Dear History Colleagues,
Melissa Bellanta (ACU), Anna Clark (UTS) and Hannah Forsyth convene the History Now Seminar Series on the second Thursday of the month, 5.30-7pm at UTS. Previously this was focused on Australian history. What we enjoyed most about these sessions was the opportunity to discuss history with colleagues from across greater Sydney. We have decided to experiment in 2017 by extending the scope beyond Australia.
We have lined up a program, for which we have sought to recruit speakers from as many of our institutions as we can (we have thus far covered Sydney, UTS, UNSW, UoW, Newcastle, WSU, ACU) and to think about History Now – as it affects those who do history, connecting with one another on topics that are relevant to our changing and volatile political, economic and environmental conditions. Our topics are Political History Now, History of Class Now, History of Sexuality Now, Indigenous History Now, Public History Now, History beyond humans, Feminist History Now, History of Genocide Now and Environmental History Now. The program is attached.
I am hoping that you will think this is a good idea and invite your history colleagues, postgraduates and honours students to come and participate. I am also hoping that this year’s speakers, who are included here, will also want to come to sessions other than their own.
In addition, today’s job is to alert you to our first seminar (which does not conform to the normal pattern) at 5.30pm on Thursday 2nd February, 2017, Room 03.470–which is just up one flight of stairs from the entrance hall of Building 10 on Jones St at UTS.
After the shocks of Brexit and Trump, we wanted to kick off the year by thinking about Political History Now. What do contemporary events mean, in the big historical picture – and what do they mean for us, as historians and scholars? Associate Professor Michael Ondaatje from ACU will present on this topic. Michael is the author of, among other things, Black Conservative Intellectuals in Modern America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010) and he has been a high-profile commentator on the recent US election, in the Australian media. We will invite Michael to offer us a more details abstract closer to the date. For now, I hope you will add this to your diary, in anticipation of further details.
I expect we will continue our tradition of heading to the pub for dinner afterwards and collecting donations for wine and cheese, at the seminar. If you would like to come to dinner on 2nd Feb, please let me know – hannah.forsyth@acu.edu.au.
Best wishes,
Hannah Forsyth
History Now Seminar Series 2017
Sydney Historical Research Network (Previously Australian Studies Research Network)
Second Thursday of the month, 5.30-7pm, UTS (Room TBC)
2 February: Political History Now (after Trump)
Michael Ondaatje, (ACU)
9 March: History of Class Now
Terry Irving (UoW), Elizabeth Humphrys (UTS), Hannah Forsyth (ACU)
13 April: History of Sexuality Now
Alison Moore, (WSU)
11 May: Indigenous History Now
Mike McDonnell, Miranda Johnson (Sydney), Leah Lui-Chivizhe, (UNSW)
8 June: Public History Now
Anna Clark, Robert Crawford, Anna Funder, Kiera Lindsay (UTS)
10 August: History Beyond Humans, Now
Warwick Anderson (Sydney), Eben Kirksey (UNSW)
14 September: History of Empire Now
Invited TBC
12 October: Histories of Genocide Now
Dirk Moses (Sydney), Lyndall Ryan (Newcastle)
9 November: Environmental History Now
Grace Karskens (UNSW), Iain McCalman (Sydney Environment Institute)
Author: Michael McDonnell
PG History Seminars
Dear History PG students and supervisors,
Once again, this coming semester the department of History is pleased to run a number of fortnightly advanced postgraduate seminars for your benefit. Chin Jou and Julie Smith have also kindly offered to open up their Honours Seminars to any postgraduate students wishing to audit them. We recommend and strongly encourage all PG students to attend at least one of the other seminars on offer. You might want to consult with your supervisor about the best choice for you. In addition to these seminars, students are also welcome and encouraged to attend the American Cultures Workshop at the USSC. Details for this is listed below.
NOTE: First year students should attend Chris Hilliard¹s weekly seminar, and not the other seminars (you will have already been contacted about this).
