Conference: Sovereignty, Economy and the Global Histories of Natural Resources

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Sovereignty, Economy and the Global Histories of Natural Resources
An International Symposium sponsored by the International Research Award in Global History,
Universities of Sydney, Basel, and Heidelberg
18-19 December 2017
Hosted by the Centre for History and Economics, University of Cambridge

Over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth century natural resources have given shape to the history of sovereignty, law, and commerce across the globe. The struggle to protect, own and extract natural resources has mobilized local authorities, national agencies and international bodies. The Standing Rock water protectors are perhaps most well-known recent example of such histories, but is certainly not the only one. From disputes over social and economic rights to dueling religious and economic understandings of resources and their value, things like carbon, gold and water have determined the lives of national and local communities.
This international symposium invites scholars to examine the history and political ecology of various natural resources – animal, vegetable, or mineral —in the modern era. It asks how natural resources such as carbon, air, and water became the subject of legal, environmental, and economic forces over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth century and how, in turn, these resources have themselves came to shape national and international histories? Papers that focus on the role of local actors, rather than solely international elites, that examine contested spaces and resources beyond the Western Hemisphere, and take an interdisciplinary approach to this global history of natural resources will feature. Papers will address (but are not limited to) the ways in which the political ecology of various natural resources has come to shape:
Border disputes, international territories and national sovereignty
Minority and religious rights
Movement and mobility of people, animals and microbes
Social and economic geographies and spaces
Cultural practices and institutions
Technical expertise and knowledge
The role of nongovernmental and economic agents in local and national contexts
We are pleased to note that Professor Glenda Sluga is co-sponsor of this conference, which was the winning concept in an international competition. A copy of the poster is available here, and you can download the final program here.

Thinkers Guide to the 21st Century

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History department staff are regulars in the ‘Thinkers Guide to the 21st Century’ talk series brought to you by the Sydney Ideas/Laureate Research Program in International History.
You can listen to the podcasts on previous topics such as The New International Order (Glenda Sluga), Authoritarianism (Dirk Moses), Feminism in the Age of Populism, and Globalisation (Glenda Sluga and Thomas Adams).
If you missed out on this series, the Laureate Research Program in International History is bringing it back with Sydney Ideas in Semester 2, 2018. The series averaged 300 subscriptions for each event; we hope to keep up the momentum and are holding a competition for next year’s topics. More information from Sydney Ideas soon.

Conference: Monarchies, Decolonisation and Royal Legacies in the Asia-Pacific

Monarchies, Decolonisation and Royal Legacies in the Asia-Pacific


Department of History, The University of Sydney,
6-7 December 2017

Organised by Robert Aldrich and Cindy McCreery

Wednesday, 6 December 2017

9.30-10.00 Welcome and Introduction
10.00-11.30 Keynote address
Harshan Kumarasingham (University of Edinburgh), ‘Monsoon Monarchy: The Mercurial Fortunes of the Crown in South Asia since 1947’
11.30-12.00 Morning coffee
12.00-1.00 India and Japan
Jim Masselos (University of Sydney), ‘Decolonised Rulers: Rajas, Maharajas and Others in Postcolonial Times’
Elise Tipton (University of Sydney), ‘From Absolute Monarchy to “Symbol Emperor”: The Transformation of the Japanese Imperial Institution after 1945’
1.00-2.00 Lunch
2.00-3.30 The Dutch East Indies / Indonesia I
Adrian Vickers (University of Sydney), ‘Royal and Other Portraits of Nineteenth-Century Indonesian Rulers in Transition’
Robert Cribb (Australian National University), ‘Faltering Decolonisation: The 1929 Ontvoogding (Detutelisation) of the Aristocracies in the Netherlands Indies’
Jean Gelman Taylor (University of New South Wales), ‘Sultans and the State: Power and Pretence in the Dutch Colony and the Republic of Indonesia’
3.30-4.00 Afternoon tea
4.00-5.00 The Dutch East Indies / Indonesia II
Bayu Dardias (Gadjah Mada University / Australian National University), ‘Surviving Monarchy in Indonesia through the Formation of a Special Region: Yogyakarta, 1940-1950’
Susie Protschky (Monash University), ‘In Disputed Territory: The Dutch Monarchy during the Indonesian National Revolution and in Dutch New Guinea (1945–62)’
5.15 Reception hosted by the Department of History
Day 2, Thursday, 7 December 2107
10.00-11.30 Special Guest Presentation
Milton Osborne (Sydney), ‘The Paradox of Cambodian Royalty, from Norodom (1836-1904) to Sihanouk (1922-2012)’
11.30-12.00 Morning coffee
12.00-1.00 South Pacific Monarchies
Matt Fitzpatrick (Flinders University), ‘The Samoan Monarchy and the Last Years of the German Pacific’
Robert Aldrich and Cindy McCreery (University of Sydney), ‘Colonialism and Monarchy in Oceania’
1.00-2.00 Lunch
2.00-3.00 Australia
Bruce Baskerville (University of Sydney), ‘New South Wales’ Vice-Royal Landscapes: Legacies Hidden in Plain Sight’
Mark McKenna (University of Sydney), ‘Indigenous Australians and the British Crown, 1954-2017’
3.00-3.30 Afternoon Tea
3.30-5.00 Roundtable Discussion
With participation by paper-givers and Miranda Johnson, Sophie Loy-Wilson, Lily Rahim and Andrés Rodriguez (University of Sydney), and Maria Nugent (Australian National University).
7.00 Conference Dinner
*
This is the third in a series of conferences on the history of colonialism and modern monarchies sponsored by the Department of History.
The organisers would like to thank Prof. Chris Hilliard, Chair, Department of History and Dr Miranda Johnson and the Pacific Studies Network for their kind support.
For further information, please contact Robert.aldrich@sydney.edu.au or cindy.mccreery@sydney.edu.au
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Postgraduate Scholarship Success

