent and impact of social and political relationships between Indians and Australians in the early twentieth century. 

Phone
9385 3665
Location
366 Morven Brown
  • Books | 2020
    Maclean K, 2020, British India, White Australia Overseas Indians, Intercolonial Relations and the Empire, 1901-1947
    Books | 2015
    Maclean K, 2015, A Revolutionary History of Interwar India: Violence, Image, Voice and Text, Hurst & Co; Oxford University Press, London/New York, http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190217150.001.0001
    Books | 2015
    Maclean K; Elam JD, 2015, Revolutionary Lives in South Asia: Acts and Afterlives of Anticolonial Political Action, Maclean KK; Elam JD, (ed.), Routledge, London, http://routledge-ny.com/catalogs/south_asian_studies1/1/5/
    Books | 2008
    Maclean K, 2008, Pilgrimage and Power: the Kumbh Mela in Allahabad, 1765-1954, Oxford University Press, New York, http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195338942.001.0001
  • Book Chapters | 2020
    Maclean K; Zachariah B, 2020, 'Violence, Non-Violence, the State and the Nation: India, 1858–1958', in The Cambridge World History of Violence, Cambridge University Press, pp. 68 - 87, http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/9781316585023.004
    Book Chapters | 2018
    Maclean K, 2018, 'Naming Charlie: Inscribing British Indian Identities in White Australia, 1901-1940', in Bandyopadhyay S; Buckingham J (ed.), Indian and the Antipodes Networks, Boundaries and Circulation, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, pp. 94 - 128
    Book Chapters | 2017
    Maclean K, 2017, 'On the Art of Panicking Quietly: British Expatriate Responses to “Terrorist Outrages” in India, 1912-33'', in Fischer-Tine H (ed.), Anxieties, Fear and Panic in Colonial Settings Empires on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, edn. Cambridge Imperial and Postcolonial Studies Series, Springer, pp. 135 - 166, http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-45136-7
    Book Chapters | 2016
    Maclean K, 2016, 'The Art of Panicking Quietly: British Expatriate Responses to 'Terrorist Outrages' in India, 1912-33', in FischerTine H (ed.), ANXIETIES, FEAR AND PANIC IN COLONIAL SETTINGS: EMPIRES ON THE VERGE OF A NERVOUS BREAKDOWN, edn. Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series, SPRINGER INTERNATIONAL PUBLISHING AG, pp. 135 - 167, http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-45136-7_6
    Book Chapters | 2013
    Maclean K, 2013, 'Situating the Role of Religion in the Rebellion: The Case of the Prayagwals in the Allahabad Uprising', in Bates C (ed.), Mutiny at the Margins: New Perspectives on the Indian Uprising of 1857, edn. 1st, Sage Publications, New Delhi, pp. 149 - 168, http://www.sagepub.com/books/Book241487?productType=Books&subject=500&sortBy=defaultPubDate%20desc&fs=1
    Book Chapters | 2012
    Maclean K, 2012, 'India in Australia: A recent history of a very long engagement', in Hosking R; Sarwal A (ed.), Wanderings in India: Australian Perceptions, edn. 1st, Monash Asia Publishing, Clayton, Victoria, pp. 20 - 35
    Book Chapters | 2008
    Maclean K, 2008, 'Hybrid Nationalist or Hindu Nationalist? The Life of Madan Mohan Malaviya (1861-1946)', in Tall Tales and True: India, historiography and British Imperial Imaginings, edn. Original, Monash Asia Institute, Clayton, pp. 107 - 124
    Book Chapters | 2007
    Maclean K, 2007, 'On the Modern Kumbh Mela', in Mehrota AK (ed.), The Last Bungalow: writings on Allahabad, edn. Original, Penguin Books, New Dehli, pp. 285 - 306
  • Edited Books | 2017
    Maclean K; Moffat C; Elam JD, (eds.), 2017, Writing Revolution in South Asia History, Practice, Politics, Routledge, London, https://www.routledge.com/products/9780415786683
  • Journal articles | 2020
    Maclean K, 2020, 'Returning insurgency to the archive: The dissemination of the ‘Philosophy of the Bomb’', History Workshop Journal, vol. 89, pp. 155 - 168, http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/HWJ/DBZ050
    Journal articles | 2019
    Amstutz A; Elam D; Choudhury R; Banerjee M; De R; Silvestri M; Maclean K; Ghosh D, 2019, 'New histories of political violence and revolutionary terrorism in modern South Asia', South Asian History and Culture, vol. 10, pp. 340 - 360, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/19472498.2019.1649942
    Journal articles | 2019
    Maclean K, 2019, 'Comrade Ryan, International Trade Unionism and White Australia: Global Communism, Trade Unionism and Empire in Interwar India', Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, vol. 47, pp. 1125 - 1152, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03086534.2019.1576834
