Metcalfe Auditorium, Ground Floor, Macquarie Street, Sydney
The well-documented convict cargo was accompanied by a far more elusive group of involuntary arrivals – the soldiers. We know much about the various regiments that served in New South Wales, but far less about the enlisted men who gave them form and force.The focus of this study is the frontier penal station of Newcastle, where the soldiers were charged with a double remit – as the agents of expansion and as the enforcers of confinement. This dual military function is examined through the story of two wooden boxes, including the Macquarie Collectors chest. This is curated as a National Treasure, an early example of Australiana and as an artistic colonial collaboration. My analysis relocates the chest in its military and penal contexts where it begins too look more acquisitive than collaborative – the incidental spoils of a frontier war and the perks of an exploited labour force. A second and more humble wooden box focuses upon the experiences of enlisted men, who felt themselves to be as trapped and tormented as the convicts they guarded. Relationships between convicts and soldiers were characterised by a tension between conflict and cooperation, between class commonality and regimental discipline and between the complex loyalties of religion and ethnicity. This paper, while seeking to negotiate these micro-geographies of class, race, gender and power on the penal frontier, also aims to reveal that the soldiers, were less tangential to the construction of convict society (as opposed to the destruction of Aboriginal society) than the monolithic archive of the Colonial Office would have us suppose. Indeed some soldiers crossed the regimental rubicon and joined convict bushrangers and pirates.
And everyone loves a pirate! So do come it’s on November 5th. Melbourne cup day or Guy Fawkes – depending on your cultural reflexes!
Remember Remember the 5th November!
Tamsin O’Connor is completing her Ph.D. at the University of Sydney. Her thesis entitled, ‘All those Places of Condemnation’: Power Relations and Convict Resistance at the Penal Stations of New South Wales 1804 – 1842,’ focuses on the settlements at Newcastle and Moreton Bay, which existed on either side of the Bigge Report. She has published her research in a number of edited collections.
The Aesthetic Needs of the Masses: Artistic Reception in the Aftermath of the Great Leap Forward
Dr Minerva Inwald
Please join us for the first in the OSA Lunchtime Seminar Series
In May 1962, as the People’s Republic of China was recovering from Mao’s disastrous Great Leap Forward, the newly constructed Museum of Chinese Art in Beijing held its inaugural exhibition: a celebration of the twentieth anniversary of Mao’s treatise on socialist cultural work, “Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Art and Literature”. This paper analyses descriptions of the new Museum and its inaugural exhibition to explore how the party-state mobilised artistic practice to contribute to post-Leap recovery efforts. In contrast to Great Leap Forward cultural policies that demanded art rouse enthusiasm for labour amongst workers, peasants and soldiers, in 1962, cultural bureaucrats argued that art should serve the “aesthetic needs” of the masses. Articles in People’s Daily and professional journals discussing the new Museum presented the institution as a space for aesthetic pleasure, describing, or even imagining, the enjoyment of exhibition visitors as they toured the Museum’s halls and gardens. This paper argues that cultural bureaucrats used ideas about reception both in an effort to win back a disillusioned population with the promise of amusement and pleasure, and to model an idealised relationship between the people and the socialist state; praising exhibition visitors for reporting their opinions and critiques of artworks, cultural bureaucrats suggested that the party-state was concerned with popular opinion and responsive to criticism. Exploring the party-state’s deployment of reception as a political resource, this paper considers the complex ways in which meaning was made in socialist artistic culture.
Dr Minerva Inwald
Dr Minerva Inwald is a Researcher based in the Department of History, University of Sydney, focusing on the cultural history of the People’s Republic of China in the Mao era. Using Chinese-language primary sources to examine how exhibitions at this prestigious space were used to communicate ideas about the role of art in China in relation to conceptions of ‘the people,’ her research seeks to investigate broader questions of how art objects circulate in museum contexts, as well as outside museums such as in domestic, work and public spheres. Minerva graduated with Bachelor of Arts (Languages) Honours degree from the University of Sydney in 2012, and in the same year was awarded the Francis Stuart Prize for Asian Art History form the Department of Art History. She has contributed a number of papers at academic conferences in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane, and recently undertook an 8-month postgraduate exchange program at Beijing’s Central Academy of Fine Arts.
About the OSA Lunchtime Seminar Series
On the last Tuesday of every month from October, the Oriental Society of Australia will hold lunchtime seminars for all to attend and hear from researchers working across different geographical and cultural understandings of Asia.
The series will feature early career and higher degree researchers, and we hope to develop a network of perspectives from across the region. Please join! And get in touch if you would like to present at a future date.
This room can be best accessed just across from the new Education Building off Manning Road.