Dear Colleagues,
In what I believe is a department first, two of our postgraduate students, Hollie Pich and Marama Whyte, have simultaneously won Endeavour Awards to undertake research in the U.S. in 2018. These highly-competitive awards are provided by the Australian government to scholars engaging in study, research, or professional development overseas.
Marama has been granted the Endeavour Postgraduate Scholarship to conduct 6-12 months of research at New York University, sponsored by Professor Thomas Sugrue, while Hollie has won an Endeavour Research Fellowship to conduct 4-6 months at Duke University, sponsored by Professor William Chafe.
It what is surely another department record, Marama has also won the Tempe Mann Travelling Scholarship for 2018, which is awarded by the Australian Federation of Graduate Women-New South Wales, taking up an honour that Hollie held the year before.
Warmest congratulations to them both.

Dr. Frances M. Clarke
Senior Lecturer &
Postgraduate Coordinator
Department of History

Faculty Teaching Excellence Awards

Many congratulations to our most recent recipients of Faculty Teaching Excellence Awards – Miranda Johnson and Hollie Pich

Dr. Miranda Johnson received a Teaching Excellence Award primarily for her outstanding work in designing and delivering a truly innovative MA unit in Museum and Heritage Studies, HSTY 6987: Presenting the Past, and the resulting public history project called “The Pitcairn Project.”

One of her nominees wrote: “Dr. Johnson has worked assiduously in creating an innovative and intellectually rigorous learning environment for students that has developed and enriched skills in historical investigation, heritage preservation, IT, collaboration, public history, and cultural competency. Students have learned to negotiate with each other, and negotiate many and often difficult ethical hurdles involved with heritage preservation and the public presentation of history. Along the way, students have posted thoughtful public blogposts about their findings, created helpful marking criteria for their own work, and written reflections about their learning experiences in the unit. They have also met experts in heritage preservation, IT development, and some of the artists and historians involved in Tapa making and its history. Having read the blogposts and sat in on some of the workshops as a curious observer, I’ve been impressed with just how engaged and enthusiastic students were. From my own personal experience of co-teaching with Dr. Johnson, I know her to be a creative, caring, and engaged teacher who works tirelessly to create exceptional learning environments. She is a brilliant teacher who is not only committed to research-led teaching, but also to an engaged and inclusive pedagogy that brings out the absolute best in students from a range of backgrounds and abilities. Her work in this particular unit will serve as an exemplary model of project-based learning for the Department and the Faculty as we move to transform the undergraduate curriculum. This is all down to Dr. Johnson’s careful planning, her deep immersion in the literature of a wide array of fields necessary to pull this off, her collaborative mindset, and her critical commitment to producing intellectually rigorous yet accessible public history. Dr. Johnson is simply an exceptional teacher and deserves to be recognized for her extraordinary efforts.”

You can read about some of the work Miranda did last semester with her class on the Pitcairn Project here.

And some of her student blogposts can be found here.

