Category: Alumni Matters

Indigeneity, Mobility and the Age of Revolutions

Public Lecture and Symposium

A Symposium Hosted by the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies, University of Notre Dame, and the History Department of the University of Sydney.

Symposium Organiser: Professor Samuel K. Fisher, Visiting Scholar, University of Notre Dame

Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences
School of Humanities 
History at Sydney

The University of Sydney1718 French map

Refugees, Migrants, and Visitors: 
A long history of Indigenous Mobility

Elizabeth Ellis | Princeton 

Tuesday 3 June 2025, 3:00-5:00pm 
followed by a reception

 What does a deep historical view reveal about Indigenous migration and movement in North America? And what can North America’s Mississippian past tell us about how Native people confronted colonial empires in the eighteenth century? This talk will focus on the patterns and practices of Indigenous migration, naturalization, and refugee acceptance that helped Native peoples along the Mississippi river survive imperial invasion. By examining both forced migration and voluntary relocation, we can see how early modern Indigenous nations confronted the new American empire in the age of Revolutions.


 Elizabeth Ellis

Elizabeth Ellis is an associate professor of history at Princeton University where she teaches early American and Native American history as well as Indigenous studies. Her first book is “The Great Power of Small Nations: Indigenous Diplomacy in the Gulf South.” She is currently researching early Native American iconography and working on a collaborative project on eighteenth-century painted deer hides (minohsaya). Liz also writes about contemporary Indigenous issues and political movements. She is a citizen of the Peoria Tribe of Indians of Oklahoma, and she serves as the tribal history liaison for her nation.

Venue: The Chau Chak Wing Museum,  University Place, Camperdown Campus Click here for map

All welcome. Please follow the registration link below. Registration via Humanitix

A History and Powerful Stories Network Event, sponsored by the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies, University of Notre Dame (USA) and the Vere Gordon Childe Centre.

This event is part of a three day symposium on Indigeneity, Mobility and the Age of Revolutions sponsored by the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies, University of Notre Dame (USA). For more information about the symposium, please contact Sam Fisher at Samuel Fisher sfisher1@nd.edu or Michael McDonnell at michael.mcdonnell@sydney.edu.au.

  The University of Sydney

Symposium Program Schedule

Events take place in the Chau Chak Wing Museum (CCWM) at the University of Sydney unless otherwise noted.

Tuesday, June 3

9:30 – Pasifika Sydney Walking Tour with Talei Magioni (optional – details to come)

12:00-1:00 pm – 50 years of Papua New Guinea’s independence (optional)

Dame Meg Taylor speaks with Professor Ben Saul in “Looking back and looking forward: 50 years of Papua New Guinea’s independence.” Room TBC, New Law Building (F10), Eastern Avenue, University of Sydney, Camperdown campus. Free, but separate registration required. Click here for more information and registration.

3-4:45: Keynote Address: “Refugees, Migrants, and Visitors: A Long History of Indigenous Mobility”

Professor Elizabeth Ellis, Princeton University

With a response by Leila Blackbird

5:00: Reception

6:30: Dinner, Camperdown Rydges Hotel Restaurant

Wednesday, June 4

9:30-10:30: Australian Association for Pacific Studies Plenary Session (co-sponsored by the Keough Naughton Institute for Irish Studies, University of Notre Dame): “Stori and Sovereignty: Marking the 50th Anniversary of Papua New Guinean Independence.”

Featuring Mercy Masta, Wendy Mocke, Tetei Bakic Tapim, and Mahealani Delaney

Business School, Belinda Hutchinson Building, Abercrombie Street, Lecture Theatre 1040

11-12:00: Exhibition Visit (CCWM): Dance Protest, Project Banaba.

12:00-1:00: Lunch

1:00-2:30: Panel 1, “Conceptualizing the Age.”

Ann McGrath, “The Ages of Deep History”

Miranda Johnson, “Revolution, Rupture, and Resurgence: Concepts in Indigenous and Other History-Writing”

2:30-3:00 – Coffee

3:00-5:00: Panel 2, “Expanding the Age.”

Samuel K. Fisher, “Good Foreigner, Bad Foreigner: Gaelic Contexts for the Age of Revolutions in Ireland”

Claudia Haake, “Writing as Witnessing: Sioux Leadership after Displacement to Reservations, 1860s to 1890s”

Victoria Bonilla-Báez, “Desnudando Uruguay: Survival through the death of the Indio and the appropriation of El Gaucho”

5:30-7:00: Dance Protest: Project Banaba Exhibition and Cocktail Event – CCWM. Hosted by the Australian Pacific Studies Association

7:30: Dinner: Glebe (tbd)

Thursday, June 5

9-10:30: Panel 3, “Travelling through the Age.”

