DESLEY DEACON  is Professor of Gender History in the Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University. She taught in the American Studies Department at the University of Texas at Austin from 1985 to 2001. She is the author of Elsie Clews Parsons: Inventing Modern Life (Chicago 1997) and is writing a life of the Australian-born international star Judith Anderson.
PENNY RUSSELL  Associate Professor of History at the University of Sydney, Australia. Her books include A Wish of Distinction: Colonial Gentility and Femininity (Melbourne University Press, 1994); and This Errant Lady: Jane Franklin's Overland Journey to Port Phillip and Sydney, 1839 (National Library of Australia, 2002). She is currently completing Arctic Romance: Lady Franklin and the Lost Polar Expedition for the University of Toronto Press.

ANGELA WOOLLACOTT  is the Manning Clark Professor of History at the Australian National University. Her books include On Her Their Lives Depend: Munitions Workers in the Great War (University of California Press, 1994); To Try Her Fortune in London: Australian Women, Colonialism and Modernity (Oxford University Press, 2001); and Gender and Empire (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).

List of Illustrations Acknowledgements Notes on Contributors Introduction; D.Deacon , P.Russell & A.Woollacott PART I: WRITING LIVES TRANSNATIONALLY Issues and Methods A Story with an Argument: Writing the Transnational Life of a Sea Captain's Wife; M.Hodes Peripheral Visions: Heterography and Writing the Transnational Life of Sara Baartman; P.Scully Boundaries Cross Bodies Writing the Entrapped Nations of Indigenous Australia into Being; P.van Toorn Dancing With Shadows: Biography and the Making and Remaking of the Atlantic World; M.McDonnell PART II: OPPORTUNITIES Fantasies Opportunists and Impostors in the British Imperial World: The Tale of John Dow, Convict, and Edward, Viscount Lascelles; K.McKenzie Imperial Melodies: Globalizing the Lives of Cliff Richard and Engelbert Humperdinck; A.Carton Colonial Origins and Audience Collusion: The Merle Oberon Story in 1930s Australia; A.Woollacott Livelihoods Herbert Hoover and the Transnational Lives of Engineers; C.Pursell Manyat's 'Sole Delight': Travelling Knowledge in Western Australia's Southwest, 1830s; T.Shellam Connecting Lives: Elihu Yale and the British East India Company; R.Sudan Performances 'That will allow me to be my own woman': Margaret Anglin, Modernity, and Transnational Stages, 1890s-1940s; C.Morgan Made on Stage: Transnational Performance and the Worlds of Katherine Dunham from London to Dakar; P.M.Von Eschen PART III: QUESTS Subaltern Crossings: Looking for Liberty? The Transnational Lives of African-American Colonists to Liberia; B.Dorsey Resistance in Exile: Anthony Martin Fernando, Australian Aboriginal Activist, Internationalist, and Traveller in Europe; F.Paisley ii - Intimate Crossings: Looking for Love 'Citizens of the World'?: Jane Franklin's Transnational Fantasies; P.Russell The Meanings of a Transnational Life: The Case of Mary Berenson; R.Pesman PART IV: COSMOPOLITANISM The World at Home Lowe Kong Meng Appeals to International Law: Transnational Lives Caught Between Empire and Nation; M.Lake Becoming Cosmopolitan: Judith Anderson in Sydney, Australia, 1913-1918; D.Deacon At Home in the World A World-War-II Odyssey: Michael Danos, En Route from Riga to New York; S.Fitzpatrick Donald Friend: An Australian Artist's Affair with Italy; I.Britain Gypsy in the Sun: The Transnational Life of Rosita Forbes; H-M.Teo

The transnationalism of ordinary lives threatens the stability of national identity and unsettles the framework of national histories and biography. This book takes mobility, not nation, as its frame, and captures a rich array of lives, from the elite to the subaltern, that have crossed national, racial and cartographic boundaries.