Many congratulations as well to Hollie Pich for receiving a prestigious Dean’s Citation for Excellence in Tutorials with Distinction for her work in HSTY 2671: Law and Order in America and also HSTY 2609: African American History and Culture.

One of Hollie’s support letters noted that “Hollie is the most conscientious tutor with whom I have worked in the six semesters I have taught at the University of Sydney. What struck me most about Hollie was her interest in pedagogy and her endeavours to become the most effective teacher she could be. She solicited feedback from the students in her tutorials and from me during the semester. She also asked me to observe one of her tutorials, and she in turn observed one of my tutorials, after which we met to discuss our respective observations and teaching aims. In observing Hollie’s tutorial and in my interactions with her throughout Semester 1 of 2017, I got a sense of her extraordinary dedication to students. She had a pleasant rapport with her students, facilitated a substantive and invigorating discussion of tutorial readings, achieved wide participation, and orchestrated a well-planned tutorial featuring a combination of group work and tutorial-wide discussion. It was clear that Hollie earnestly cared about her students, treated them with respect, and was approachable while maintaining her professional authority. As one student wrote in the USS survey of HSTY2609, “Hollie’s a great tutor. It’s a pleasure to go to [her class] every week.”

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.

Awards were presented by Professor Annamarie Jagose on Monday, 6 November 2016 at MacLaurin Hall. Unfortunately, Hollie Pich was in the US on a research trip and unable to pick up her award in person.

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A few of the award recipients, including Miranda, were invited to give a brief presentation on how they were able to engage with and respond to evidence of effective student learning to successfully achieve excellence in teaching.
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Please join us in congratulating Miranda and Hollie and the other recipients on their Teaching Excellence Awards, in the company of their family and friends.
The 2017 Teaching Awards recipient are:
Teaching Excellence Award
Dr Gareth Bryant (SSPS)
A/Professor Damien Cahill (SSPS)
Dr Mark de Vitis (SLAM)
Dr Amanda Elliot (SSPS)
Dr Marianne Fenech (SSESW)
Dr Huw Griffiths (SLAM)
A/Professor Pablo Guillen (Economics)
Dr Miranda Johnson (SOPHI)
A/Professor David Kim (Economics)
Dr Guy Redden (SOPHI)
Dr Brigid Rooney (SLAM)
Dr Jen Scott Curwood (SSESW)
Dr Aim Sinpeng (SSPS)
Professor Rodney Smith (SSPS)
Dr Louise Sutherland (SSESW)
Dr David Ubilava (Economics)
Dean’s Citation for Excellence in Tutorials with Distinction
Georgia Carr (SLAM)
James Goulding (SSESW)
Hollie Pich (SOPHI)
Tim Smartt (SOPHI)
Alix Thoeming (SOPHI)
Dean’s Citation for Excellence in Tutorials
Ella Collins-White (SLAM)
Alex Cubis (SLAM)
Karla Elias (SLAM)
Danica Jenkins (SLC)
Michael Leadbetter (SLC)
James Monaghan (SOPHI)
Wyatt Moss-Wellington (SLAM)
Cressida Rigney (SLAM)
Angela Rose (SSESW)
Margaret Van Heekeren (SLAM)
Peter Wasson (SSESW)

The 2nd Bicentennial Australian History Lecture

50,000 years of Australian History: a plea for interdisciplinarity
Professor Lynette Russell, Monash Indigenous Studies Centre, Monash University
The 2nd Bicentennial Australian History Lecture, hosted by the Department of History, the University of Sydney
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Joseph Lycett – Aborigines Resting by a Camp Fire near the Mouth of the Hunter River, Newcastle, NSW. (National Library of Australia)

