Ph.D. Candidate
Specialization:
Areas of Concentration: Australian colonial architecture and landscape; carceral settlements; Aboriginal cultural landscapes; African art and performance of the colonial period
Faculty Advisor: Swati Chattopadhyay
Committee Members: Richard Wittman, Kelly Kay (UCLA Geography), John Bradley (Monash Indigenous Studies)
Dissertation: "Building and Wounding: Colonial Architectures of Confinement and the Transformation of Aboriginal Landscapes in Tasmania, 1822–77"
M.A. Thesis: "Materialising Mythologies: Shaker Chairs and the 'Transcendent Good'" (Curtin University, Perth, Western Australia, completed 2014)
Bio:
Megan J. Sheard specializes in Australian colonial architecture and landscape. Her dissertation queries how penal settlements in colonial lutruwita/Tasmania might be productively re-examined through Australian Indigenous landscape practice and the ecological histories of timber, brick, and stone, to consider colonial architecture as a process of wounding.
Megan holds an MA in Applied Design and Art from Curtin University, with a specialization in furniture design and history. She is a former Public Humanities Graduate Fellow at UCSB’s Interdisciplinary Humanities Center, through which she worked with the Santa Barbara Trust for Historic Preservation on public Californian history programming. She is a founding member of react/review: a responsive journal for art and architecture, and has served as co-managing editor for three volumes.
Publications:
Megan J. Sheard. “Bricks and the Body, Timber and the Tide: Architectural Traces at the Macquarie Harbour Penal Station.” PLATFORM, October 20, 2025.
Megan J. Sheard. “The Lure of the Lash: Spectacular Violence and White Ethnonationalism at an Australian Convict Site.” react/review: a responsive journal for art and architecture, vol. 3 (May 2023): 188-195.