Aug. 21 – Sheila Fitzpatrick, University of Sydney, “Russians, White and Red: a Story of Postwar Immigration to Australia”
Abstract: The paper, summarizing the book of the same title I am currently completing, deals with two immigration streams – Displaced persons from Europe and Russians from China – that arrived here in the late 1940s and ‘50s. The first problem to discussion is “Who is a Russian?” Then I go on to look at wartime collaborators, fascists, Orthodox believers, boy scouts, and even a few “Reds” (Russian-speaking Jews sometimes being put in that category) and Soviet spies.
Bio: Sheila Fitzpatrick is primarily a historian of modern Russia, especially the Stalin period, but has recently added a transnational dimension with her research on displaced persons (DPs) after the Second World War. She received a Mellon Foundation Distinguished Achievement Award in 2002 and the American Historical Association’s Award for Scholarly Distinction in 2012. She is past President of the Association for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies (formerly AAASS) and a member of the Australian Academy of the Humanities and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Having worked for most of her career in the United States, she moved back to Australia in 2012.
Sep. 4 – Glenda Sluga, University of Sydney, “Climate and Capitalism”
Abstract: This talk takes up the 1972 UN Human Environment conference: the first example of the attempted global governance of environmental issues and climate change that foundered on the challenges of development and North-South antagonisms. I will argue that history connects Delos, the ancient capital of the Athenian League, with the club of Rome, and the New International Economic Order.
Bio: Glenda Sluga is Professor of International History, and ARC Kathleen Fitzpatrick Laureate Fellow at the University of Sydney She has published widely on the cultural history of international relations, internationalism, the history of European nationalisms, sovereignty, identity, immigration and gender history. In 2013, she was awarded a five-year Australian Research Council Laureate Fellowship for Inventing the International – the origins of globalisation. Her most recent book is Internationalism in the Age of Nationalism (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013) and with Patricia Clavin, Internationalisms, a Twentieth Century History (Cambridge University Press, 2017).
Sep. 25 – Mark McKenna, University of Sydney, “Finding the Centre: Uluru and the legacies of Australia’s frontier”
Abstract: The centre of Australia – geographical, political, psychological & ‘spiritual’ – is an elastic idea with a long history. As the literary scholar Roslynn Haynes remarked in 1998: ‘Because Australia is the only island continent, the notion of its centre has acquired a unique significance’. We do not ‘conceptualise the centre of any other continent’ in quite the same way. In this seminar, I’ll explore how and why Australians have become preoccupied with the idea of ‘the centre’ and how their ideas have changed over time. In doing so, I’ll pay particular attention to Uluru and its relatively recent invention as the ‘spiritual centre’ of the nation, a change that was dramatically illustrated by the release of the Uluru Statement from the Heart in May 2017. Entangled with this history is the story of the shooting of an Aboriginal man at Uluru in 1934, an event that has continued to resonate as Uluru has become a place of national and international significance.
Bio: Mark McKenna is Professor of History at the University of Sydney. He is the author of several prize-winning books, including The Captive Republic: A History of Republicanism in Australia 1788-1996, Looking for Blackfellas’ Point: an Australian History of Place, An Eye for Eternity: The Life of Manning Clark, and From the Edge: Australia’s Lost Histories. In this seminar, Mark will draw on a chapter from his forthcoming book, Untitled (2020).
Oct. 16 – Sarah Bendall, University of Sydney, “They do swarm through all parts of London: The place of the Bodymaking and Farthingalemaking trades in the Textile Industries of Seventeenth-Century London”
Abstract: During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the female silhouette underwent a dramatic change. This period saw the frequent addition of solid materials such as whalebone, wood, and metal into European wardrobes, and clothing was intentionally distorted as ideas of form, size and structure were artfully explored. The desirable body during this period was achieved by using two main foundation garments: bodies and farthingales. Accounts and bills reveal that tailors often made foundation garments; however, these records also show that two separate, specialised branches of tailoring –bodymaking and farthingalemaking –were also established in the late sixteenth century. Scarcely any scholarly investigation of these trades has been conducted and so we know very little about their significance to England’s textile industries. Utilising guild records, household accounts and artisans’ bills this paper explores the origins, scale, organisation and reputation of these trades in the seventeenth century. It seeks to recover these artisans from historical obscurity and put them back into the bustling textile landscape that characterised the craft trades of early modern London.
Bio: Sarah A Bendall is currently an Associate lecturer in the Department of History at the University of Sydney. She was previously a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Western Australia, and a Visiting Research Fellow at the Bodleian Libraries Oxford and the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington DC. Her research examines the history of dress, jewellery and armour in early modern England, Scotland and France, particularly in relation to ideas of gender and the histories of garment production/consumption. Her work has appeared in Gender and History, Renaissance Studies and Fashion Theory. Her PhD (Sydney) examined how sixteenth and seventeenth-century female foundation garments (bodies and farthingales) shaped both the body and notions of femininity in England. Her current research examines the textile industries that that sourced and produced garments made with baleen (whalebone), to examine the relationship between fashion and ecology in early modern Europe.
