Pacific Focus
Launched in 2006, the Pacific Focus Series fills a gap in the literature of the contemporary Pacific from the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences. The study of the Pacific Islands is often marginalised in global academia for being too small, too scattered and too far away from the centres of metropolitan power, teaching and research. This series deliberately focuses attention on the peoples, cultures and histories of the Pacific Islands, or Oceania. It privileges indigenous perspectives and also remains alert to global contexts. The authors are established in their respective fields; to date these include discipline-based and interdisciplinary approaches to Art History and Visual Culture, Museum Studies, Comparative Literature, Medical History, Pacific History and Historiography, Biography, Politics and Governance, Cultural Studies, Gender Studies and Education. Emerging scholars and Indigenous authors are highly encouraged to submit their work.
Most titles submitted are monographs. Edited volumes of conference papers with thematic coherence are also considered. All manuscripts are peer-reviewed and authors are encouraged to supply reader’s reports or suitable endorsements of their proposed work to the Pacific Focus Series editors. Authors should consult the comprehensive guidelines for manuscripts and submissions on Cambridge Scholars Publishing website.
Current and forthcoming titles in the Pacific Focus Series:
Prue Ahrens and Chris Dixon (eds.) Coast to Coast: Case Histories of Modern Pacific Crossings
Susan Cochrane. Art and Life in Melanesia
Susan Cochrane and Max Quanchi (eds.) Hunting the Collectors: Pacific Collections in Australian Museums, Art Galleries and Archives
Doug Munro. Beyond the Ivory Tower: Participant Pacific Historians
Max Quanchi. Photographing Papua: Representation, colonial encounters and imaging in the public domain
David Watters, A history of surgery in Papua New Guinea
Since 1984, Dr. Susan Cochrane’s research interests have focused on contemporary Pacific visual culture and Pacific collections in museums. She is the author of Contemporary Art in Papua New Guinea (1997), Beretara: Contemporary Pacific Art (2001), Art and Life in Melanesia (2007) and A Black and White Family Album:Mother and Daughter memoirs of Papua New Guinea 1950s-1970s (2007). She is the editor of Aboriginal Art Collections: Highlights from Australia’s Public Museums and Art Galleries (2001); co-editor with Hugh Stevenson of Luk Luk Gen! (Look Again!): Contemporary Art in Papua New Guinea (1990), co-editor with Max Quanchi of Hunting the Collectors: Pacific Collections in Australian Museums, Art Galleries and Archives (2007) and co-editor with Lee Juinshyan of Across Oceans and Time: Art in the Contemporary Pacific (2007) She has also written numerous catalogue essays, articles and reviews.Her academic qualifications are BA with Pacific Studies major, Macquarie University (1983), MA Hons Art History, Wollongong University (1986), PhD Art History, Wollongong University (1995), MPhil Creative Writing, University of Queensland (2005). Susan was awarded an Australia Council Established Author grant in 2008 to research a new work on Papua New Guinea art. In 2008, she was a Harold White Fellow at the National Library of Australia and in 2007 she was a Visiting Fellow at the National Museum of Australia. She held the University of Queensland Postdoctoral Fellowship for Women from 2005-07.
Dr Max Quanchi teaches Pacific Island History at QUT in Brisbane. His research interests are Australia's historical and contemporary relationship with the Pacific Islands, imaging and representation in colonial era photography, and the history of cross-cultural encounters in the Pacific. He is an executive member of AAAPS and the PHA and has taught in Australia and the Pacific Islands. From 1995-2001 co-coordinated a regional professional development program for history teachers in the Pacific Islands. His monographs, and edited, co-edited or co-authored books include Pacific people and change (1990), Culture contact in the Pacific (1992), Messy entanglements (1995), Jacaranda atlas of the Pacific Islands (2000) The historical dictionary of discovery and exploration of the Pacific Islands (2005), Hunting the collectors (2007) and Photographing Papua (2007) as well as contributing to the journals, Pacific Studies, Journal of Pacific Studies, Journal of Pacific History, History of Photography, Journal of Australian Studies, Meanjin and Australian Historical Studies.