Kate Fullagar, “Coming Home to the Age of Revolution”

Bruce Buchan, “The Enlightenment’s Enslavement of the Indigenous Dead: The Mobility of Human Remains in the Early Colonisation of Australia”

10:30-11: Coffee Break

11-12:30: Panel 4: “Life and Deathways in the Age”

Annemarie McLaren, “‘Something mysterious and sacred’: Catholic Baptism and Aboriginal People in Early Colonial New South Wales, Australia”

Lyndon Fraser, “Reflections on Mobility, Death, and Cross-Cultural Encounters in Nineteenth-Century Aotearoa/New Zealand”

12:30-1:30: Lunch

1:30-3: Australian Association for Pacific Studies Session Celebrating Pacific Lives and Voices in Australia. Featuring Katerina Teaiwa, Kate Fullagar, Solstice Middleby, Talei Mangioni, and Victoria Stead.

Location: Business School, Belinda Hutchinson Building, Lecture Theatre 1090.

3:30-5: Concluding Discussion

5:15-7: Book Launch (optional) for Lisa Ford, Kirsten McKenzie, Naomi Parkinson, and David Andrew Roberts, Inquiring into Empire: Colonial Commissions and British Imperial Reform, 18-19-1833, published by Cambridge University Press.

To be launched by Zoë Laidlaw, University of Melbourne, at the Vere Gordon Childe Centre, University of Sydney.

7:30: Dinner: Newtown (tbd).

Participants

Leila K. Blackbird née Garcés (Louisiana Creole, unenrolled adoptee of Apache and Cherokee descent) is the Pozen Family Human Rights Doctoral Fellow of U.S. & Atlantic History at the University of Chicago.

Victoria Bonilla-Báez is an Uruguayan and Indigenous Pampeana woman of Black-Indigenous and Iberian decent and a PhD candidate at the University of Sydney. She is also the recipient of the Indigenous Knowledges, Health and Sustainability Scholarship tied to the Australian Research Council’s Discovery Project ‘Planetary Health Histories: Developing Concepts’ led by Prof Warwick Anderson, Prof Jakelin Troy, Prof Anthony Capon, and Prof Sverker Sörlin. Currently her research looks at silenced Indigenous and Afro-Indigenous knowledges on caring for land, waterways, and non-human species that are embedded and ‘hidden in plain sight’ within Uruguay’s rural areas. Her research is tied to the lands of her own ancestors, which are under threat due to monoculture farming and deforestation.  As an emerging anthropologist and Indigenous woman she has both a cultural and academic duty to ensure that her peoples and her lands stories are told. This unearthing of knowledges and stories are part of broader cultural duty as an Indigenous women to add to the Gran Quillapí del Oyendau, a metaphysical memory keeper, where women weave (re)emerged knowledges and (re)assemble the memories that have been scattered throughout time.

Bruce Buchan is an intellectual historian whose work traces the entanglement of European political thought with the experience of empire and colonisation, focussing on the Early Modern and Enlightenment periods. Bruce’s research seeks an understanding of concepts by bringing different fields of historical enquiry into productive conversation, most notably colonial history, histories of sound and noise, the history of science and medicine, and the history of ideas and political thought. His previous research on European perceptions of Indigenous government, the conceptual history of asymmetric warfare, and the meanings of civility, savagery and civilisation have appeared in a wide range of journals.

Elizabeth Ellis is an associate professor of history at Princeton University where she teaches early American and Native American history as well as Indigenous studies. Her first book is “The Great Power of Small Nations: Indigenous Diplomacy in the Gulf South.” She is currently researching early Native American iconography and working on a collaborative project on eighteenth-century painted deer hides (minohsaya). Liz also writes about contemporary Indigenous issues and political movements. She is a citizen of the Peoria Tribe of Indians of Oklahoma, and she serves as the tribal history liaison for her nation.

Samuel K. Fisher is Associate Professor of History at the Catholic University of America and a Visiting Faculty Fellow at the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies. He is the author of The Gaelic and Indian Origins of the American Revolution: Diversity and Empire in the British Atlantic, 1688-1783 and co-editor of Cnámh agus Smior/Bone and Marrow: An Anthology of Irish Poetry from Medieval to Modern.

Lyndon Fraser is an anthropologist and historian who works at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand, and as a Research Fellow in Human History at Canterbury Museum. Lyndon co-edits The New Zealand Journal of History, serves on the Editorial Advisory Board for Irish Historical Studies, and is a member of the Executive Committee of the Association of Social Anthropologists of Aotearoa/New Zealand.

Kate Fullagar FAHA FRHistS is Professor of History at Australian Catholic University andVice President of the Australian Historical Association. She is the author of The Savage Visit: New World Peoples and Popular Imperial Culture (Univ. of California Press, 2012) and The Warrior, the Voyager, and the Artist: Three Lives in an Age of Empire (Yale Univ. Press, 2020). Her most recent book is Bennelong & Phillip: A History Unravelled (Simon &Schuster, 2023). She is General Editor, with Katerina Teaiwa, of a forthcoming six-volume Cultural History of Oceania (Bloomsbury, 2027).

Claudia Haake is Principal Research Fellow in History at La Trobe University. Her primary research interest is Native American History from the 19th century onward. She is especially interested in North American Natives from Mexico and the US. Her major areas of interest in Native American Studies are ethnicity, identity and culture. Her work for her first book has focused on identity issues in a transnational comparative framework, investigating the cases of the Mexican Yaquis and the United States Delawares.

