The Department of History at the University of Sydney presents:
History on Monday
Seminar Series for Postgraduates and Faculty
Held at 12.10-1.30
in Woolley Common Room, Woolley Building A22
(Enter Woolley through the entrance on Science Road and climb the stairs in front of you. Turn left down the corridor, and the WCR is the door at the end of the hall)
Click here for map
2016 Coordinator:
Professor Dirk Moses
The semester at a glance
Semester 1 2017
13 March
Max Paul Friedman (American University, Washington, DC)
The Containment of the United States: Latin America and the Limits of Principle
20 March
Adrian Vickers (Asian Studies/University of Sydney)
Art and Politics in 1950s Indonesia
27 March
Daniela Helbig (History and Philosophy of Science/University of Sydney)
Life without Toothache: Hans Blumenberg on History of Science as Theoretical Attitude
3 April
Andres Rodriguez (History/University of Sydney)
Listening to Minorities: Citizenship and Ethnic Representation in Early Post-War China (1945-49)
10 April
Nicholas Baker (Macquarie University)
Trust, Risk, Credit: Taking Chances on the Future in the Renaissance Marketplace
17 April AVCC Common Week
24 April
Anna Clark (University of Minnesota)
Rethinking Individualism in New Zealand and the British Empire
1 May
Alanna O’Malley (Leiden University)
Internationalism and the Challenge to the Liberal World Order: The United Nations and the Rise of the Global South, 1955-1981
8 May
Jamie Martin (Laureate Research Program in International History/University of Sydney)
Governing Global Capitalism in the Era of Total War
15 May
Hans-Lukas Kieser (University of Newcastle)
Holy Scripture and Apocalypticism in Today’s Levant
22 May
Mélanie Lamotte (University of Cambridge)
Before Race Mattered: Ethnic Prejudice in the French Empire, c. 1635-1767
29 May
Tim Allender (Education/University of Sydney)
Racial Cure and Pious Learning: Gender, Feminism and Empire
5 June
Maartje Abbenhuis (University of Auckland)
Fence Sitting? Asking Questions of Neutrals and Neutrality in International History
For updated details, please see our website.
Category: Department News and Events
Book Launch – Miranda Johnson
Miranda Johnson: The Land is our History (Oxford University Press, 2016)
The Land Is Our History tells the story of indigenous legal activism at a critical political and cultural juncture in Australia, Canada, and New Zealand. In the late 1960s, indigenous activists protested assimilation policies and the usurpation of their lands as a new mining boom took off, radically threatening their collective identities. Often excluded from legal recourse in the past, indigenous leaders took their claims to court with remarkable results. For the first time, their distinctive histories were admitted as evidence of their rights.
Miranda Johnson examines how indigenous peoples advocated for themselves in courts and commissions of inquiry between the early 1970s to the mid-1990s, chronicling an extraordinary and overlooked history in which virtually disenfranchised peoples forced powerful settler democracies to reckon with their demands. Based on extensive archival research and interviews with leading participants, The Land Is Our History brings to the fore complex and rich discussions among activists, lawyers, anthropologists, judges, and others in the context of legal cases in far-flung communities dealing with rights, history, and identity. The effects of these debates were unexpectedly wide-ranging. By asserting that they were the first peoples of the land, indigenous leaders compelled the powerful settler states that surrounded them to negotiate their rights and status. Fracturing national myths and making new stories of origin necessary, indigenous peoples’ claims challenged settler societies to rethink their sense of belonging.
Miranda Johnson is a historian of indigenous peoples and settler colonialism in the Anglophone post/colonial world, most specifically in North America and the Pacific. At the University of Sydney, She holds an appointment as a lecturer in the Department of History. She was previously Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the School of Philosophical and Historical Inquiry, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences and in the Centre for Values, Ethics and the Law in Medicine, Faculty of Medicine, as part of Professor Warwick Anderson’s ARC Laureate Fellowship project, “Race and Ethnicity in the Global South”. She has taught at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Michigan.
Tues. 28 March, 5pm-6.30pm, REGS Western Tower Balcony, Quadrangle
Please see the link below for an invitation to a book launch for Miranda Johnson’s The Land is Our History: Indigeneity, Law, and the Settler State published by Oxford late last year.
Download file
All are warmly invited to join us at REGS on Tuesday 28 March, at 5pm. Duncan Ivison will launch the book.
Please RSVP to