We are also opening up the “Finishing the Thesis” workshop to interested students. Places are limited though, so please do contact me if you are interested.
Once you have chosen a seminar, please contact the coordinator, who will shortly send further details, including the room in which to meet and the full schedule of meetings (if not already listed below). Please take careful note of the start dates listed below and get in touch with the relevant coordinator ahead of time especially the seminars that start next week.
Any questions about all of this, please let me know.
Thanks,
Mike McDonnell
PG Coordinator
ADVANCED POSTGRADUATE SEMINARS
Reading Evidence in a ‘Post-Truth” Age
Associate Professor Julia Horne
Julia.horne@sydney.edu.au
Wednesdays, 3-5 pm
Start Date: March 15
Christopher Hitchens wrote of George Orwell’s determination to seek “elusive but verifiable truth”. But how do historians approach truth, and how do they verify the elusive? This postgraduate seminar explores the use of evidence in history, the idea of historical truth, and the theoretical, ethical and methodological hurdles along the way. Key readings include those by Timothy Garton Ash, Northrop Frye and Joan Scott along with others on critical evaluation, the socially constructed archive and the history of the footnote.
Seminars will be held 3-5pm fortnightly on Wednesdays from 15 March.e
Modern International History
Dr. Jamie Martin
Jamie.martin@sydney.edu.au
Tuesdays, 2-4 pm
Start Date: March 14
This seminar offers a grounding in new approaches to the study of international history. It has two major aims: first, to introduce students to international history as a historiographical field, one that has focused largely on Europe and its relationship with the wider world since the early nineteenth century; and second, to consider international history as an approach to historical scholarship that has applications in many different geographical and thematic sub-fields. It will look, in particular, at new works in international history — both European and non-European — and at methodological debates about writing the history of international institutions, empire, and global capitalism. It also will look at the relationship between international history as it’s now practiced and the methods of diplomatic and military history that once dominated the writing of European history.
Historical and Anthropological Approaches to Food and Eating
Dr. Chin Jou
chin.jou@sydney.edu.au
Mondays, 2-4, Bosch 192
Start Date: March 6
Food has been central to lived experience. It has shaped history through events and phenomena such as famines, uprisings, imperialism in search of commodities and markets, and population surges though more efficient methods of agricultural production. It has informed the development of structures of labour along lines of race, gender, and class; it has, of course, also been an essential part of daily life. In this seminar, we will consider examples of how historians and anthropologists have written about food and eating in order to illuminate broader historical developments, social relations, and identity. Readings will cover a variety of chronological and geographic contexts, although a disproportionate share of readings will focus on the United States since the early-twentieth century.
NB: If any PG students are interested in auditing the seminar, please advise them to email me ASAP, because there are required readings for the first week (i.e. this coming Monday). Although one of those readings can be accessed online, there is a reading that I would need to email them.
Reading Travel Writing
Dr. Julie Smith
julie.smith@sydney.edu.au
According to Mary Carruthers [The Witness and the Other World], “The travel book is a kind of witness”. However, witnessing and ways of seeing are culturally and historically inflected. For centuries, travellers (whether explorers, pilgrims, ambassadors, merchants, missionaries, tourists) have related their experiences for a variety of audiences, and have claimed authority as eyewitnesses, “I have seen”. Thus travel writing cannot be satisfactorily understood unless it is historicised against contemporary understandings of visuality, of ways of seeing. If travel writers from other places and times were seeing for others, how should this inform our reading of their works? The seminar readings and discussions will take into account matters such as author-audience relations, geographical knowledge, gender, faith, cross-cultural contacts. Individual projects will offer opportunities for students to study travel writings and eye-witnessing from their particular research field and period.
