Dr. Felicity Jensz

Curriculum vitae

Research interests:

• History of German missionaries in the English-speaking world
• Transnationalism
• Colonial history of the 19th century

Function within the Cluster/Membership in Projects and Groups:

• Research fellow
• Member of the study group Comparison and Transfer
• Member of the study group Concepts of the Enemy - Formation, Development and Reception
• Member of the study group Civil Religion, Religion and the State in the 19th and 20th Centuries

Mentor to the following graduate school doctoral students:

• Acke, Hanna, M. A.
• Alrahmany, Alsayed, M. A.
• Drewes, Frauke, M. A.
• Duran, Muhammet Sait, M. A.
• Frye, Malte, M. A.
• Merdian, Sara, M. A.
• Quakatz, Manja, M. A.
• Schnoor, Antje

Project

Educating the ‘Natives’: Schools, missions, and governments in the British colonial world

This project focuses on the ideology behind the provision of schools to Indigenous and non-European children in different geopolitical spaces and from the differing perspectives of secular and religious bodies within the British Empire, and particularly within the colonies and dominions of Canada, Australia, the West Indies, and South Africa. By the third quarter of the nineteenth century, governments in many industrialized and (post)colonial lands, including many settler colonies, had introduced compulsory education and expected children of all social and economic backgrounds—including indigenous children—to obtain the primary skills that were seen to be important to be able to assimilate into the increasingly urbanized, modernized, and secularized world. For many governments of the late-nineteenth century, education became a right; a necessary part of citizen building; and an institution no longer largely under the exclusive management of religious organizations. Yet, such sentiments were not uniformly applied to the education of non-Europeans within colonial spaces and governments often still need to rely upon missionaries to supply education to Indigenous and non-European peoples, with missionary societies generally reliant upon governments for funding and material support. Non-Europeans were not, however, passive receivers of Western education; their aspirations for educational outcomes were often different to those of either governments or missionaries. Throughout the nineteenth century, the aims of education, including for non-Europeans, were also debated in many sections of colonial and metropolitan society, with these debates affecting ongoing discussions in colonial and British societies. This project examines education on mission stations in various geopolitical spaces to study both the entangled nature of religion and politics as well as how increasingly secular states sought to shape their Indigenous subjects for citizenship.

Publications:

Book

Felicity Jensz, Moravian Missionaries in the British Colony of Victoria, Australia, 1848-1908: Strangers in a Strange Land, Studies in Christian Missions, 38, Brill: Leiden, 2010.

Peer-reviewed journal articles

• Jensz, Felicity, “Missionaries and education in the 19th century English-speaking world, Part 1: Church-State relations and Indigenous actions and reactions” History Compass (forthcoming 2012).
• Jensz, Felicity, “Missionaries and education in the 19th century English-speaking world: Part 2: Gender, Class, and Race” History Compass (forthcoming, 2012).
• Jensz, Felicity, “Origins of Missionary Periodicals: form and function of three Moravian publications,” Journal of Religious History (forthcoming 2012).
• Jensz, Felicity, “Moravian Mission Education in the Nineteenth Century: Global patterns and local manifestations at New Fairfield, Upper Canada, ”Journal of Moravian History, 11, (forthcoming December, 2011).
• Jensz, Felicity, "Firewood, Fakirs and Flags: The construction of the non-Western ‘other’ in a nineteenth century transnational children’s missionary periodical,“ Schweizerischen Zeitschrift für Religions- und Kulturgeschichte, Sonderheft Mission-transnationale Perspektiven, 105 (2011):167–191.
• Jensz, Felicity, “Collecting cultures: Institutional motivations for nineteenth-century ethnographical collections formed by Moravian missionaries,” Journal of the History of Collections, Advance Access published February 14, 2011 (doi:10.1093/jhc/fhq043).
• Jensz, Felicity, “Controlling marriages: Friedrich Hagenauer and the betrothal of indigenous Western Australian women in colonial Victoria,” Aboriginal History, 34 (2010): 35-54.
• Jensz, Felicity, “Religious migration and political upheaval: German Moravians at Bethel in the Colony of South Australia, 1851-1907”, Australian Journal of Politics and History, 56/3 (2010): 351-366.
• Jensz, Felicity, “Three Peculiarities of the Southern Australian Moravian Mission Field,” Journal of Moravian History 7 (2009): 7-30.
• Jensz, Felicity, ‘Writing the Lake Boga failure’ in Traffic, An Interdisciplinary Postgraduate Journal, The University of Melbourne: Melbourne Vol. 3, 2003. S. 147-161.
• McInnis, C. & Jensz, F. ‘Flexibility in the Australian Higher Education Framework’ Th&Ma, 10(5), 2003. S. 33-37.

