Dr Alexandra Roginski - Touching the Town: Popular Phrenology and Charismatic Careering in the Tasman World

2024 History Week: Marking Time

*Please note the venue is changed due to Local Government Elections using the School Hall.

Dr Alexandra Roginski - Touching the Town: Popular Phrenology and Charismatic Careering in the Tasman World

During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a cadre of self-appointed professors and ‘madames’ took the popular science of phrenology into even the smallest new settlements in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand. Claiming to judge innate character and intellect from head shape, these performers – who often hid sordid pasts – injected chaos and levity into the towns they visited in exchange for small incomes and a touch of authority. In this presentation, Dr Alexandra Roginski will explain why phrenology – a science contested from its outset – held such a firm grip on the public imagination well into the twentieth century, and will introduce some of the men and women who refused to let it go.

Dr Alexandra Roginski is a historian, writer and heritage consultant based on Wurundjeri Country in Bulleke-Bek (Brunswick, Victoria) who studies ideas and practices of the body in earlier times. She is the author of two books: Science and Power in the Nineteenth-Century Tasman World: Popular Phrenology in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand (Cambridge, 2022), and The Hanged Man and the Body Thief: Finding Lives in a Museum Mystery (Monash University Publishing, 2015). She has published academic journal articles and chapters and written for titles including the Times Literary Supplement, the Australian Book Review and The Age. Alex is a Visiting Fellow of Deakin University and a former CH Currey Memorial Fellow of the State Library of New South Wales, where she carried out a research project on histories of self-improvement.