American Cultures Workshop
Dr Alix Beeston, Research Fellow, United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney
Dr Lucas Thompson, Research Fellow, United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney
Contact Email:
americanculturesworkshop@gmail.com
Wednesdays, 5:30-7:00 pm
Start Date: March 15
Becoming a Historian: First-Year Introductory Postgraduate Seminar
Professor Chris Hilliard
Chris.hilliard@sydney.edu.au
Mondays, 2-4pm
SOPHI Common Room
Start Date: Monday, March 6
Finishing the Thesis
Associate Professor Michael McDonnell
Michael.mcdonnell@sydney.edu.au
Wednesdays, 3-5pm
Start Date: Wednesday, March 22
Please note: this seminar is open to PhD and MPhil students who are within a year of submission. Places are limited so please contact Mike if you¹d like to join.
Postgraduate Drinks
Dear Historians,
Welcome to the 2017 academic year! We would like to invite you all to our welcome drinks for postgraduate students and history staff on Monday 13 March. We hope this event will provide everyone with the opportunity to meet our incoming students and to kick off the new year.
Warwick Anderson has kindly allowed us to host the drinks at REGS on the battlements again this year. Drinks and nibbles will be provided. If you are planning on coming along please let us know via email to help us confirm numbers for catering.
Time/date: Monday March 13 at 4.30pm
Location: REGS battlements (directions attached)
Looking forward to seeing you all then,
Emma Kluge, Hollie Pich and Marama Whyte
Postgraduate Representatives 2017
Department of History
hollie.pich@sydney.edu.au
University of Sydney Postgraduate History Conference Wrap-up
On the 23 and 24 November 2016 the Department of History successfully hosted the annual University of Sydney Postgraduate History conference. The theme for the conference this year was ‘Historical Identities’.
The keynote was delivered by Dr Sarah Walsh from the centre for Race and Ethnicity in the Global South (REGS) at the University of Sydney. Her paper ‘Latinizing Whiteness: Race, Nation, and Visual Culture in Latin America’, focused on constructions of whiteness in relation to national identity in nineteenth and twentieth-century South America, with particular focus given to Chile. Through Walsh’s exploration of how racial identity is both constructed and utilised her paper offered a stimulating beginning to the conference.
The conference was well attended with over fifty papers delivered over the two days. Presenters came from local universities, interstate and even as far as New Zealand. Sessions contemplated the concept of ‘identity’ and how it might be used to historically investigate in a variety of time periods and geographic locations, from the ancient world to the twentieth century, to Europe, the Americas and Asia-Pacific.
Special thanks to the team of volunteer postgraduate students, headed by our 2016 postgraduate representatives, Sarah Bendall and Georgia Lawrence-Doyle, who organised the conference, and to the department of history for generously funding the conference.
We look forward to hosting another successful conference next year.
To see the organising committee and past conference programmes, please visit our website: https://usydhistoryconference.wordpress.com
Cecil Hills – History Extension mentoring program
On Wednesday, December 7, the Department of History and the Department of Classics and Ancient History commenced a new partnership with Cecil Hills High School, as part of the History Extension mentoring program. Located in south-west Sydney, Cecil Hills is a large but vibrant school where over eighty percent of students have a language background other than English. In the week prior to our visit, the school had just celebrated its twentieth year.
USYD History students Stephanie Schenk, Sarah Charak, and Samantha Lawford were selected as mentors for the program, and they spent the first session with Year 12 students Alyssa Marsili, Kayla Oshana, and Christina Hanna working to refine their research topics and each develop a specific line of inquiry engaging with historiographical debates. Alyssa, Kayla, and Christina are tackling a range of topics from Native American to Russian and Assyrian history.
The students found this first session very useful. Alyssa wrote that “I was able to gain a different perspective on my chosen topic due to the the feedback I received, which helped me finally attempt to narrow down my argument and thesis.”
Christina thought that “the uni visit was a beneficial experience that raised many questions which I had not thought about concerning my extension project. I left the mentoring session with new ideas and new things to implement into my project. My mentor was extremely helpful and gave me many starting points and suggestions.”