Oct. 30 – James Curran, University of Sydney, “Charles Pearson’s National Life and Character(1893): A vision of China’s rise and a post-western world.”
Abstract: This paper will explore CH Pearson’s classical work, National Life and Character: A Forecast (1893) and look in particular at how from his Australian vantage point Pearson explored the importance of modernisation for the West and its future relations with the world, especially China. Pearson was an English liberal intellectual who moved to Victoria in 1870 and in the following decades played a key role in the colony’s public life. He came to believe that the Australian colonies were at the forefront of the social forces modernising the Western world, but predicted that great problems were emerging for the West as this process was extended to Asia, Africa and South America.
Bio: James Curran specialises in the history of Australian and American foreign relations. In 2013 he held the Keith Cameron Chair at University College Dublin, and in 2010 was a Fulbright scholar at Georgetown University. Prior to joining academia, Curran worked in The Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet and the Office of National Assessments. A non-resident fellow at the Lowy Institute for International Policy, he is also a regular commentator on radio and television, and his opinion pieces on foreign affairs and political culture have appeared in major Australian newspapers as well as the Lowy Interpreter, China-US Focus, the East Asia Forum and the Council on Foreign Relations ‘Asia Unbound’ series.
Nov. 6 – Macarena Ibarra, Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile, “Rethinking the Republican City: The Debates about Heritage in Santiago de Chile (1880-1920)”
Abstract: To come.
Bio: Macarena Ibarra is a Historian from the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. She has an MA from the University of Leeds, and a PhD from the University of Cambridge, United Kingdom. Her teaching and research focuses on twentieth century urban and planning history with a particular interest both in the politics of urban public health, and in the debates and practice about cultural heritage. Some of her recent publications are the co edited books Vísperas del Urbanismo en Latinoamérica (2018), Patrimonio en Construcción (2017), the articles Hygiene and Public Health in Santiago de Chile´s Urban Agenda, 1892-1927 (2015) and the entry Urban History, in The Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Urban and Regional Studies (2019).
Semester One
Time: 12.10-1.30 pm
Place: 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
Or:
Professorial Board Room, Main Quadrangle (Enter the vestibule near the Nicholson Museum. Take the stairs and turn left at the top.) Click here for map
Coordinator: Michael A. McDonnell Semester 1 2019 Week 3 – Mar 13 – Professorial Board Room
Marilyn Lake, University of Melbourne, “From MUP to HUP: The Re-Shaping of Progressive New World”
Abstract: In January this year Harvard University Press published my book Progressive New World: How Settler Colonialism and TransPacific Exchange Shaped American Reform. In presenting the argument of the book, I shall also talk about the ways in which negotiations with different publishers – in Australia, the UK and US – shaped conceptual transformations in the thematic orientation and theoretical framework of this transnational transPacific book. It became in the end, I hope, a more interesting book and a work of American history. ‘Progressive New World’, I write in the Introduction, ‘offers a new history of progressivism as a transpacific project shaped by Australasian example and the shared experience and racialized order of settler colonialism’. It is a book about postcolonial sensibilities and the subjective politics of race.
