Category: Department News and Events

Dr Miranda Johnson discusses indigeneity and the sacred and what it means when a river is legally declared a person on the Social Science Research Council blog called The Immanent Frame, which publishes short invited essays about secularism and politics. Her creative and innovative teaching around The Pitcairn Project was also recently featured in Sydney University news.
Dr Chin Jou contributed an essay on historical precedents for protesting Trump’s ‘Muslim Ban’ for The Huffington Post, and also was a featured author in the Princeton Alumni Weekly
PhD candidate Marama Whyte recently published an article in History Today on women of the American press and their fight for equality in the 1960s and 1970s.
PhD candidate Sarah Bendall published a piece on using material culture to examine notions of gender in the early modern English world on the Journal for the History of Ideas blog.
PhD candidate Billy Griffiths recently contributed a piece to The Conversation on western Arnhem Land and the important work of Indigenous Rangers in caring for country and telling it’s stories to raise awareness of environmental threats to their land.
MA candidate Chris Maxworthy featured on ABC Radio Drive talking about the early Spanish explorer Luis Vaez de Torres, and how the strait that bears his name between Cape York and New Guinea was ‘plagiariased’ by James Cook in 1770.
Professor Dirk Moses was interviewed by the Turkish Platform for Independent Journalism, platform24.org on freedom of the press and genocide denial. He wrote about the Australian press and its treatment of European affairs for the ABC Religion and Ethicssite, and on the historical categorisation of Donald Trump in the Washington Post.
Associate Professor Michael A. McDonnell was interviewed about enlistments in the Revolutionary War for the US public radio program and podcast BackStory. He also recently featured in a podcast on “The History of History Writing” for the popular Ben Franklin’s World in the US, and served as an NEH Visiting Scholar at a Summer Institute at the Library of Congress on the topic of “On Native Grounds.”
Dr. Frances Clarke was interviewed by ABC’s Nightlife on April 9 2017 on the end of America’s Civil War, and recently wrote a blog post for the Australian Women’s History Network
Professor Glenda Sluga posted an article on the recent concern about the demise of the existing international order on E-International Relations, which was also published in German in the May edition of the German magazine Merkur, as part of her GeschichtesKolumn series. She also blogged on women in the long history of humanitarianism for the Australian Women’s History Network
Professor Mark McKenna took part in three events at the Sydney Writers Festival, appeared at the Writer’s Festival, South Coast, NSW in April, was interviewed by BBC and AAP Reuters regarding Uluru Statement on May 26, and contributed an article to the Conversation on ANZAC day and republicanism. He also published a major essay on Australian political biography in the Monthly in April, and was Interviewed on RN Late Night Live.
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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 2 2017
7 August
Ayhan Aktar (Bilgi University, Istanbul)
Remembering and Forgetting: Official Histories and Silenced Memories in Turkey
14 August
Leigh Ann Wheeler (SUNY Binghamton)
Sexual Civil Liberties and the Rise of Gay Rights: An Untold History of Stealth and Wealth
21 August
Phillippa Hetherington (School of Slavonic and East European Studies, London)
Imperial Governmentalities and the Campaign to End the Traffic in Women in the Russian Empire
28 August
Alison Bashford (University of Cambridge)
Gendering Modern World History
4 September
Anna Ross (University of Warwick)
Tetouan: Spanish Imperialism after the Americas, 1913-56
11 September
Frances Steel (University of Wollongong)
Anglo Worlds in Motion and Transpacific Encounters
18 September
Saliha Belmessous (UNSW)
Emancipation within Empire, Algeria, 1945-1962
25 AVCC Common Week
2 October
Labour Day
9 October
Katie McDonough (Western Sydney University)
Public Works Laboratory: Experiments in Provincial Governance in Eighteenth-Century France
16 October
Stephen Macekura (Indiana University Bloomington)
The Rhodesian Quandary: Accounting for International Development in the 1940s and 1950s
23 October
Andreas Stucki (University of Bern)
Engendering the Iberian Empires: Domesticity, Female Cooperation, Violence and Resistance, c. 1955-1975
30 October
Richard Steigmann-Gall (Kent State University)
Star-Spangled Fascism: American Interwar Political Extremism in Comparative Perspective

Dr Anne Rees (right, centre) talks of the impact that Australians in Shanghai should make
On 21 March, the Department of History celebrated a launch of three books by its lecturers before an audience of over 40 colleagues and friends.
* Chin Jou, Supersizing Urban America: How Inner Cities Got Fast Food with Government Help (University of Chicago Press, 2017):
Launcher: Warwick Anderson
* Sophie Loy-Wilson, Australians in Shanghai: Race, Rights and Nation in Treaty Port China (Routledge, 2017):
Launcher: Ann Rees with introduction by Kirsten McKenzie.
* Marco Duranti, The Conservative Human Rights Revolution: European Identity, Transnational Politics, and the Origins of the European Convention (Oxford University Press, 2017):
Launcher: Danielle Celermajer
The Department thanks the launchers and congratulates Chin, Sophie, and Marco on their tremendous achievement.
The Department also thanks Dirk Moses and Natasha Wheatley for generously offering to host the triple book launch.

Professor Warwick Anderson lauds Dr. Chin Jou’s provocative Supersizing Urban America, while Dr. Jou (middle, left) looks on.

Books by some of our newest members of staff at the History Department are making waves around the world.
The prestigious Times Higher Education Supplement recently reviewed Chin Jou’s book, Supersizing Urban America at https://www.timeshighereducation.com/books/review-supersizing-urban-america-chin-jou-university-of-chicago-press
The influential Australian Book Review took on Miranda Johnson’s The Land is our History: https://www.australianbookreview.com.au/abr-online/current-issue/may/4058-kevin-bell-reviews-the-land-is-our-history-indigeneity-law-and-the-settler-state-by-miranda-johnson
Dissent magazine looked at Marco Duranti’s The Conservative Human Rights Revolution at https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/conservative-internationalism-review-marco-duranti-samuel-moyn-christian-human-rights
And the Times Literary Supplement reviewed David Brophy’s book, Uyghur Nation at http://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/private/david-brophy-politics-china-uyghur/?akamai-teaser=true
It is a privilege to work with such a talented group of people.
Congrats to Chin, Miranda, Marco and David!

A belated congratulations to Dr. Sophie Loy-Wilson on the publication of her book, Australians in Shanghai: Race, Rights and Nation in Treaty Port China (Routledge, 2017).

This work focuses on a diverse community of Australians who settled in Shanghai in the first half of the twentieth century and forged a ‘China trade’, circulating goods, people and ideas across the South China Sea, from Shanghai and Hong Kong to Sydney and Melbourne. In following the life trajectories of these Australians, the book addresses one of the pervading tensions of race, empire and nation in the twentieth century: the relationship between working-class aspirations for social mobility and the exclusionary and discriminatory practices of white settler societies.
The book has already featured in an ABC news story, which you can read here, and/or listen to the Earshot program produced by Sophie and Tamson Pietsch.
More information about the book can be found here.
We look forward to launching the book at the University of Sydney when Sophie returns from maternity leave. Many congratulations.

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.

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 Author Michael McDonnellPosted on March 24, 2017Categories Department News and EventsLeave a comment on Book Launch – Miranda Johnson