Miranda Johnson is Associate Professor of History at the University of Otago. She is a historian of colonialism and decolonisation, focusing on issues of settler identity, race, indigeneity, citizenship, and the politics of writing history. Her research focuses on Anglophone settler societies of the South Pacific and North America. Her first book, The Land is Our History: Indigeneity, Law and the Settler State (Oxford University Press, 2016) examined the wide-ranging effects of legal claims of Indigenous peoples in the settler states of New Zealand, Australia, and Canada in the late twentieth century. It won the W. K. Hancock Prize in 2018 from the Australian Historical Association. Miranda is currently president of the New Zealand Historical Association.

Michael McDonnell is Professor in Early American History at the University of Sydney. He is the author of Masters of Empire: Great Lakes Indians and the Making of America (2015) and numerous other publications on the Age of Revolution.

Ann McGrath has led the Kathleen Fitzpatrick Laureate Program on Deep History for the past seven years. Based at the Australian National University, she is the WK Hancock Distinguished Chair of History and currently serves on the Council of the National Museum of Australia. Her publications include Illicit Love: Interracial sex and marriage in the United States and Australia (2015) which won the NSW Premiers History Prize, and Born in the Cattle (1987), awarded the inaugural Hancock Prize. Along with Laura Rademaker and Jakelin Troy, she co-edited Everywhen: Australia and the language of Deep History (NewSouth Publishing 2023) and with Jackie Huggins, edited Deep History: Country and Sovereignty (NewSouth Publishing 2025). Ann has co-directed and produced various films, including A Frontier Conversation (2006), Message from Mungo (2014) and Japarta (2025). Her work has been recognised by the Human Rights Award for non-fiction, the John Barrett Prize, and the Archibald Hannah Junior Fellowship at the Beinecke Library, Yale. She has been awarded Membership of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, of is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Social Sciences and the Australian Academy of Humanities. She has gained memberships of the Institute of Advanced Study, Durham and Fellowships at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton as well as two Rockefeller Foundation Scholarly Residencies at Bellagio.

Annemarie McLaren is an historian of the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century world and the British empire, with a particular interest in the Indigenous societies encountered and how intercultural exchange took place. In 2020, her doctoral thesis was awarded the biennial Serle award for best postgraduate thesis in Australian history by the Australian Historical Association. She has also been the recipient of national and international research and essay prizes. She has held research fellowships at the Museum of Anthropology & Archaeology (Cambridge), the Omohundro Institute & Jamestown Rediscovery Center (Virginia) and Griffith University (Brisbane). She is review editor and board member of the journal Aboriginal History and a board member of the History Council of Western Australia.

Powerful Stories Seminar – August 2024

Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences
School of Humanities 
History at Sydney 2024 | Powerful Stories Seminar Series The University of Sydney kemper-image

“Unauthorized Archives” in the 21st Century. Writing History and Creating Community Through Art in Egypt, Nigeria, and Kenya 

Mark Le Vine (UC Irvine) & Lucia Sorbera (Sydney)
12.30pm – 2.00pm

Vere Gordon Childe Centre (F09) and Zoom

In the third issue of the reestablished journal Souffles Monde/Anfas al-‘alam – which continues the trajectory of the pioneering Maghrebi intellectual journal of the same name that first published in the late 1960s – we introduced the concept of “collaborative ontologies” as a methodology for re-empowering a praxis-based critical theory. Our premise is that any viable 21st century critical theory needs to be grounded in engaging with, learning and taking the lead from Indigenous ways of knowing and being (epistemologies and ontologies) as being developed and practiced today by Indigenous scholars, activists and practitioners in both post-settler colonies of the Global North (Australasia and North America) as well as Global South (Africa, Latin America, South and Southeast Asia). Our work builds on the genealogies and trajectories of critical theory, postcolonial studies, and decolonial studies, in particular the feminist streams across them. We argue that engaging with the histories, experiences, ideas and practices of Indigenous scholars and activists based on Indigenous research principles and methodologies is crucial to developing new forms of collective knowledge production, solidarity and action in a world increasingly – literally – on fire, with multiple polycrises that have rendered most theories and strategies for social change more or less inoperative today.

In this seminar, we apply the concept of collaborative ontologies to our work with grassroots communities of artists in Port Harcourt (Nigeria), Ezbet Khairallah (Cairo, Egypt), and the Kakuma Refugee Camp in Kenya, to explore new ways of writing history from below, and building “counter-archives,” which feminist scholars describe as collective record keeping of radical and unauthorized stories (Salime, 2022; Dakhli, 2020). We argue that this is not a merely theoretical exercise. In fact, our argument is that only through sharing our most basic experiences of being-in-the-world can we develop authentically collaborative ways of knowing and acting in it, and through these activities finally move away from an increasingly necrocapitalist modernity, and towards a global political, economic, cultural, and discursive system that heals rather than destroys our world.


ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Mark Le Vine is Professor of modern Middle Eastern and African histories and cultures at UC Irvine and founding director of the Program in Global Middle East Studies. A 2020-21 Guggenheim Fellow, he is the author and editor of a dozen books, most recently We’ll Play till We Die: Journeys Across a Decade of Revolutionary Music in the Muslims World (California, 2022), Altered States: The Remaking of the Political in the Arab World (Routledge 2023), and Art Beyond the Edge: Creativity and Conflict in a World on Fire (California, 2025)

Lucia Sorbera is Senior Lecturer and Chair of Discipline of Arabic Language and Cultures at the University of Sydney. She published widely in history of Egyptian feminism, women’s political activism, and cultural productions in the Arab world, among them, the book Sex and Desire in Muslim Cultures. Beyond Norms and Transgression from the Abbasids to the Present. Day (with Serena Tolino and Aymon Kreil, I.B. Tauris, 2021). Her forthcoming book, Biography of a Revolution. The Feminist Roots of Human Rights in Egypt, is published by University of California Press. 

The Powerful Stories Network is presented by History at Sydney & the Vere Gordon Childe Centre

Click here to register your attendance Zoom link to be sent with event reminder.

Venue: Vere Gordon Childe Centre (F09)
Contact: Please contact Mike McDonnell for more information:
michael.mcdonnell@sydney.edu.au

Seminar image: Courtesy of Dr Lucia Sorbera     The University of Sydney

History on Wednesday

Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences
School of Humanities 
History at Sydney

The University of Sydney
History on Wednesday

Listening to Australian-Oceanic histories: Indigenous performance cultures at Pacific Arts festivals since 1970

Wed, 21 August 2024 12:10 – 1:30 | Hybrid event Dr Amanda Harris (Sydney) and Nardi Simpson

In the early 1970s, delegations of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander performers travelled across the Pacific Ocean to cultural festivals in Papua New Guinea, Fiji, Japan and Hong Kong. Exploring networks across the Asia-Pacific, these acts of performance were entangled in momentous shifts in Indigenous rights and new politics of representation. Bringing new mobilities of the post-referendum era into dialogue with old practices of cultural performance, these exchanges of performance both signalled a modern post-colonial era and a reaching back into what Damon Salesa (2014) has characterised as the “deep and resonant past”. In this presentation we move between historical and recent experiences of festivals of Pacific Arts. We collaboratively bring together first-person accounts of involvement in festivals of Pacific Arts and Culture and campaigns for an Indigenous Voice to Parliament, with historical efforts by key cultural and political leaders such as Oodgeroo Noonuccal and George Winunguj to establish annual festivals of the Black Pacific. Moving between past and present, we contemplate how approaches to Oceanic histories that centre song, dance and story may offer methodological insights for Australian history. 

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Amanda Harris is a musicologist and cultural historian who works collaboratively to explore histories of musical encounter in Australia’s Oceanic location and colonial history. Amanda is an ARC Future Fellow at Sydney Conservatorium of Music, University of Sydney and Director of the Sydney Unit of digital archive PARADISEC.

Nardi Simpson is a Yuwaalaraay musician, composer, author and culture keeper from the freshwater floodplains of New South Wales. Nardi’s second novel ’the belburd’ will be released by Hachette Australia in October 2024.

Hybrid Event: Places to attend in-person are limited, so please register as soon as possible to reserve your place. 

Vere Gordon Childe Centre F09, Level 4, Madsen Building.

Zoom link: https://uni-sydney.zoom.us/j/5326450738?pwd=SVFveTNPeU8yZnB0UHRVMXlmaTFDZz09
Passcode: 423557Click here to register 

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Powerful Stories Network

Dear friends, students and colleagues,

Thank you so much for registering and/or attending one or all of our events in the “Powerful Stories” series on March 14 and March 15. We were amazed at the turn-out and felt so lucky to have such an extraordinary group of presenters and audience-members to make the events memorable – in both powerfully emotional and intellectual ways.  

Quite a few of you asked about keeping in touch and/or follow-up events. In that spirit, we invite you to leave your contact details so we can stay in touch about building on the workshop especially and think together about where we might be able to go from here. We think it is important that people ‘opt-in’ to this, so we created a google form. We invite all participants from within and outside the University to join us, and those who were not able make it in the end but want to stay connected. https://forms.gle/byx9vfcQ19EVYfhy6

On this form, if you like, and have not already done so by email, etc., you can also leave some feedback if you want (entirely optional!). If you don’t want to opt-in to future discussions, you can also just leave feedback and do this anonymously. Just leave the name and email blank.

As a reminder, the full program can be found and downloaded here: https://historymatters.sydney.edu.au/2024/03/powerful-stories-program/

And if you did not get a chance to watch the documentary, there’s a spot on the form to let us know and we will send you a free link to watch it.

