Rate My Professor Margaret Sankey

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.