Bio: Professor Marilyn Lake grew up in Tasmania, where she completed her undergraduate and Master’s degrees in History. She moved to Melbourne in 1976 and enrolled in a PhD degree in History at Monash University. During that time she gave birth to two daughters, Kath and Jess. She subsequently held academic positions at Monash University, The University of Melbourne and La Trobe University, where she also served as Associate Dean Research and was appointed Charles LaTrobe Professor in History in 2010. Professor Lake held Visiting Professorial Fellowships at Stockholm University, ANU, the University of Sydney, the University of Western Australia and the University of Maryland. Between 2001 and 2002 she held the Chair in Australian Studies at Harvard University. In the last ten years she has mainly been in research positions supported by two ARC Australian Professorial Fellowships. Professor Lake was elected Fellow of the Academy of Humanities of Australia in 1995; and Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences of Australia in 1999. She has also served as President of the Australian Historical Association. Author of numerous books and articles, Professor Lake has won many prizes, including: The Limits of Hope: Soldier Settlement in Victoria 1915-38 won the Harbison-Higinbotham prize and was short-listed for the Age Book of the Year in 1987; FAITH: Faith Bandler Gentle Activist won the HREOC award for non-fiction in 2002; Creating a Nation which Marilyn wrote with Patricia Grimshaw, Ann McGrath and Marian Quartly also won the HREOC prize for non-fiction and was shortlisted for the Adelaide Writers’ Festival Prize; Drawing the Global Colour Line which she co-authored with Henry Reynolds won the Ernest Scott prize, the Queensland Premier’s Prize for History and the Prime Minister’s Prize for Non-Fiction in 2009. Week 5 – Mar 27 – MECO Seminar Room S226
Niccolò Pianciola, Lingnan University, Hong Kong, “The Aral Sea Fisheries and the Environmental History of Settler Colonialism in Central Asia, 1873-1917”
Abstract: The presentation addresses the managing of Aral Sea fisheries by the Tsarist administration, and the making of a colonial frontier inhabited by exiled Ural Cossack, Qaraqalpaq, Qazaq, Russian, and Ukrainian fishermen. By comparing the different power relations between Cossacks and the local population on the Ural River and in the Aral Sea region, it shows how they shaped fisheries management regulations and their effectiveness. It also investigates the conditions of production of scientific knowledge on the Aral Sea ecosystem and what role it played in governance decision-making. By drafting a series of fishing regulations and by examining the balance between humans and aquatic animals, scientists oriented the Tsarist government’s decisions on how to manage both the fisheries and the populations that exploited them.
Bio: Niccolò Pianciola is Associate Professor of History at Lingnan University, Hong Kong. His research focuses on the social and environmental history of Tsarist and Soviet Asia. His first book focused on the relations between immigrant Slavic peasants in Central Asia, local pastoralists (Kazakhs and Kyrgyz) and the state from the late Tsarist Empire to Stalinism. The resulting monograph, Stalinismo di frontiera. Colonizzazione agricola, sterminio dei nomadi e costruzione statale in Asia Centrale (1905-1936), investigates the historical background of the great famine in Kazakhstan in 1931-33, one of the worst man-made catastrophes of the twentieth century. After dealing with peasant immigration in the Kazakh steppe during late Tsarism,the revolt of 1916 in Central Asia, early Soviet decolonization policies, and Stalinist “revolution from above”, it highlights the causes and patterns of development of the famine. The book is based on extensive research in provincial, republican and central archives in Russia, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan and outlines the ambiguous policies of neocolonization and decolonization of the early Soviet state in Central Asia. Dr. Pianciola also studied the policies of forced population transfers during periods of war, revolution and competitive state-building in the twentieth century. He recently published a co-authored book on the topic covering East-Central Europe, the Balkans, Anatolia, the Caucasus and Soviet Asia (1850s-1950s), with A. Ferrara, entitled, L’età delle migrazioni forzate. Esodi e deportazioni in Europa (1853-1953) [The Age of Forced Migrations.] Bologna: Il Mulino, 2012, Week 8 – Apr 17 – Woolley Common Room
Sophie Chao, University of Sydney, “Eating and Being Eaten”: Gastro-Politics in a West Papuan Village
Abstract: This paper explores the cultural meanings of hunger and satiety among indigenous Marind in the Indonesian-controlled region of West Papua. I begin by describing the nourishing qualities attributed by Marind to sago and other forest-derived foods in light of their associations with place-making, multispecies sociality, and collective memory. I then investigate how agro-industrial expansion and commodified foodways provoke conflicting forms of hunger among Marind – hunger for sago, ‘plastic’ foods, money, and the flesh of other humans. At the same time, Marind see themselves as subjected to the hunger of threatening ‘others’: corporations, roads, cities, and monocrop oil palm. Finally, I examine how villagers interpret the prevalence of hunger in light of indigenous spiritual beliefs, the political history of West Papua, Catholic notions of martyrdom, and the association of hunger with a ‘modern’ way of life. The paper invites attention to hunger and satiety as culturally constructed, politically situated, and morally charged categories of experience, whose significance may draw from yet also transcend, biophysical conceptions of hunger defined in terms of nutritional deficiency and food deprivation. In particular, I suggest that Marinds’ ambivalent self-positioning as both the ‘eaters’ and the ‘eaten’ constitutes a perceptive, if troubling, critique, of capitalism in both its attributes and effects.
