If you are looking for a good read this weekend, try former Chair and current coordinator of HSTY3903 Professor Kirsten McKenzie’s freshly minted English Historical Review essay entitled: “A Dance of Crown and Parliament: Empire and Reform in the Age of Liverpool.” It is currently on open-access at the following link. Congrats to Kirsten and her co-author, Lisa Ford. It is definitely not everyday that you can get published in the very prestigious English Historical Review – it is one of the top historical journals in the world.
Check out Associate Professor Frances Clarke’s latest blog about her recently published book on Child Soldiers in the American Civil War Era. Frances’ recent book, called Of Age: Boy Soldiers and Military Power in the Civil War Era published by Oxford University Press this year is making waves in the United States. Frances will be back in Australia in second semester and teaching our blockbuster first year unit called HSTY1023: Emerging Giant: The Making of America, which takes you from the origins of the United States through to the Civil War.
You might also be interested in an article written by one of our current Honours students, Marika Mehigan. She recently published a version of her research on Korean comfort women that she did in one of her History Honours seminars on “Writing War.” Marika pitched her idea to the editors of Honi Soit, and they gave her the green light. It is a great example of what we might call an “op-ed” essay – in which we use our historical research to help think through contemporary historical problems. Congrats, Marika – and you can read the article here: https://honisoit.com/2023/05/is-there-a-future-without-sexual-violence-first-we-must-confront-the-past/If any other students are putting your work to interesting uses, please get in touch and let us know about it.
Dr. Sophie Loy-Wilson, senior lecturer in History and a scholar of Chinese Australian history, recently attended a new production from the Sydney Theatre Company called “The Poison of Polygamy” – a play based on what was probably the first Chinese Australian novel, originally written in 1909-1910.
Sophie was commissioned to review it for the Conversation. You can read Sophie’s terrific – and glowing – review here: https://theconversation.com/a-gothic-brilliant-success-the-poison-of-polygamy-brings-the-first-chinese-australian-novel-to-the-stage-after-113-years-206929.
You can also listen to Sophie Loy-Wilson’s recorded talk at Fisher Library Rare Books and Special Collections on the material they hold and “Sydney’s Chinese Ghosts”
If you’re looking for some interesting television watching between World Cup Football games this weekend, have a look at the SBS show, “Who the Bloody Hell are We?” In particular, Series 1, Episode 3 hosted by Adam Liaw, features our own Dr. Sophie Loy-Wilson commenting on some interesting Chinese Australian migrants who have enriched Australian history.
You can also read about Sophie’s involvement in the Multilingual Archive Project, and hear from her PhD student, Samuel He, about the amazing work he is doing with the Archive.
If you are interested in US Affairs, you can also read an article co-written by one of our History HDR students, Ben Ormerod, supervised by Dr. Hélène Sirantoine. The article was published in last week in the journal Cogent Social Sciences and examines the way U.S. Presidents use the optics of the White House to implement public policy. The article is available to read for free on open access here.
Finally, have a listen to Dr. Marco Duranti on Sky news about Albanese’s recent defence deal with the Germans – Marco is becoming a ‘regular’ on Sky news – and always manages to remind his audience of the historical context to decisions made today. You can also hear his historical take on the situation in Russia on Sky News,
If you speak German you can hear Cindy McCreery’s thoughts on the new King on German tv or if you prefer English, why not browse James Curran’s latest columns in the Australian Financial Review.
Finally, if anyone has some spare time while waiting for a bus this weekend, why not have a listen to me and a colleague, Professor Fitzhugh Brundage at the University of North Carolina talk about a new publication of ours – a collaboratively authored text called A New History of the American South.
We discuss contemporary ideas about southerners in the US, historians’ new ways of looking at the region, the value of looking at history as an ‘outsider,’ and I even manage to make a controversial comment about the election of Donald Trump. I’ll leave it at that. You need to listen to get more: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rBi3lQ5989I
Mike M
Chair, History
