Bruce Buchan

• Professor of History, School of Humanities, Languages and Social Science, Griffith University

Bruce is an intellectual historian whose work traces the entanglement of European thought with the experience of empire and colonisation, focussing on the Enlightenment period (c. 1680-1820). Bruce's research seeks an understanding of concepts by bringing different fields of historical enquiry into productive conversation, most notably colonial history, histories of science and medicine, sound and noise, and the history of ideas and political thought. His previous research on European perceptions of Indigenous government, the conceptual history of asymmetric warfare, and the meanings of civility, savagery and civilisation have appeared in a wide range of journals. Bruce's research has been supported by a competitively awarded Discovery grants and a Future Fellowship from the Australian Research Council. His current research (with Linda Andersson Burnett at the University of Uppsala) focusses on the conceptual prehistory of race in the teaching of medicine and moral philosophy, and in colonial travel during the Scottish Enlightenment. This research has been supported by a Riksbankens Jubileumsfond grant (2015-2019), and a new Swedish Research Council grant (2020-2024). Their work is available in a series of open access articles and a new book, Race and the Scottish Enlightenment: A Colonial History 1750-1820, published by Yale University Press in late 2025. Their next book on race, head hunting, and the history of scientific instructions is under contract with Princeton University Press (2028).

• –present Associate Professor of History, Griffith University

• 2000 Australian National University, PhD/political studies

MENAFN10042026000199003603ID1110965677