Bio: Sophie Chao joined the History Department at the University of Sydney in March 2019. Dr. Chao received her PhD in Social Anthropology from Macquarie University in February 2019. She holds a BA in Oriental Studies and a Masters in Anthropology from Oxford University. Her doctoral thesis, which received a Vice-Chancellor’s Commendation, was based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Indonesian West Papua, where she investigated the socio-environmental impacts of monocrop oil palm plantations among indigenous forest-dwelling communities. Prior to her doctoral studies, Dr. Chao undertook extensive research on human rights and agribusiness in Southeast Asia as a member of international Indigenous rights organization Forest Peoples Programme. Her postdoctoral project will weave together social science methods (including history), science and technology studies, and biomedicine to examine the nutritional and health impacts of agribusiness on humans and their environments across the tropical belt. Dr. Chao is also interested in research development more generally and looks forward to engaging in inter-disciplinary collaboration of the Department of History and FASS (more generally) with the Charles Perkins Centre. Week 10 – May 8 – Professorial Board Room
Scott Relyea, Appalachian State University, “Lamas, Empresses, and Tea: Sharing imperial models in early twentieth-century Tibet”
Abstract: As the twentieth century opened, the Tibetan plateau was a zone of intense imperial contact – and competition – between British India and Qing China. Indian rupees had become the primary currency of commercial exchange across the plateau, and British explorers had gathered detailed knowledge of both the presumed natural resource bounty of eastern Tibet and the lucrative border tea trade traversing it. Although Sichuan Province officials engaged with administering the Kham region of eastern Tibet shared a common perception of Khampa society with their British counterparts, they also recognised the encroachment of Indian rupees, British explorers, and ambitious railway plans as potential challenges to Qing authority, if not a prologue to territorial expansion paralleling the contemporaneous scramble for concessions in coastal China. This presentation will explore the mutual exchange of imperial models fostered by the interaction between British and Sichuanese officials, merchants, and explorers in this region, and its influence on transformative policies in Qing China’s southwest borderlands.
Bio: Dr. Scott Relyea is currently a Fulbright U.S. Scholar and senior visiting scholar in the School of History and Culture at Sichuan University in Chengdu, PRC. An Assistant professor of Asian history at Appalachian State University in Boon, N.C., USA, He is in the midst of a two-year research visit to China, funded by a Fulbright grant and a Henry Luce Foundation/ACLS Postdoctoral Fellowship in China Studies. A historian of late imperial and modern China, Dr. Relyea’s research centres on state-building and nationalism in the southwest borderlands of China and the global circulation of concepts of statecraft and international law in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In addition to his current research, Dr. Relyea is working on converting his dissertation into a book, tentatively titled Gazing at the Tibetan Plateau: China’s Infrontier and the Early Twentieth Century Evolution of Sino-Tibetan Relations. He earned a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago and Master’s degrees from the School of Oriental and African Studies and the George Washington University.
Week 12 – May 22 – Woolley Common Room
Debbie Doroshow, Yale University, “A New Kind of Child: Residential Treatment and the Creation of Emotional Disturbance in Twentieth Century America.”
Abstract: Before the 1940s, children with severe emotional difficulties would have had few options. If they could not be cared for in the community at a child guidance clinic, they might have been placed in a state mental hospital or asylum, an institution for the so-called “feebleminded,” or a training school for delinquent children. But starting in the 1930s and 1940s, more specialized institutions began to open all over the country with the goal of treating these children. Staff members at residential treatment centers (RTCs) shared a commitment to helping children who couldn’t be managed at home. They adopted an integrated approach to treatment, employing talk therapy, schooling, and other activities in the context of a therapeutic environment. In the process, they made visible a new kind of person: the emotionally disturbed child. This is a story about Americans struggling to be normal at a time when being different was dangerous. At RTCs, treating emotional disturbance and building normal children and normal families were inextricably intertwined. Though normality remained a distant, if unreachable goal for most children in residential treatment, RTC professionals grounded their therapeutic approach within this ideal. The emergence of RTCs to build normal children and the emergence of emotionally disturbed children as a new patient population were thus fundamentally intertwined.
Bio: Deborah Doroshow began her studies in the history of medicine at Harvard, where she earned an A.B. in the history of science. She graduated from Harvard Medical School and received a Ph.D. in the history of medicine from Yale. Her work on the history of psychiatry and the history of children’s health has appeared in the Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, Isis, and the Bulletin of the History of Medicine. Her book, Emotionally Disturbed: Caring For America’s Troubled Children, was published by the University of Chicago Press in April 2019. She is currently completing her fellowship in adult hematology and oncology at the Yale University School of Medicine, where she frequently lectures and teaches medical students and undergraduates about both oncology and the history of medicine. In August 2019, she will be Assistant Professor of Medicine at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York.
Thanks to the generosity of an anonymous donor, the Department of History in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences was able to award almost $100,000 in Undergraduate Equity Scholarships to study History at the University of Sydney.
Established in 2015, this Scholarship provides assistance to enrolling and current undergraduate students who are majoring in History. The award is worth $5000 per year. Current students can apply for up to one year of funding, while recent school leavers who enrol in a BA or BA Advanced degree majoring in History can receive from 3 to 4 years of funding.