Thanks so much,

Niro Kandasamy

Michael McDonnell

Photo: Georginia Sappier-Richardson sharing her story at a TRC community visit. Photo by: Ben Pender-Cudlip. Courtesy: Upstander Project, from the movie Dawnland (https://upstanderproject.org/films/dawnland)

History End-of-Year Review, 2023

Historians in the News – a quick summary

In 2023 our historians have graced TV screens, written in print media, and broadcast the past on radio. Noteworthy are Cindy McCreery, Marco Duranti, and James Curran’s manymedia engagements (local, nation, and international) including James’s work as International Editor at the Financial Review. A special highlight was the ABC’s Natasha Mitchell hosting Chris Hilliard and Niro Kandasamy for the Challis Lecture in History at a packed-out event broadcast on Radio National’s Big Ideas program. 2023 also witnessed the creation of five history podcasts, titled “History of University Life – Whose University? Whose Culture?”, “Monarchy in Peril”, “An Australian World”, “Making Sense of History” and “Speaking of History”. For lovers of art, John Gagné presented in the popular Art Appreciation lecture program at the Art Gallery of NSW. While on campus, History on Wednesday seminars continued to engage audiences from within and outside the university. The discipline’s commitment to outreach continued through the History Extension Mentoring Program. The 2024 program kicked off in November with an enthusiastic uptake from regional high schools. Looking ahead to the new year, two major public events are on the horizon; Professor N. Bruce Duthu (Dartmouth) will be running a public screening of his Emmy award winning documentary ‘Dawnland’ and a public workshop on narrating stories in refugee and Indigenous communities in March, and Professor Chris Clark (Cambridge) will deliver the Ward Lecture in May.

Historians and their Craft

David Brophy: I finished up the editing (all 1000+ pages!) of some WWII diaries I’ve been working on, which have now been published as A Decade in Sino-Soviet Diplomacy: The Diaries of Liu Zerong 1940-49 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023). I had a journal article accepted as part of a special issue on the concept of the “Persianate” for the Papers of the Modern Language Association and submitted another article to ReOrient: The Journal of Critical Muslim Studies.A couple of book chapters also came out in 2023. One was part of a project with Japanese colleagues on “Historical Narratives and the Utilization of the Past in Central Asia”. The other was a chapter in Ben Kiernan’s Cambridge World History of Genocide, on mass killings during the Qing empire’s expansion into Central Asia. As part of an international group project on “Sects and Sectarianism in Chinese Islam” I was lucky enough to participate in workshops in Tokyo (January) and Riyadh (December), with the group working towards a special issue on this theme in 2024.

Roberto Chauca: I, for the first time, coordinated two units, including my own HSTY2719 and was also part of co-teaching teams in two first-year units, INGS1004 and HSTY1002. An article is forthcoming in Cartographica, journal published by the University of Toronto Press. In November I was invited to lead a seminar at The Amazon Basin as Connecting Borderland symposium organised by the Getty Foundation and colleagues from universities in Brazil, Colombia and Ecuador. I was also accepted to participate in the First Book Workshop in Map History at the Newberry Library in Chicago, USA and in the Fourth World Congress in Environmental History in Oulu, Norway, in February and August 2024, respectively.

Frances Clarke: I spent the first half of the year in the U.S., on long service leave, trying to catch up on a few projects delayed during covid. Our book came out in January (Frances M. Clarke and Rebecca Jo Plant, Of Age: Boy Soldiers and Military Power in Civil War America, New York: Oxford, 2023). We wrote half a dozen blog posts and short pieces to publicize this work and have done seven or eight interviews so far. My collaborator, one of her students, and I also spent several months completing a document project for classroom use, consisting of a dozen letters written by poor women during the Civil War along with an accompanying article: Cayla Regas, Rebecca Jo Plant, and Frances M. Clarke, “‘Do not toss this letter away’: Women’s Hardship Petitions to the U.S. Federal Government during the Civil War,” Women and Social Movements in the United States 1600-2000. (Alexandria, VA: Alexander Street, 2023). I’m also part-way through an ARC discovery project with a number of collaborators, which focuses on the aftermath of war from the Napoleonic era to WWII. We had an article accepted earlier in the year in English Historical Review and we completed several additional chapters of our co-authored book. Coming back to teaching in second semester, I taught a first year American history unit, and a history workshop, as well as running the postgraduate seminar. Now I’m looking forward to starting something new.

James Curran: After spending the first half of the year on long service leave, I commenced a 0.6 position as International editor at the Australian Financial Review (AFR), where I write a weekly column on geopolitics and longer pieces/reviews/ essays for the Weekend AFR. I have also published a long essay in Australian Foreign Affairs on the narrative of the China ‘threat’ and in November was inducted into the Australian Academy of the Social Sciences. I also began a podcast for the discipline and faculty on the history of Australia’s relations with the world (to be released in February and available wherever you get your podcast:) and also signed a book contract with Simon & Schuster for a study of Paul Keating’s foreign policy as PM. During the year I also wrote a number of longer commentaries for Australian Book Review, appeared on the 730 Report and other ABC and local radio nations, and attended and spoke at a conference in Singapore on the Chinese economy. I also spoke at the annual conference of the Australian Institute of International Affairs.

Marco Duranti: Chris Hilliard and I had an article accepted in the Law and History Review on the birching of youth on the Isle of Man. All of us in History collectively won a couple of education awards thanks to Mike McDonnell. I sold out to the mainstream media. My daughter dressed up as a ‘Bluey Monster’ for Halloween and my son succeeded in getting me to watch horror movies with him.