Book chapters and other articles

• Jensz, Felicity, “The Moravian Periodical Accounts and the pressure of publishing in eighteenth-century Britain”, in Markus Friedrich/Alexander Schunka (eds): Reporting Christian Missions in the Eighteenth Century. Communication, Culture of Knowledge and Regular Publication in a Cross-Confessional Perspective (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, in press).
• Jensz, Felicity, “The Little Missionary: Freund-, Fremd- und Feindbilder am Beispiel einer Kindermissionszeitschrift im 19. Jahrhundert in Nordamerika“  In eds. Alfons Fürst, Harutyun Harutyunyan, Eva-Maria Schrage, Verena Voigt Von Ketzer bis zum Terroristen: Interdisziplinäre Studien zur Konstruktion und Rezeption von Feindbildern (Münster: Aschendorf Verlag, 2012), 67-90.
• Jensz, Felicity, “Colonial Agents: German Moravian Missionaries in the English-speaking World” in Patricia Grimshaw and Andrew May (eds) Missionaries, Indigenous Peoples and Cultural Change, First Nations and the Colonial Encounter Series (Sussex: Sussex Academic Press, 2010), 138-150.
• Jensz, Felicity, "Kommunikation zwischen einem Herrnhuter Missionar, F.A. Hagenauer, und dem Naturwissenschaftler Charles Darwin," Unitas Fratrum, 63/64, 2010, 307-314.
• Jensz, Felicity ‘“Imperial critics” Moravian missionaries in the British colonial world’ in Amanda Barry, Andrew Brown-May, Joanna Cruickshank and Patricia Grimshaw, [online] (Hg.) Evangelists of Empire? Missions and Colonialism in Historical Perspective. eScholarship Research Centre: Melbourne, 2008.
• McInnis, Craig & Jensz, Felicity ‘Bachelor/Masters: An Australian perspective on the Anglophone perspective’. In Barbara M. Kehm (Hg.) Looking Back to Look Forward. Analyses of Higher Eduction after the Turn of the Millennium. Werkstattberichte 67. International Centre for Higher Education Research Kassel: Kassel, 2007. S. 93-106.
• Jensz, Felicity, “„Ohne Neid” (Without Jealousy) Moravian Missionaries’ Ideas of Land Ownership within Colonial Victoria”, In Rethinking Colonial Histories: New and Alternative Approaches, Sam Furphy and Penny Edmonds (Hg.) Melbourne University Conference & Seminar Series: Melbourne, No. 14, 2006. S. 219-231.
• Jensz, Felicity, "German-speaking Missionaries and Their Concepts of Britishness.", In: Exploring the British World: Identity - Cultural Production - Institutions. Darian-Smith, Kate; Grimshaw, Patricia; Lindsey, Kiera; Mcintyre, Stuart (Hg.). RMIT Publishing: Melbourne, 2004. S. 142-160
• Jensz, Felicity, ‘Moravian Missionaries’ contribution to ethnographical studies in Victoria; both then and now’ in Veit, W. [Ed] Strehlow Research Institute Occasional Papers. Special Issue: The struggle for souls and science. Constructing the Fifth Continent: German Missionaries and Scientists in Central Australia, Northern Territory Government: Alice Springs, 2004. S. 29-35.

Reports

• The Royal Australian Chemical Institute, Future of Chemistry Study: Supply and Demand of Chemists, Final Report Prepared by Felicity Jensz, Samantha Carroll and Elizabeth Gibson, The Royal Australian Chemical Institute, Melbourne, 2005.
• The Australian Council of Deans of Science, Who’s teaching Science? Meeting the demand for qualified science teachers in Australian secondary schools, Report prepared by Kerri-Lee Harris, Felicity Jensz and Gabrielle Baldwin, Centre for the Study of Higher Education, The University of Melbourne, Melbourne, 2005.
• The Australian Council of Deans of Science, The Preparation of Mathematics Teachers in Australia. Meeting the demand for suitably qualified mathematics teachers in secondary schools. Report prepared by Kerri-Lee Harris and Felicity Jensz, Centre for the Study of Higher Education, The University of Melbourne, Melbourne, 2006.

Reviews

Reviews for publications such as H-Soz-u-Kult, Zeitschrift für Historische Forschung, AHF, JAS.

Contact

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