And Kayla added, importantly, “It was an incredibly helpful and fun experience!”
The program consists of five school and university visits over a six-month period, where the mentors also provide guidance on applying to and studying at university. We are looking forward to hosting the students here at the University of Sydney in February, when they will meet up with the students and mentors from the History Extension program at Chifley College Senior Campus and get a chance to tour the campus before doing some research in the library.
Students and mentors work together on initial ideas while teacher Felicity Wicks looks on
We are very pleased to have created this new relationship with Cecil Hills High School, and look forward to getting to know the students better. We are especially keen to encourage students with second languages (and more) to study history at Sydney because those abilities are invaluable in our increasingly globalising world, and of course new international history initiatives.
We are also grateful to teachers Stephanie Haskett and Felicity Wicks for their enthusiasm for the program. Both are creative and inspiring teachers who are already teaching us new tricks for the classroom. Felicity promises to introduce us to the world of Virtual Reality and History on our next visit. While running the mentoring program, we also hope to visit with and host Stephanie’s Year 12 Ancient History students, too.
Finally, in a nice turn, one of the student mentors who volunteered to work with the Cecil Hills group, Steph Schenk (who is in her 3rd year of Uni) told us that she first decided she wanted to go to Sydney Uni when she came here five years ago with Trinity Catholic College, Auburn, and did a campus tour with student volunteers and heard mini-lectures from Helen Dunstan and Robert McCowan. It turned out that was one of the first school visits we organised to the Uni as part of this program, and it was the first time Steph had visited a University. We are very pleased that Steph is now a valuable volunteer on the program, and pursuing a teaching career.
Granville Boys High School Presentations and Awards
Earlier in the year, we reported on the Year 7 Granville Boys High School visit to the University and Museums. We’ve pasted a copy of that report below, and we’ve also provided a link to a short video of that trip created and provided by one of their teachers, Fiona Donnelly: https://youtu.be/vaYaBBJxSXg
Last week, we were invited to GBHS to view the final projects and award prizes and certificates to the best teams and students involved in them.
We were amazed at the work the boys did. They were split in to teams of three and four and tasked with a project of building virtual museum on the topic of “How Do the Dead Speak to Us?” The boys chose who would be their primary researcher, who would undertake the website design, and who would choose artifacts, texts, and pictures to use in their virtual museums.
The boys worked hard but also enjoyed the new challenge of working in a team and building something tangible that their parents and friends could also see. Some of their reflections can be found here on this video created and provided by Ms. Donnelly: https://youtu.be/-oEKbFl8Z5M
Using the website development tool Weebly, the boys created some terrific websites on different archaeological figures including Tutankhamun, Tollund Man, Narrabeen Man, Mungo Man, Otzi the Iceman and Ramesses II.
The work they did is also testimony to the innovative and creative thinking of the HSIE team at Granville, including teachers Fiona Donnelly, Stephanie Ghassibe, Tarek El-Homsi, and Chris Mandarakas.
Though all the final presentations were excellent, the Department of History awarded the following certificates and prizes:
Certificate of Excellence and Prize
Hosam Al-Ubudi
Certificate of Excellence and Prize
Noah Kheir
Mohamed Saddieh
Rabih El Kheir
Certificate of Merit
Mohamed Agha
Mortatha Alhessany
Mohamed Dunia
Certificate of Merit
Ben Harfis
Ahmed Al Fararjeh
Zimraan Anjum
We look forward to working with the next group of Year 7 students early in the new year.
Original Report on Visit
Year 7 Granville students at the University
Over the past four years, several groups of students from Granville Boys High School have visited the University of Sydney as part of the Social Inclusion program – usually Year 11 students completing individual research projects. On the 12th and 17th of August, the university hosted four classes of Year 7s in a pilot for a Project Based Learning program.