James Findlay: The through-line for this year has been the efforts to finish my first book. A process that could be summarised by the attached drawing my 8-year old son did. I’m happy to say that as of yesterday the last sentence of the last chapter was written. Intro and conclusion still to come, but the submission date looms, and it’s beginning to feel veryreal. Other research work in 2023 included a chapter in an edited collection, Writing Australian History on Screen, and jointly writing an article with a colleague at Deakin University on the controversy generated by the BBC historical television series Banished. I was lucky enough to travel to Paris (sigh) on a successful Partnership Collaboration Award between USYD and the Sorbonne University titled ‘Surveillance Imaginaries’. We also hosted some wonderful French scholars in Sydney in Sept and introduced them to the competitive world of Australian pub trivia. Teaching this year meant coordinating first, second, and third-year Australian history subjects. Extra-curricular activities such as an excursion to Cockatoo Island (thanks Kirsten and Brad!), weekly Australian history film screenings and (very nearly) having students’ work featured in this year’s Vivid festival added further excitement to each semester. I was also thrilled to have my first two honours students Liz Bowmer and Alice Tompson submit their theses. Their work is brilliant and I’m so very proud of their efforts. Guest teaching included lecturing for the Master of Museum and Heritage Studies and delivering a masterclass for postgrad students at the Sorbonne. Ongoing work with colleagues Mike, Niro, and Thomas in the History Extension Mentoring Program has been immensely rewarding. Running History on Wednesday and co-OEI Lead with Niro has also been a real joy (apart from glitchy technology in Lvl 8 conference room). Speaking at the FASS Teaching Symposium and receiving a Commendation for the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Teaching Excellence award was a lovely way to round out the year. Writing it all down now is helping me understand why it has all gone so fast.

John Gagné: Together with his co-editors Stephen Bowd and Sarah Cockram, John published a collection of essays titled Shadow Agents of Renaissance War (Amsterdam UP, 2023). He’s also finishing a book, Vibrant Banners, with co-author Timothy McCall for the ‘Elements in the Renaissance’ series (Cambridge UP). He delivered talks (in person and virtual) in Rome, Liège, and Hong Kong. He directed the Medieval and Early Modern Centre and coordinated the History Honours Programme. John co-taught History’s senior capstone class and 2 first-year units. He worked with 8 postgraduate students, and would like to congratulate Kathryn Hempstead for her highly-praised MA thesis (which passed without revision) and Paddy Holt, who submitted his excellent PhD thesis in late September. John was nominated for a SUPRA ‘Supervisor of the Year’ award. He lectured at the Art Gallery of NSW and was interviewed in Honi Soit and on the ABC. Finally, he finished the year with a promotion to Associate Professor.

Chris Hilliard: On SSP in semester 1 I worked out the argument of my next book and wrote the first 20,000 words of it. Marco Duranti and I published an article about corporal punishment and the British constitution (well, that’s how I see it) in Law and History Review. Niro Kandasamy and I spoke at an event organized by the School of Humanities and broadcast on the ABC’s Big Ideas podcast. I continued to co-edit the OUP journal Twentieth Century British History, which is re-launching as Modern British History at the beginning of 2024. I served my first year as a member of the Council of the Australian Academy of the Humanities and became its Treasurer. I stepped in as interim Head of School at the end of October. 

Niro Kandasamy: I spent the first semester teaching two units in the International and Global Studies degree. It was gratifying watching students engage with diverse concepts, histories, and case studies, especially as they hone their critical thinking skills to grapple with contemporary questions of sovereignty, justice, and freedom. A trip to London in June provided me invaluable research time at the archives, which culminated in a journal article submitted to History Workshop Journal. I spent the second semester teaching another unit in INGS, and beginning work on some exciting new projects, including co-organising two Workshops that will be held at the Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, and the University of Sydney. A highlight of the year has been organising the History on Wednesday seminars with James Findlay – there is so much interesting work happening among fellow researchers! Finally, ongoing work on the History Extension Mentoring program with James, Michael McDonnell, and Thomas Café has been truly rewarding.

Cindy McCreery: 2023 has been another busy year for me both professionally and personally and I took Long Service Leave in Semester 2 to support my family through some big milestones. At work the highlights included extending my engagement with object-based learning in the classroom through my Honours seminar ‘Modern Monarchy and Material Culture in Global Perspective’ and my third-year seminar ‘Eighteenth-century Britain and Ireland’. I was delighted to reflect on this experience during a co-presentation with my former student Emma Slee at the University Museums Annual Conference held at the University’s Chau Chak Wing Museum in August. Another highlight was seeing my four 2022 History Honours students graduate on a beautiful day – lovely to see them reach this milestone – as well as to co-supervise another History Honours student through to successful completion at the end of 2023! It was also a pleasure returning to the Great Hall later in the year to receive a joint Vice-Chancellor’s Excellence award (alongside a Faculty award!) with my History colleagues for Student Experience Excellence. I also enjoyed running co-writing sessions for School of Humanities colleagues on weekdays throughout the year – so nice to bond over coffee and the clicking of our keyboards. With Professor Emeritus Robert Aldrich and Dr. Falko Schnicke I co-edited Global Royal Families (Oxford University Press 2024). Robert and I also recorded a six- episode podcast series ‘Monarchy in Peril’ produced by the School of Humanities’ Peter Adams – listen out for it in the new year. Our Modern Monarchy in Global Perspective Research Hub continues to thrive with over fifty members from across the globe. This year we hosted regular formal seminar papers via ZOOM as well as several special roundtable discussions on ‘Succession in Modern Monarchy’ and ‘The Coronation in Modern Monarchy’. I also continued my media work and in addition to interviews, participated in two television documentaries, one for French national TV on 19c. French explorers in Australia and one for Swedish national TV on 20c. British and Scandinavian monarchies. On the home front I shepherded my three children through Years 12, 10 and 7 respectively and survived the HSC, NAPLAN, AMEB and NSW driving exams. In 2024 I am looking forward to another busy and productive year – but with fewer acronyms.:)

