Prof Agnieszka Sobocinska
The ANU Australian Studies Institute (AuSI) is pleased to introduce Prof Agnieszka Sobocinska, our fellow in the 2025 Visiting Fellowship Program.
Prof Agnieszka Sobocinska is a historian of international development, with a particular interest in project implementation and grassroots experiences of development. She has just started a large project that explores what happened once projects became operational at sites in Indonesia, India, Ghana and other places, from the 1950s to the 1990s. She is also interested in how adverse experiences of development were mobilised into campaigns of resistance, both at national and transnational scales.
During her time at AuSI, she has been focusing on Australian and Indonesian experiences of international development, as well as resistance to global economic governance. Australian and Indonesian histories are rarely viewed through the same frame, but resistance to international finance institutions such as the World Bank allows us to view the two societies as facing structural economic changes taking place at a global level. The resistance movements opposing these changes arose in very different political and social contexts, but they had many shared aims and targets.
“This fellowship has allowed me to conduct focused research within the collections at ANU, as well as in the National Archives and National Library. I’m now based in the UK and can only dream of such relevant collections! More broadly, I’ve been thrilled to reconnect with old friends and make new connections at AuSI. I’m part of the Australia Studies Institute at King’s College London and I look forward to strengthening these ties in future.”
- Prof Agnieszka Sobocinska, Visiting Fellow, ANU Australian Studies Institute
Prof Agnieszka Sobocinska is Professor of Global History and Director of the Australia Studies Institute at King’s College London. She is Primary Investigator of the European Research Council Consolidator project DEVHIST (2025-2030). Her books include Saving the World? Western volunteers and the rise of the Humanitarian-Development Complex (Cambridge University Press, 2021) and Visiting the Neighbours: Australians in Asia (UNSW Press, 2014).