For this new project, Granville students will be investigating ancient artefacts and human remains, particularly looking at how remnants of the past are used to bring history to life in the present-day. Their case studies will include Ancient Egyptian mummies, Otzi the Iceman, and closer to home, Mungo Lady and Mungo Man. The students visited the Nicholson and Macleay museums to get a closer look and a better understanding of the importance of artefacts and remains, as well as the processes of preservation, storage, and presentation.
At the Nicholson Museum, the students handled artefacts such as canopic jars, ceramic sherds, mummy wrappings, grave-robber lamps, and Sumerian tablets. While handling these collections, they applied a series of questions to determine each object’s material, date, and place of origin. In the end it was the two swords – one Cypriot, the other Mycenaean – that drew the most attention from the students.
The staff at the Nicholson Museum were terrific guides and hosts for the boys. Craig Barker also took a group for an impromptu chat about the mummies, but quickly found out that at least one of the boys had been doing a little work on his own, and could describe the process of mummification down to the finest detail. His friends, along with us, were amazed.
Dr Craig Barker with students in the Nicholson Museum
After learning about the material cultures of ancient civilisations at the Nicholson, the students explored Macleay Museum’s natural history collection. Upon their arrival, Jude Philp, Senior Curator at Macleay, tasked the students with locating the oldest and weirdest objects on display. Several of the students were also determined to find fake objects – but turns out the entire collection is real! Even at the end of what was quite a long day, the students were bursting with questions about the scientific instruments and animal life on display, how they were collected, and what it is like working in a museum.
We are looking forward to seeing their projects at school. And judging by their enthusiasm for learning about the history of the University and how we study history at the University and Museums, we are also looking forward to having them as students in a few years’ time.
HDR+ Student Grant Success
As the year winds down the Department is very pleased to note that Hollie Pich, Marama Whyte, and Sarah Dunstan from the Department of History were all successful in their applications for 2017 HDR+ Student Grants (https://sydney.edu.au/education-portfolio/ei/strategic-education-grants/2017/hdr-student-grants/)
Hollie and Marama were successful in their bid to organise and host a series of seminars around the theme: Working Women: A Forum for Women in Academia
Sarah was successful in her bid to organise and host a series of seminars around the theme of building key skills for higher degree research success.
Their proposals were terrific, and our Chair, Professor Chris Hilliard, has kindly agreed to match the funds given by the University to show the department’s support for such great initiatives.
Details of the seminars, which will run in 1st semester of next year, will follow in the new year.
This is terrific news and is testimony to the high quality work being done by our PG students, their innovative ideas, and their commitment to support the PG community.
Congratulations!
Mike McDonnell
New PhD – William Matthew Kennedy
On behalf of the Department of History, a hearty congratulations to William Matthew Kennedy for the award of his PhD.
Matt’s thesis, entitled “Recolonizing Citizenship: Australia and the Ideal of Empire, 1867-1911,” was supervised by Mark McKenna, and deals with the relationship between an emerging Australian national identity and a more global, racialized, imperial political identity in establishing a settler-colonial ‘republic’ based on a contested notion of British rights. In developing his argument, Matt looked at the impact of communication technology, colonial philanthropy, and colonial imperialism and was particularly commended for situating this developing political identity relative to other constituent parts of the empire, most notably British India and the Pacific region within which Australia acted as a sub-imperial power. Examiners praised it as an “important contribution to the literature; one with relevance to historians of Australia, of other settler colonies and of the empire as a whole.” “Packed full of suggestive insights…adding up to a vibrant new appreciation of the relationship between Australian and imperial identities.” “Highly original, timely and compelling.”
Well done to Matt on this fine achievement. Congratulations.
Presenting the Past – Week 12 in History Beyond the Classroom
Photo by Tracey Trompf from http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/lifematters/catherine-freyne/3976124
This past week we were again very fortunate to have Catherine Freyne (pictured) as our guest speaker to talk about ways of presenting the past. We couldn’t have got a better speaker on this topic. Catherine is an award-winning historian and media producer who specialises in 20th century urban, social and oral history. She has developed multimedia history content for the City of Sydney, ABC Radio National, ABC Innovation, Think+DO Tank and the Dictionary of Sydney.