This year we were able to award 3 or 4 year scholarships to four new students, and three year-long scholarships to current students.
The successful applicants all performed extremely well in their HSC courses or current University courses, submitted strong statements of interest, and come from unique and diverse backgrounds – exactly the kind of students the Department, and University, needs. In interviews with the selection panel, all of the students impressed by speaking about their passion for studying History and what they saw as the relevance of their History degree in understanding modern society, culture and politics.
In some cases having overcome very serious obstacles to get to University, most of the applicants also spoke about how they wanted to use their University studies to not just learn more about the world in which they lived, but also to help try and change society and make it easier for others to learn and to follow their passions. Most of the students also spoke of the influence of particular teachers on their studies and their motivation to go to University.
Recipients included three students from the Sydney area, including one Indigenous student, and four students from rural/regional NSW. The Department was particularly pleased to note that two of the successful applicants had participated in the Department of History and Department of Classics and Ancient History Social Inclusion program with Chifley College Senior Campus in Mount Druitt, and had previously won special Year 11 University History Awards. For more information about the program, see:http://blogs.usyd.edu.au/historymatters/history_and_social_inclusion/
Many congratulations again to all the award winners. We are very much looking forward to having them in our classes in the coming years.
For more information about the Scholarship, please see: http://sydney.edu.au/scholarships/undergraduate/faculty/fass.shtml#UESH
The Laureate Research Program in International History welcomes its latest Postdocs: Dr. Ben Huf, who graduated with his PhD from the ANU this year, and works on Imperial and Economic History; and Emma Kluge will join us as a JRF, working with us on a Geneva collaboration looking at the significance of 1919 and the creation of the League of Nations in Australia. Emma is a PhD student in the Department of History, working on the History of West Papua.
The Laureate Research Program in International History has been awarded a Partnership Collaboration working with SEI at Usyd, and colleagues at Utrecht University’s Strategic Programmes ‘Pathways to Sustainability’ and ‘Institutions for Open Societies’. Utrecht will visit Sydney in April 2019, to continue to discuss collaborations focused on the concept of ‘Planetary Thinking’ which is currently being developed at the Laureate program under the leadership of Dr. Sabine Selchow.
The Laureate Program in International History is a partner in a successful German Cluster of Excellence bid, “Contestations of the Liberal Script” (SCRIPTS) based at the Berlin Centre for European Studies at the Free University Berlin, and the WZB Berlin Social Science Centre.
Harvard PhD student Ben Goossen was a visitor at the Laureate Research Program in International History and presented a paper on his doctoral thesis on The Year of the Earth (1957-1958).
In 2018, Laureate Research Program in International JRF Alumna Dr Catherine Bishop won an ARC Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) to work on the history of small businesswomen in Australia, which she will take up at Macquarie university’s School of Management.
In December, Professor Glenda Sluga co-convened the inaugural MENTOR workshop with the Director, Culture Strategy at The University of Sydney. The workshop, which was co-organised by Hollie Pich and Marama Whyte, offered women and gender diverse ECRs in the humanities and social sciences concrete advice on how best to forge a career in academia. MENTOR ran from December 5 – 7, and was attended by a group of ECRs selected from The University of Sydney and universities around Australia. For full details, see http://blogs.usyd.edu.au/historymatters/2018/12/mentor_workshop_1.html
Prof Glenda Sluga with Prof Madeleine Herren from Basel University published an op-ed in the Washington Post, The Trump administration deals another blow to international cooperation— https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2018/12/14/trump-administration-deals-another-blow-international-cooperation/
In December, Glenda Sluga working with JRF Emma Kluge , and Laureate Research Program in International History Alumnus, Aden Knapp (now at Harvard studying for his PhD), worked with the HistoryLab Podcast to produce an episode marking the forthcoming centenary of the origins of the League of Nations. The podcast ‘Skeletons of Empire’ can be listened to here: https://historycouncilnsw.org.au/history-lab-s2e3/
In December Glenda Sluga, Anne Rees (a former Laureate JRF, now at La Trobe) and Ben Huf organised and co-hosted a inter-disciplinary workshop, Capitalism in Australia: New Histories for a Re-imagined Future in Melbourne, November 2018. Hosted by La Trobe University, in conjunction with the University of Sydney, the workshop congregated some of the country’s leading social scientists and historians to discuss how Australian historians might more actively research and respond to our present moment of economic transformation. The follow up to this event will be the launching of an annual Economic History Winterschool in 2019. The first will be at Usyd, in July next year, working with LaTrobe and ANU. Stay tuned.
In November, Professor Glenda Sluga also presented keynotes at the University of Göttingen and University of Ljubljana on Human Rights in the Shaping of International Orders, 1814-1974.