Michael McDonnell: It has been a busy but rewarding year after taking on the role of Chair of History in January. Much of my energy has been spent learning the ropes, understanding how the University works, and figuring out how we might be able to make it work better. The best part of the job, however, has been learning much more about the varied and diverse work of my terrific colleagues in History, and getting to know more and more students through the various events and talks at which we’ve come together – as well as recent graduates. In between a fairly demanding schedule of meetings and events, I’ve managed to make some progress on a couple of research projects, including a three-part podcast series on Indigenous portraiture and empire with colleague Kate Fullagar, and a co-edited three-volume Cambridge History of the American Revolution, both of which should be out next year. I did not make as much progress on the monograph on Revolutionary War Memoirs as I would have liked, in part because I have been getting too interested in new research projects with colleagues in the School and beyond – on refugee history, and on working with community organisations to support their history-making. I’ve also been working closely with one of our amazing former students, Darcy Campbell, to write some scholarly articles about the unit History Beyond the Classroom, andwas very happy to be involved in the successful nomination of colleagues in History for a Faculty Student Success Award, and a Vice Chancellor’s award for Supporting the Student Experience. Finally, and as always, I’ve enjoyed being involved in the Social Inclusion program which this year has focused on supporting History Extension high school students in diverse, low-ses and regional/rural schools. It is a pleasure to work alongside colleagues Thomas Café, Niro Kandasamy, and James Findlay and our great volunteer student mentors to support the many wonderful teachers and students who are part of the program. 

Kirsten McKenzie – First semester was an intense teaching experience with a new Honours seminar and teaming up with John Gagné for our new core third year unit, HSTY3903 History and Historians. That was a wild ride with timetabling and other challenges including the last gasp of RE/CC teaching. There were times when I didn’t think we could make it work, but watching such a large cohort of students come up with outstanding projects and reading the wonderfully warm responses we got in student evaluations made it all worthwhile. Second semester saw five months overseas on sabbatical leave – a very welcome opportunity to get stuck into archives again, mostly in Scotland. Reading through an extraordinary collection of family documents from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century letter by letter was like being plunged into an undigested version of War and Peace or Vanity Fair as viewed through the lens of Edward Said. With photography forbidden I came away with more than 300 000 words of transcription. Now I face the challenge of securing permission to use the material. Debate over the legacy of empire in Britain has made these questions more than usually politically fraught. Never one to accumulate annual leave, I also managed to fit in some close encounters with lions and elephants on safari,  reconnected with in-laws in the mountains of Sicily and scrubbed up in a public bath built in 1556. As the year draws to the close I’m in the last stages of two books that will come out with Cambridge University Press next year – copyediting one and preparing another for final submission. I’m looking forward to new challenges next year when I take over as Director of the Vere Gordon Childe Centre for the study of humanity through time. 

Jess Melvin: Together with my co-editors Annie Pohlman and Sri Lestari Wahyuningroem, I am very pleased that our new book Resisting Indonesia’s Culture of Impunity: Aceh’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission has been published by ANU Press. This book examines the role of Indonesia’s first truth and reconciliation commission- The Aceh Truth and Reconciliation Commission, or KKR Aceh- in investigating and redressing the extensive human rights violations committed during three decades of brutal separatist conflict (1976-2005) in the province of Aceh. Most excitingly, each chapter has been written by a team of authors, composed predominantly of commissioners and staff from the KKR itself, members of key civil society organisations in Aceh and Jakarta and academics. In other news, my family and I were adopted by a new kitten, Hunter. His favourite activity is annoying our two other cats. He also likes to eat durian.

Andres Rodriguez: Andres has enjoyed being on Long Service Leave after working for ten years at USYD. He also has enjoyed explaining to his non-Aussie friends what this actually means. He became an Aussie citizen along with his family, but still not quite appreciating the joys of eating Vegemite. Earlier this year Andres hit the archives at the National Library of Australia working with its Chinese language materials as part of his new Burma Road project. He then travelled to London and worked at the British Library – and left the day the library system came under a ransomware attack. He is also feeling more ‘senior’ this year. 

