Wesfarmers Chair of Australian History, The University of Western Australia

Jane Lydon is the Wesfarmers Chair of Australian History at the University of Western Australia. Her research centres upon Australia’s colonial past and its legacies in the present. Her books include ‘Imperial Emotions: The Politics of Empathy Across the British Empire’ (Cambridge University Press, 2019), and ‘Anti-slavery and Australia: No Slavery in a Free Land?’ (Routledge, 2021). She leads the Australian Research Council-funded research project ‘Australian Legacies of British Slavery: Capital, Land and Labour’, which traces the movement of capital, people and culture from slave-owning Britain to the new settler colonies, aiming to produce a new history of the continuing impact of slavery wealth in shaping colonial immigration, investment, and law.