Finally, Laureate Postdoc Dr. Ben Huf has won with Dr. Anne Rees an ASSA award to host a follow up workshop next year as well.
Assoc. Prof. Frances Clarke and her collaborator Assoc Prof. Rebecca Jo Plant (University of California, San Diego) received the Carol Gold Prize for the best article published in a peer-reviewed journal in 2018 by an academic at mid-career or above level, given out by the American Historical Association’s Coordinating Council of Women Historians.
Many congratulations to Senior Lecturer Thomas Adams, who will be spending November 2018-July 2019 as a fellow at the International Research Center for Work and Human Lifecycle in Global History at Humboldt University, Berlin.
Many congratulations to Miranda Johnson, whose book This Land is Our History, was shortlisted for the W.K. Hancock Prize, given out by the Australian Historical Association. The biennial W.K. Hancock Prize recognises and encourages an Australian scholar who has recently published a first scholarly book in any field of history. The W.K. Hancock Prize was instituted in 1987 by the Australian Historical Association, to honour the contribution to the study and writing of history in Australia by Sir Keith Hancock. Since his death in 1988, it has served to commemorate his life and achievements.
Many congratulations to Dr. Sarah Claire Dunstan on her two year postdoctoral Fellowship with the Leverhulme Trust. She will be working at the University of Sussex in the UK.
In May, Sydney University History Department Alumna Dr. Lizzie Ingleson has won one of ten early career researchers Travelling Fellowships for 2018, awarded by the Australian Academy of the Humanities.
Many congratulations to current PhD student, Darren Smith, for winning the prestigious Hakluyt Society Essay Prize competition, for his essay: ‘Ex Typographia Savariana: Franco-Ottoman relations and the first oriental printing press in Paris’.
The Laureate Research Program in International History at the University of Sydney is pleased to note the following good news: Beatrice Wayne, postdoctoral fellow in the Laureate program, has won a three year lectureship at Harvard in the Literature and History program; Marigold Black, recent History PhD, and JRF in the Laureate Research Program in International History, has won a three-year research fellowship at ANU working with the Australian Defence Forces on Strategic Issues; and Glenda Sluga was a successful co-applicant in a European Research Council funded project with Stockholm Royal Institute of Technology on the Rise of Global Environmental Governance.
History at the University of Sydney was recently ranked 26th in the world (and 2nd in Australia after ANU) by the QS World University Rankings by subject, sharing a 5 star rating with the top twenty history departments.
Congratulations to recent PhD student Sarah Bendall who was awarded a Bodleian Library Visiting Research Fellowship at Oxford University. as well as a Folger Shakespeare Library Fellowship.
Many congrats to recent Sydney University History Department PhD recipient Liz Ingleson on earning a prestigious and highly competitive two-year postdoc fellowship at Southern Methodist University’s Center for Presidential History. Many congrats and warm wishes for the coming year or two.
Congratulations to Ben Silverstein, winner of the History Australia and Taylor & Francis best article for 2017. You can read Ben’s article online now: ‘Possibly they did not know themselves’: the ambivalent government of sex and work in the Northern Territory Aboriginals Ordinance 1918
Senior Lecturer Thomas Adams, along with Matt Sakakeeny, are pleased to note that their edited collection, Remaking New Orleans: Beyond Exceptionalism and Authenticity will be available from Duke University Press in early 2019. https://www.dukeupress.edu/remaking-new-orleans
Professor Michael A. McDonnell, along with Associate Professor Kate Fullagar at Macquarie University, published a new edited collection in November with Johns Hopkins University Press, entitled Facing Empire: Indigenous Experiences in a Revolutionary Age. https://jhupbooks.press.jhu.edu/content/facing-empire. A blog about the book appeared late last year at the Age of Revolutions blogsite: https://ageofrevolutions.com/2017/11/29/facing-empire-indigenous-experiences-in-a-revolutionary-age/
“Expansive,” “deft,” “lively,” “cogent and powerful,” and “essential reading” – just some of the praise for Miranda Johnson’s book, This Land is Our History: Indigeneity, Law, and the Settler State, in a new review for H-Environment.
Congratulations to recent PhD recipient Billy Griffiths on the publication of Deep Time Dreaming: Uncovering Ancient Australia, which investigates a twin revolution: the reassertion of Aboriginal identity in the second half of the twentieth century, and the uncovering of the traces of ancient Australia. The book explores what it means to live in a place of great antiquity, with its complex questions of ownership and belonging. Billy will launch his book in Sydney at a special event at Gleebooks on Thursday 15 March 2018, 6:30 pm: “In conversation: Billy Griffiths discusses his book Deep Time Dreaming: Uncovering Ancient Australia with Professor Iain McCalman” For further information and tickets, click here.