How do we understand, imagine, visualise and create narratives for 50,000 years of Australian history?
As commonly presented, Australia’s past seems to consist of 230 years of European colonisation and over 50,000 years of Aboriginal culture, the former the purview of historians and the latter of archaeologists. Yet it presents striking opportunities for a truly integrated and seamless deep continental history, combining disciplines and methodologies.
Such a history would consider the full range of human experience from arrival, through changes in climate, technologies and belief systems to interactions with Maccassan, Portuguese, Dutch, French and finally the British. It would stretch across 2500 unbroken generations of people birthed, nurtured and sustained: people who modified landscapes, hunted, sang songs, practised religion and buried their dead.
This lecture argues for mixing epistemologies to create historical narratives of the deep past that may be taught in schools and universities, presented in museums and popular culture, and proudly shared by all Australians.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Professor Lynette Russell is Director of the Monash Indigenous Studies Centre, Monash University, and Node Director of the Australian Research Council’s Centre of Excellence in Australian Biodiverstiy and Heritage. She traces her Aboriginal ancestry via her grandmother from Western Victoria with connections into Tasmania and the Bass Strait islands; on the other side she is descended from transported convicts.
Lynette has a PhD in history from the University of Melbourne and has taught and researched in historical studies for over twenty years. In 2015 she was visiting fellow at All Souls College Oxford. Her monographs include: Hunt them, Hang Them: The Tasmanians in Port Phillip, 1841-1842 (2016); Roving Mariners: Aboriginal Whalers in the Southern Oceans 1790-1870 (2012); Appropriated Pasts: Archaeology and Indigenous People in Settler Colonies, coauthored with Ian McNiven (2005); A Little Bird Told Me (2002); and Savage Imaginings: Historical and Contemporary Representations of Australian Aboriginalities (2001). She is the current President of the Australian Historical Association.
The Bicentennial Australian History Lecture is a biennial public lecture hosted by the Department of History in the School of Philosophical and Historical Inquiry, University of Sydney. Distinguished historians offer engaged and critical perspectives on Australia’s past and the legacies of colonisation.
Date: Thursday 19 October, 2017
Time: 6 – 7.30pm
Please join us before the lecture for a reception in the Nicholson Museum at 5pm.
Venue: General Lecture Theatre, The Quadrangle, The University of Sydney. Venue location
Cost: Free and open to all with online registrations required
Register: here

NSW Premier’s History Prize Finalists and Winners

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Many congratulations to Mark McKenna for winning the Australian History Prize for his book From the Edge: Australia’s Lost Histories
And to Peter Hobbins for winning with NSW Community and Regional History Prize with Annie Clark and Ursula Frederick for Stories from the Sandstone, the book that grew out of the Quarantine Station project.
The Department also congratulates Miranda Johnson, whose The Land Is Our History was one of the three finalists for the extremely competitive General History Prize.
It’s an honour for the Department to have been so well represented in the Premier’s Awards this year.
Chris Hilliard
Chair, Department of History
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Miranda Johnson talks about her new book ‘The Land Is Our History’

In The Land Is Our History, Miranda Johnson shows how the forces of globalisation – much maligned in the current political climate – allowed previously marginalised indigenous peoples to form transnational networks of solidarity with which they asserted strong claims against national governments. This was the beginning of a powerful new ‘politics from below’. For the first time, minority indigenous groups in Australia, Canada and New Zealand successfully engaged with the legal systems of these states to insist on their distinct identities and, importantly, land rights. Rejecting policies of assimilation, indigenous activists radically challenged assumptions that the nation-state was one single and unified entity. Beginning in the 1960s, indigenous peoples established a ‘fragile truce’ with settler-states that would last for the next three decades.  Crucially, their claims carried extra weight as these nations attempted to cut ties with their British pasts, redraw their foreign policies in light of decolonisation and forge new cosmopolitan national identities.

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RC: The book places indigenous legal claims in this period in a global perspective, and shows how closely their success or failure was tied to global politics and anti-colonial discourses.  In the increasingly interconnected world of the 20th and 21st centuries, is it possible to separate nations from global or transnational contexts? What implications does this have for writing indigenous histories of this period?

MJ: Nationally-defined fields are still the norm in history departments and that is still how we frame many of our undergraduate classes. Of course, in the last two decades or so, transnational and global approaches to historical inquiry have been in the ascendant, so that those who work exclusively within a national framework may feel like they need to defend why they do so, which is interesting. I think few historians would write now without a sense of how the global impacts the local. Even if you frame a project within the context of a single nation-state, most historians are alert to how globalization––variously defined––impacts their study.

Indigenous history as a field plays a very interesting role in all of this. The fields of Aboriginal history and Māori history, for instance, emerged in part as a critique of settler national history. So historians involved in the construction of these fields such as Henry Reynolds here in Australia framed their projects in terms of the nation, but as a critique of the costs borne by Indigenous peoples in the making of that nation. They were critical nationalists. The effectiveness of the field of Aboriginal history in leveling this critique can be seen for instance in the infamous History Wars of the late 1990s and then in the development of another approach, that of settler colonial studies.