Hélène Sirantoine: How to sum up another busy year?!? I guess for me 2023 has been most of all a constant ‘lost in translation’ experience. Among other things, I’ve finally published a book chapter (‘When being king was not enough: imperatores in medieval Iberia’, freely available here) that quickly summarises for an English audience the contents of my 2012 French-language monograph on medieval imperial Spanish experiments (Imperator Hispaniae: Les idéologies impériales dans le royaume de León, Casa de Velázquez). I’ve got an article accepted in the French journal Cahiers de civilisation médiévale, that explores the Latin narration of the eighth-century Islamic conquest of Spain by the twelfth-century English cleric Ralph the Black. All the while I’ve been trying to remember my Spanish grammar, co-drafting with a Catalan colleague a Latin edition, translation into Castilian, and Spanish commentary of the chronicle composed by Genoese consul Caffaro di Rustico about the conquest of Andalusí coastal towns of Almería and Tortosa in 1147-1148 by an alliance of Castilian, Genoese and Catalan terrestrial and naval forces. Needless to say, ya no sé ahora dans quel monde (et langue!) je vis…

Powerful Stories: Indigenous and Refugee Histories of Dispossession and Displacement 

Workshop – Call for Presentations

March 14-15,  2024, The University of Sydney

Mununjali Yugambeh and South Sea Islander Professor Chelsea Watego lamented that the powerlessness of dispossession comes from stories told about you; about feeling your own account is not worthy of being told (Another Day in the Colony). Indigenous peoples and refugees can sometimes share this sense of powerlessness. But as Watego argues, power can be reclaimed by exercising sovereignty – one’s own sovereignty: “and that is exercised in the stories we tell of ourselves…our power is found within; it is embodied and it is enacted, every day. It is in knowing one’s own power, even – and especially – in those most violent encounters, that we are able to remember how powerful we really are.” Refugee writers have echoed these claims. As Iranian-American writer Dina Nayeri notes, “our stories were drumming with power.” (The Ungrateful Refugee).

We invite proposals from community members, groups and academics about the ways and means by which they have shared and continue to share their stories, reclaimed their own histories, and/or uncovered different kinds of self-representations in their current work or research. Indigenous peoples and refugees share and have shared an experience of exile, of dispossession. How have they narrated and preserved those stories? How does displacement interrupt memory and history-making? How has trauma been represented over time? What kind of work have those stories done, and what do they do now? 

We aim to showcase short papers or presentations (10-15 minutes maximum) that unveil different and varied ways of telling stories in the past and present. We would love to hear from a wide array of presenters about how those stories have been told, for what purposes, and with what results.

We hope that participants will help expand our collective understanding of what constitutes self-representations or self-histories, amid ongoing settler colonial violence, and how we might ethically and collaboratively work toward supporting the telling of those stories.  

This workshop coincides with the visit of Samson Occam Professor N. Bruce Duthu, an enrolled tribal member of the United Houma Nation of Louisiana. He is an internationally acclaimed scholar of Native American law and policy. In addition to authoring American Indians and the Law and Shadow Nations, he has also contributed to Felix S. Cohen’s widely praised Handbook of Federal Indian Law and co-edited “Sovereignty, Indigeneity, and the Law,” a volume of South Atlantic Quarterly that won the 2011 Council of Editors of Learned Journals Award for Best Special Issue. 

Professor Duthu also co-produced the Emmy-Award winning documentary film, Dawnland, which we will screen as part of the program. For decades, child welfare authorities have been removing Native American children from their homes to “save them from being Indian.” In Maine, the first official Truth and Reconciliation Commission in the United States begins a historic investigation. Dawnland goes behind-the-scenes as this historic body grapples with difficult truths, redefines reconciliation, and charts a new course for state and tribal relations. Dawnland aired on Independent Lens on PBS in November 2018 and 2021, reaching more than two million viewers. The film won a national Emmy Award for Outstanding Research in 2018 and made the American Library Association’s list of 2020 Notable Videos for Adults.

Proposals of no more than 250 words accompanied by a short CV or website link should be sent in by February 1, 2024. Successful applicants will be notified by February 10, 2024. We have very limited funds for the workshop. Please indicate in your submission if you would like financial assistance to attend the workshop. 

Please send your proposals to Thomas Cafe at tcaf4450@uni.sydney.edu.au

Please contact Niro Kandasamy and/or Michael McDonnell if you have any enquiries at michael.mcdonnell@sydney.edu.au; niro.kandasamy@sydney.edu.au

History Alumni – Stay in Touch

If you did a History major, minor, or a special field for your Education degree, or even just did an elective with us and want to stay in touch, please take a few minutes to fill out this short form. We’d love to stay in contact, and also have your feedback if you have any.

Most of our students lose their Uni email address after leaving – and so we have no way of being in contact with you. So please do leave whatever email addresses work best for you, and any other information you are happy to share.

You don’t have to answer all the questions on the survey. Just the first couple. But if you want to leave us some feedback, we would love to hear it.

We promise we won’t bombard you with messages – but will from time to time send out details of any alumni events, public talks, etc., that might be of interest.

And please be assured we will not share your information with other students, organisations, or groups without your express written consent.
Any questions or concerns, please let me know at Michael.mcdonnell@sydney.edu.au

Many thanks,

Mike M.

Chair, History