Visions of the Future: Past and Present 

'How have past cultures envisioned the future and how has this influenced our view of the future today?’. 

The project aims to place visions of the future from Britain, America, and Australia since 1800 alongside each other, comparing the anxieties and preoccupations that have produced them. 1800 marks a key shift. New ideas about time emerged, in which past, present, and future constituted separate entities. This same period, the dawn of western industrialization, is also a candidate for the beginning of the Anthropocene, around which contemporary anxieties about the future have clustered. The collaboration will be centred on a series of staged outputs: a co-authored monograph Visions of the Future Since 1800, a digital exhibition, student creative responses, and an archival reading group.

Researchers: Hannah Murray, William Tullett (Anglia Ruskin), Ruth Morgan (Australian National University)

Other information: this project is funded by a British Academy Seed Fund, following the British Academy and Australian Association of Humanities Knowledge Frontiers Forum held in Brisbane, November 2019.