In the last few years, a new kind of critique has emerged, influenced by the work of historians arguing for transnational, trans-imperial, trans-regional approaches, which is that the frameworks of the nation-state really delimits, even conceals, Indigenous peoples’ agency. In response, some scholars are arguing for a focus on the mobility of Indigenous peoples both within nation-states and across them. This critique arises from different political circumstances, as a response to the effects of the legal claiming that I talk about in my book. As we well know in Australia, “native title” which, it was hoped in the early 1990s, would revolutionize Aboriginal peoples’ place and status has in fact led to new forms of inequality and constraint. In representational terms, there’s a lot of concern that the process of claiming native title has actually further intensified the operation of an “oppressive authenticity,” as Jeff Sissons calls it, in which Indigenous peoples are fixed in time and space. So, the argument for tracing Indigenous peoples’ mobility is in part I think a response to this distinctive legal process and political moment in settler states such as Australia, as well as broader trends in the historical discipline. As you can see, I am interested in the transnational, the global and the national. I think all these frameworks are important in thinking about the twentieth-century histories of Indigenous peoples.

RC: Activists in these decades forced courts to accept indigenous testimony and to incorporate indigenous practices and oral traditions into western legal systems. Does indigenous engagement with the settler-state legitimise it? Is it possible to resist the state without engaging with it? 

Engagement with the state, or refusal of the state’s power, are two poles of Indigenous politics. These might be more significant than conventional distinctions between “Left” or “Right” politics that are used to define majoritarian politics in liberal settler democracies. Yes, to be a claimant in a settler court means that to some extent you are legitimizing state sovereignty, the state’s power to offer limited justice, to redistribute property, to mediate disputes. At the same time, I think for a lot of Indigenous claimants it’s certainly the case that while one might recognize the authority and the power of the state to make decisions about one’s future that this doesn’t mean you think that the state is morally legitimate. So a large part of what was at stake in the cases I talk about in my book was demonstrating this gap between law and justice, showing up the immorality of prior legal rulings and policy-making, to force a change. Of course, some Indigenous people would say that to engage at any level with state processes is to cede a degree of sovereignty and so they refuse to do so.

RC: At the end of the book you suggest that the ‘fragile truce’ struck between indigenous polities and settler states has come undone in the face of neoliberal reforms that limit the commitment of governments to equality and social justice. Is there an implicit narrative of progress in many activist histories? What are the implications of this?

The Indigenous rights claims that I talk about in my book came to national attention in a period of heightened awareness of racial discrimination, of anti-colonialism, civil rights protests and so on. Aboriginal rights became a progressive cause in this context––the 1967 referendum was, for the majority of the population in Australia, an issue of equality and social justice. But Indigenous rights struggles were about more than equality; they were claims to the state for recognition of the distinct sovereignty of Indigenous peoples, often based in land rights. So they always troubled a progressive consciousness for it was never going to be enough to simply establish rights to equality; Indigenous peoples wanted something more than that. I think this claim is not very legible to settlers and yet at some level it registers and troubles them.

This trouble came more out into the open in the 1990s, post-Mabo, in Australia, and as claims to the Waitangi Tribunal in New Zealand increased in number and extent in the same period. Many white settlers began to feel that their rights to land, and their sense of identity and belonging, was under threat. At the same time, the old social contract was being pulled apart, as you say, through radical neoliberal reforms. Suddenly, I think it seemed to a lot of white settlers that Indigenous peoples were getting things that were being taken away from them, whites. So this particular and complex set of changing political conditions were what I was trying to allude to in saying that the “fragile truce” was undone during the late 1990s/early 2000s. And I think this breakdown of the brief consensus around the importance of recognizing Indigenous rights was really disheartening for many Indigenous activists and leaders, even if they also expected it. In the sense that in order to fight for change, you need to believe that change is possible, then certainly activist consciousness is progressive (or even radical in some instances); but I think for many Indigenous activists there is a critical awareness of the specific constraints and limits of how far one can get in a settler majority democracy.

RC: Since the 1990s, the politics surrounding indigenous history in Australia have been intense and divisive. What are the challenges of writing indigenous histories in this climate? Does it affect the kinds of histories that are told? What attitudes do students bring to the study of indigenous history?

I see a lot of students come into my classroom who think that Indigenous issues are important but they don’t know why. As I’ve been briefly alluding to, the issues are incredibly complex and we don’t have a “go to” shared language for talking about these politics. So I feel like I need to teach a new language to the overwhelmingly non-Indigenous students I have, one that will take them beyond the guilt or shame or denial that still characterizes public debate about Indigenous issues in this country. This is one of the major challenges for writing or teaching Indigenous history here in Australia, establishing a useful, critical language for thinking and talking about the distinctiveness of Indigenous-settler state politics. Studying Indigenous history is hard, it is challenging intellectually, ethically, politically.

