Margaret Sankey

Professor Margaret Sankey is Emeritus Professor of French Studies at the University of Sydney in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. She earned her BA, PhD, and DipEd from the University of Sydney and became the first woman to hold the prestigious McCaughey Chair of French at the university. A Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities since 2010, she received the distinction of Officier in the Ordre des Palmes académiques from the French Government in 2008 for her contributions to French studies.

Sankey's academic interests center on French cultural history, with a specialization in the Baudin expedition to the Southern Hemisphere (1800-1804), seventeenth-century French conceptions of Terra Australis, and the impact of Abbé Paulmier’s Mémoires (1663) on early French explorations. She has authored and edited numerous works, including the critical edition Mémoires touchant l’établissement d’une mission chrestienne dans le troisième monde. Autrement appelé, La Terre Australe, Meridionale, Antartique, & Inconnuë (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2006). Other key publications feature ‘The Baudin Expedition 1800-1804: Texts, Contexts and Subtexts’ co-authored with P. Cowley and J. Fornasiero in Australian Journal of French Studies (2004), ‘The Journals of François Péron and the Voyage de découvertes aux Terres australes’ (2021), ‘The French “discovery” of the Pacific: New Worlds in the South’ (2020), and ‘The Cartography of the Baudin Expedition: Louis Freycinet’s map of New Holland’ (2012). Additionally, she co-translated The Anthropological Structures of the Imaginary and The Five Senses. Sankey organized the Australian Society for French Studies conference Regards croisés: the French and Terra Australis from the sixteenth century to the present at the University of Sydney in 2002, marking the bicentenary of Baudin’s visit to Port Jackson. She delivered the inaugural Frank Horner Lecture in 2007 on Writing and Rewriting the Baudin Scientific Expedition and presented papers at international venues, including the 2008 conference on Lapérouse et les explorateurs français du Pacifique at the Musée de la Marine in Paris. Her work has significantly influenced scholarship on French-Australian historical connections through projects like the Baudin Legacy Project.

Professional Email: margaret.sankey@sydney.edu.au