    Journal articles | 2018
    Maclean K, 2018, 'Gentlemanly Terrorists: Political Violence and the Colonial State in India, 1919–1947', The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, vol. 49, pp. 186 - 188, http://dx.doi.org/10.1162/jinh_r_01264
    Journal articles | 2018
    Maclean K, 2018, '‘A Colonial in the Colonies: Casey, Gandhi, and the Endgame of Empire’,', Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, vol. 19, http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/cch.2018.0022
    Journal articles | 2017
    Maclean K, 2017, 'The Fundamental Rights Resolution Nationalism, Internationalism, and Cosmopolitanism in an Interwar Moment', Comparative studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, vol. 37, pp. 213 - 219, http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/1089201x-4132833
    Journal articles | 2016
    Maclean K, 2016, 'Revolution and Revelation, or, When is History Too Soon?', South Asia: Journal of South Asia Studies, vol. 39, pp. 678 - 694, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00856401.2016.1191536
    Journal articles | 2015
    Maclean K, 2015, 'Examinations, access, and inequity within the empire: Britain, Australia and India, 1890–1910', Postcolonial Studies, vol. 18, pp. 115 - 132, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13688790.2015.1044483
    Journal articles | 2014
    Maclean K, 2014, 'Imagining the Indian nationalist movement: Revolutionary metaphors in imagery of the freedom struggle', Journal of Material Culture, vol. 19, pp. 7 - 34, http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1359183513502408
    Journal articles | 2013
    Maclean K, 2013, 'What Durga Bhabhi Did Next: or, Was there a Gendered Agenda in Revolutionary Circles?', South Asian History and Culture, vol. 4, pp. 1 - 20, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/19472498.2013.768843
    Journal articles | 2013
    Maclean K; Daniel Elam J, 2013, 'Reading revolutionaries: Texts, acts, and afterlives of political action in late colonial South Asia: Who is a revolutionary?', Postcolonial Studies, vol. 16, pp. 113 - 123, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13688790.2013.823259
    Journal articles | 2012
    Maclean K, 2012, 'Australia India Relations and the Economy of Ideas', East Asia Forum Quarterly, vol. 4, pp. 20 - 22
    Journal articles | 2012
    Maclean K, 2012, 'The History of a Legend: Accounting for Popular Histories of Revolutionary Nationalism', Modern Asian Studies, vol. 46, pp. 1540 - 1571, http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0026749X12000042
    Journal articles | 2011
    Maclean K, 2011, 'The Portrait's Journey: The Image, Social Communication and Martyr Making in Colonial India', Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 70, pp. 1 - 32, http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0021911811001562
    Journal articles | 2009
    Maclean K, 2009, 'Seeing, Being Seen, and Not Being Seen: Pilgrimage, Tourism and Layers of Looking at the Kumbh Mela', Cross Currents, vol. 59, pp. 319 - 341, http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1939-3881.2009.00082.x
    Journal articles | 2003
    Maclean K, 2003, '‘Making the Colonial State Work for You: the Modern Beginnings of the Ancient Kumbh Mela’', Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 62, pp. 873 - 906, http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/3591863
    Journal articles | 2001
    Maclean K, 2001, 'Conflicting Spaces: The Fort of Allahabad and the Kumbh Mela, 1801-1860’', South Asia - Journal of South Asian Studies, vol. 24, pp. 135 - 159
    Journal articles | 2001
    Maclean K, 2001, 'Conflicting spaces: The KumbhMelaand the fort of Allahabad', South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, vol. 24, pp. 135 - 159, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00856400108723455

Prizes, Awards and Fellowships
Professorial Research Fellow, University of the United Arab Emirates, 2009
Honorable mention, Anand Kentish Coomaraswamy Prize, Association of Asian Studies, 2009
Association of Asian Studies (AAS) First Book Subvention, 2007
Australian Academy of the Humanities (AAH) Fieldwork Fellowship, 2004
Asian Studies Association of Australia (ASAA) Presidents’ Prize, 2004

 

Association of Asian Studies (AAS)

South Asian Studies Association (SASA), member, executive committee

Asian Studies Association of Australia (ASAA)

Editor, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 
 

My Teaching

Kama Maclean coordinates and teaches two courses, Modern India: British Raj to Bollywood (second year) and Powerful India (third year). She also teaches History and Asian Studies Honours.