RC: The (at times) thorny question of agency is crucial to histories from below. You describe The Land is Our History as ‘a rare story about the disempowered changing the status quo’, yet you never diminish the ability of powerful state institutions to affect indigenous lives.  Can an overemphasis on agency run the risk of obscuring the determining role these powerful forces can play?

Great question! In fact, this is the question I was wrestling with in writing this book; how far can I take the story of agency? Is structural oppression of settler colonialism really the true story? As you point out, I try to have it both ways because this is the reality that I perceive and that I have drawn out of the archives I used for this project. The story of a struggle, which this book is, is necessarily a dialectical one.

RC: You argue in the book that for a variety of reasons – including shifting global political paradigms – there was a reversal of the ‘relations of power’ between indigenous peoples and settler-states in the 1960s and 70s.  As the modern neoliberal era is threatened by a new politics that promises a reclamation of national sovereignty, do you see opportunities for the creation of a new truce between indigenous peoples and states? What do relations of power between these two groups look like in 2017?

It really depends which Indigenous people you’re talking about and where. I think one of the things that is really different about 2017 from, say, 1967, is that there is now a recognition on the part of the state of a plurality of Indigenous representatives, political communities, voices (even if this is not necessarily well-represented in mainstream media). So there are multiple forms of relation, opportunities for compromise, negotiation etc. There is also a marked difference between and among Indigenous nations in terms of socio-economic wellbeing and so on. It’s hard to tell a single story about advantage or disadvantage because the reality is so complex. And yet, you have a fascinating and important story of unification in the making of the Uluru Statement recently. How that came about, and what it’s effects politically will be, is yet to be told.

RC: What do you know now that you wish you knew before you started working on the book?

 
That the hard part of bringing a major project to completion is the psychological game, the kind of faith that you have to maintain in order to get there but which, after many years, is often wavering because you think that what you’re saying is so obvious.

The Land Is Our History is published by Oxford University Press. Order it here

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Established by the History Department, USYD First Gen aims to celebrate the skills and perspectives that first generation students bring to academia and beyond.
Our objectives include:
1. Providing support to students in the transition from high school to university through initiatives
such as sharing social and academic resources among members on campus and online;
2. Fostering a community amongst First Gen students who share common experiences; and
3. Providing the First Gen community at USYD an inclusive platform where they can express
themselves and embrace their identity as First Gen students
A First Generation student is a student who is the first in their family to attend university; whose parents or guardians who have not completed tertiary study, or an equivalent qualification abroad. We also acknowledge students whose older siblings have gone to university, as well as staff and graduates.
To find out more about us and receive updates, visit our Facebook page: USYD First Gen
Or, send us an email: usydfirstgen@outlook.com

Book News

Dr. Sophie Loy-Wilson’s new book, Australians in Shanghai recently featured in an ABC news story, and/or listen to the podcast on the Earshot program produced by Sophie and Tamson Pietsch.
Professor Mark McKenna’s book From the Edge: Australia’s Lost Histories has been reviewed in the SMH, ABR, Saturday Paper, Adelaide Advertiser, Telegraph, and the Monthly. Between October and December 2016, he did over 20 radio interviews (WA, SA, Victoria, Tasmania, Queensland, NSW, Northern Territory) about the book, and Radio National’s Earshot is broadcasting and podcasting a half hour documentary based on the book.
Professor Glenda Sluga’s co-edited volume has just been published entitled Internationalisms: A Twentieth-Century History which the Chronicle succinctly describes as a collection of essays on internationalism as an idea and institutional phenomenon espoused by groups across the political spectrum.
Dr Marco Duranti was recently interviewed by Phillip Adams on Late Night Live (Radio National) about his recently released book The Conservative Human Rights Revolution. Marco has also published a commentary in The Conversation UK on how The Conservative Human Rights Revolution informs the controversy in Britain surrounding Theresa May’s calls for the UK to exit the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). The book was also reviewed in Lawfare, where legal scholar Ed Bates concluded, “Duranti’s book is highly recommended….it should influence debates on how the ECHR is seen today.” And, in an unexpected twist, Wikileaks founder Julian Assange provoked a robust discussion on the book’s argument when he tweeted about the book.
For some other reviews of new books by members of the department, see: http://blogs.usyd.edu.au/historymatters/2017/05/new_reviews_for_our_latest_pub.html