Margriet Fokken is working as a research-assistant on an ARC-funded project named ‘Settler society in the Australian Colonies’ of Professor Angela Woollacott. This project is focussing on the cultural and political changes in the colonies in the 1830s to the 1860s. Margriet Fokken is looking specifically at gender and race issues in primary sources like newspapers and at public and private writing of women in this period. Next to this she is writing her own methodological and historiographical essays on ‘historical novels as source’ and ‘the current views on the nineteenth century cult of domesticity’. All of this is contributing to the Research Master Modern History and International Relations she is hoping to finish this year at the University of Groningen in The Netherlands.