Professor Rosita Henry

Overview

Rosita Henry is an Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at James Cook University; Research Fellow, The Cairns Institute; Fellow of the Australian Anthropological Society; Fellow of the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS); educator, researcher and author.

Her research career has broadly focused on the political dimensions of people-place-state relations and the performative politics of memory in Australia and the Pacific. In this regard, she has studied a range of areas including Indigenous cultural festivals, environmental/development protest, issues of land tenure conflict and gender, and Aboriginal artefact collections of the Wet Tropics of North Queensland. More recently she has begun developing an archival ethnography project on the work of patrol officers (kiaps) in colonial Papua New Guinea.

Rosita is author of the book 'Performing Place, Practicing Memory: Indigenous Australians, Hippies and the State' (Oxford and New York: Berghahn Books, 2012), co-editor of the book 'The Challenge of Indigenous Peoples: Spectacle or Politics?' (with B. Glowczewski, Oxford: Bardwell Press 2011), editor and co-author of a unique ethnographic auto/biography entitled 'A True Child of Papua New Guinea: Memoir of a Life in Two Worlds' by Maggie Wilson (McFarland 2019) and co-editor of the book 'The Chinese in Papua New Guinea: Past, Present and Future' (Anu Press, 2024). She began her long career working as a bibliographer at AIATSIS during the late 1970s. While recently retired, she continues to conduct research, serve on several editorial boards of academic journals, and supervise higher degree research students at James Cook University.