One fully funded project on the study of Aesthetics of the Exhibited Body: Transnational Circuits of Race, Beauty, and Ugliness in European Human Zoos (1851–1913) is available. This Joint PhD project will be primarily based at the University of Melbourne with a minimum 12-month stay at KU Leuven.
Applications will close once a suitable candidate is identified. Interested applicants are encouraged to submit their application as early as possible.
The successful applicant will receive a scholarship package which includes a tuition fee waiver, living allowance, health insurance, and relocation support.
Project Details:
This PhD project investigates how so-called human zoos at European World Fairs constructed and circulated visual representations of Indigenous bodies, focusing on people from Congo, the Americas, and Australia within European transnational networks. It examines how Indigenous men, women, and children were staged, photographed, and consumed as visual spectacles within a pervasive colonial exhibitionary culture. Between 1851 and 1913, human exhibitions across Belgium, France, Germany, and the UK displayed an estimated 25,000 individuals, functioning as physical expressions of racial ideologies. These displays reflected malleable notions of beauty, ugliness, normality, and monstrosity, creating artificial and instrumental distinctions between Europeans and colonised peoples.
Through meticulous examination of photographs, illustrated magazines, advertisements, postcards and other visual media, the project traces how racialised bodies were both aestheticised and politicised. Adopting a comparative approach, it concentrates on three critical nodes of exhibition: the 1897 Brussels International Exposition in Tervuren, where the display of Congolese people legitimised Belgian colonial rule, the exhibition of the so-called giant Patagonians at the Jardin Zoologique d’Acclimatation in Paris, and the circulation and display of Aboriginal Australians across the United Kingdom.
By placing these case studies in dialogue, the research aims to demonstrate how human exhibitions operated as instruments of colonial persuasion that shaped public attitudes toward race and empire. Ultimately, it contributes to visual culture, art history, and museum studies by revealing how these representational regimes and the “spectacle” of the Indigenous body continue to influence heritage institutions and public memory today.
Anticipated project start date: 1 Ocotber 2026
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