Catherine is particularly well known for her work on the ground-breaking Hindsight documentaries at ABC Radio National (http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/hindsight/). But she has also worked on 80 Days that Changed Our Lives (http://www.abc.net.au/archives/80days/) and Against The Tide: A Highway West (http://www.againstthetide.net.au/). For her work in radio, Catherine has received two NSW Premier’s History Awards – a remarkable achievement by any standard.
Since we spoke with her last year, Catherine has started a creative practice PhD in history and journalism at UTS, where she also holds a prestigious Chancellor’s Research Scholarship. Like the poet Muriel Rukeyser, Catherine believes “the universe is made of stories, not atoms” and has a particular penchant for the true ones.
Catherine’s work exemplifies the power of stories. She talked to us about the many projects she has been involved with, and why she is so passionate about public history. She particularly engaged students with her explanation of how her team at the ABC recreated history on Pitt Street and in Hyde Park when making the Hindsight program, Good Sex: The Confessions and Campaigns of W.J. Chidley (http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/hindsight/good-sex—the-confessions-and-campaigns-of-w.j.-chidley/4605590), and also raised the bar on thinking of good public history apps when talking about the Against the Tide project which is still in development and which Catherine contributed to in 2014. The app allows users travelling along the Parramatta River on the Rivercat to make choices about what kinds of histories they are interested in, and hear of the experiences of different groups of people in different voices.
Catherine responded engagingly to students’ questions about how to get the balance right between “important” history and “interesting” history, and told us of her sense of history as political both in giving voice to the marginal and marginalized, but also as giving us a richer sense of the present, emphasising history as a process of sharing. She also talked about the need to think about different formats for showcasing different kinds of sources, and how the digital age allows us to add yet another layer to the landscape of places like the City, noting the importance of thinking about the depth of history in any one place. Catherine talked about the archives of the ABC, and the City of Sydney and great examples of public history.
Though she lamented the end of Hindsight, she also noted that students should tune in to Earshot, Radio National’s new general documentary slot which still broadcasts history features each week (http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/earshot/). Catherine also told students that if they had a good ideas that might fit the program, to contact her and she might be able to help develop and pitch the idea to Radio National.
Following on from Catherine’s talk, we had a workshop on the problems and challenges that students were facing in getting their project designs off the ground. These ranged from the need for some technical advice, to dealing with creative differences and emphases between themselves and the organisations with whom they were working. While we couldn’t always come up with clear and easy answers, students learned to appreciate that there might be ways to work around some of these problems.
We also returned project proposals. Students were asked to outline their work with their chosen organisations and sketch out their ideas for their major project that has grown from that work. These proposals were a treat to read and mark. Like last year, the work students have been doing with their community-partners has been diverse, and in most cases been extremely important, fascinating, and often heart-warming (you can glean some of this through the blogposts by students on this site).
Their reflections on this work and how they plan to approach the major project were also thoughtful, creative, and provoking, and reflected a real engagement with the work they were doing, and the groups with whom they were working.
New PhD – Keith Stael
Congratulations go out to Keith Stael, who received his PhD in September, 2016.
Keith worked with Professor Chris Hilliard. His thesis was on the early intellectual development of Kingsley Martin, editor of the New Statesman from 1930-1960. Looking at Martin’s education and work in the 1920s especially, the thesis sets out to understand the political and social context in which Martin began his career, and the experiences and circumstances that undergirded his later influential role. The examiners praised the thesis for its analysis and “deep contextualization of an important intellectual during a mostly overlooked period in his life.” “The scholarship is careful, the writing is clear, and Mr. Stael writes authoritatively and convincingly.”
Congratulations to Dr. Stael for this great achievement!