A “dazzling work of microhistory.” Professor Chris Hilliard’s latest book The Littlehampton Libels is reviewed in the London Review of Books.
Many congratulations to our most recent recipient of a Faculty Teaching Excellence Awards – Andres Rodriguez. The award was presented by the Dean Annemarie Jagose at a ceremony on October 31, 2018 at MacLaurin Hall at the University of Sydney, along with other recipients from across the Faculty.
Dr. Rodriguez received a Teaching Excellence Award primarily for his outstanding work in developing a suite of new Chinese History units, and also his sensitive and thoughtful approach to teaching the modern history of China.
The Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Teaching Excellence Awards program is designed to recognize and reward the teaching excellence of staff at all career levels, to encourage teachers to engage in reflective teaching practices, and to promote and support the development of high quality and innovative teaching.
Recipients have demonstrated an evidence informed approach to critical reflection on teaching and learning, evaluation of their teaching practice, engagement with higher educational research, and a focus on improving student learning.
One of Dr. Rodriguez’s nominees wrote: “I am delighted to have the opportunity to write this statement in support of Andres Rodriguez’s nomination for a FASS teaching award. Andres’ reputation as a teacher of extraordinary talent, energy and generosity has been firmly established during the years he has been employed at this university….Andres has remarkably high student satisfaction ratings in his units on Chinese history – a success that has contributed significantly to improved enrolments and retention of students in this field….many colleagues have noted just how generous, helpful, supportive and creative Andres proved to be as a colleague and co-teacher. He is always happy to talk about teaching, and more than generous in sharing insights and resources with both junior and more senior colleagues. Thoughtful, diligent, inventive, caring, lively, and manifestly dedicated to the interests of his students, he is a teacher to celebrate and reward.”
Dr. Rodriguez was also asked to make a short speech about his teaching to the gathering:
“I am a specialist in modern China who has had the privilege of leading hundreds of students on their journey to make sense of a very complicated history of China in the twentieth century.
At Sydney Uni I have students from all sorts of backgrounds, many of them eager to break out of their Eurocentric shell and ready to understand the world from a very different perspective.
I should also note that many of my students are Chinese, who openly tell me that they are curious to see how Western societies see China and how their history is taught in a place like Australia.
This rich diverse student body makes each semester a unique learning experience for all of us in the classroom.
Chinese students with personal ties to the region might share unique memories of family histories that are aligned with the broader themes we discuss in class. Students from other disciplines such as archaeology or classics also bring their own particular understandings of what comprises ‘evidence’ to classroom discussions.
How does one go about in bringing these experiences into the classroom? And how can we create the space for those who are not inclined to speak in class or perhaps lack the confidence as non-native speakers of English? After all, there is no effective student learning if we cannot hear the voice of the student.
I took it upon myself to find a way that would allow students to express what was going on in their minds as they began to prepare for our weekly tutorial. As I am sure many of you here will agree with, sometimes we can obtain results with simple yet meaningful changes in our teaching. This meant reconceptualizing the tutorial as a meeting that begins when students sit down to read and prepare for each weekly session rather than when the clock in the classroom says so. Together with Bec Plumbe we designed a simple platform allowing students to submit any meaningful thoughts, reflections, or comments on what they had encountered in their readings.
The response was overwhelming – intellectual curiosity had been unleashed as students sent me new sources they had found after a particular theme caught their attention
Chinese students ventured into their own wartime family histories or drew upon their own cultural backgrounds which I would then address in class and ask if they were willing to elaborate on for their classmates.
I too would highlight comments in class that I found particularly meaningful, each of these were helpful in drawing out what we would discuss as a class each week.
Creating a space for students that allows them to listen to their voice, and to each other’s voices is a meaningful way to help them understand how they relate to the world, and to learn about who they are. You will no doubt recognise in these words the trappings of cultural competence, a key skill that helps students to acknowledge and respect the rich diversity of our world.
In these days of anger that shake the world at so many levels, I hope my contribution to the learning experience of my students will help dispel the clouds of hatred and racism that are now gathering over our horizons.
Dr Andres Rodriguez
Lecturer in Modern Chinese History
School of Philosophical and Historical Inquiry
The University of Sydney
China Book Review Editor for Asian Studies Review
The Department of History is pleased to announce the following promotions in 2018. Many congratulations to all – this is well-deserved recognition for the remarkable teaching, research, and service contributions made by each.
Dr. Frances Clarke was promoted to Associate Professor
Dr. Hélène Sirantoine was promoted to Senior Lecturer
Dr. Peter Hobbins was promoted to Senior Lecturer
Dr. Thomas Adams was promoted to Senior Lecturer
