Events in the Department of History
History on Monday
Seminar Series for Postgraduates and Faculty
Held at 12.10-1.30
in The Refectory, Main Quadrangle
(take the stairs leading down from the south-west corner of the Quad)
2011 Coordinator: James Curran
Semester 2, 2011
August 1
Dirk Moses (European University Institute, Florence)
The Diplomacy of Genocide
August 8
Tomoko Akami (College of Asia and the Pacific, ANU)
Bringing empire into an analysis of international history: the idea of the nation-state/empire and the case of Japan in international history
August 15
Maria Nugent (Australian Centre for Indigenous History, School of History, ANU)
Lost Deeds: Aboriginal narratives and colonial archives
August 22
Christina Twomey (History, Monash)
The Return of the POW: War, Trauma and the authentic voice of the survivor in Australian history
August 29
Gwenda Tavan (Politics Program, La Trobe)
‘Fractured Families’: The Jan Allen Controversy and Australia-British Relations, 1970-72
September 5
David Garrioch (History, Monash)
The Huguenots of Paris and the coming of religious toleration in the eighteenth century'
September 12
Geoffrey Sherington (Sydney)
'Home and Away': Academics and Academic Life at the University of Sydney c.1850-1890
September 19
Marco Duranti (Sydney)
Human Rights Reactionaries: Right-Wing Visions of Supranational Justice in Postwar Europe
Mid Semester Break, 26-30 September
October 3: Labour Day
October 10
Nick Eckstein (Sydney)
‘History and Image in Renaissance Florence: the Carmelite Order, the Brancacci Chapel and the Triumph of Anghiari
October 17
Kirsten McKenzie (Sydney)
Personal Liberty, British Identity and Surveillance in the Antipodes, 1780s - 1830s
October 24
Richard Waterhouse (Sydney)
From Pearl Harbour to Singapore: War, Diplomacy and the "transformation" of Australian culture
Public Lectures
J.M. Ward Memorial Lecture
The Ward Lecture honours the late John Manning Ward AO. Professor Ward was a distinguished historian, serving as Challis Professor of History from 1948 to 1979. He steered the History Department through a period of scarce resources into an era of expansion. Today it is one of the largest and most productive in Australia. Professor Ward took office as Vice-Chancellor of the University of Sydney in 1981 and retired from that position on 31 January 1990.
In 2010 the Ward Lecture will be presented by Joyce E. Chaplin, James Duncan Phillips Professor of Early American History at Harvard University.
A native of California, she received her B. A. from Northwestern University and her M. A. and Ph. D. from the Johns Hopkins University. She was awarded a Fulbright Grant for study in the United Kingdom during the 1985-86 academic year.
Professor Chaplin has taught at five different universities on two continents and an island, and in a maritime studies program on the Atlantic Ocean. After she completed her doctoral work at Hopkins, she taught at Vanderbilt University for fourteen years and then began teaching at Harvard in 2000. She has been a visiting professor at the School of History, the University of Leeds, and the University of Sydney. She has also taught for the Sea Education Association aboard the 140-foot brigantine SSV Corwith Cramer.
A specialist in early American history, she is the author of An Anxious Pursuit: Agricultural Innovation and Modernity in the Lower South, 1730-1815 (1993), Subject Matter: Technology, the Body, and Science on the Anglo-American Frontier, 1500-1676 (2001), and The First Scientific American: Benjamin Franklin and the Pursuit of Genius (2006), which was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times book prize and winner of the Annibel Jenkins Biography Prize of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies. She has also published many articles on topics in intellectual history, environmental history, the history of science, and maritime history. Presently, she is working on a history of around-the-world travel, from Magellan the Spanish explorer to Magellan the GPS.
The Circumnavigating Body: Why it Hurts to Go around the World
Joyce E. Chaplin
James Duncan Phillips Professor of Early American History, Harvard University
The Ward Lecture honours the late John Manning Ward AO, Challis Professor of History (1948-1979) and Vice-Chancellor (1981-1990) of the University of Sydney.
Thursday, 22 July 2010
5:30pm for 6:30pm
Reception in Nicholson Museum
Lecture in Ward Lecture Theatre (History Room S223), Quadrangle Building.
For the past 500 years–by ship, airplane, spaceship, and many other forms of transport–humans have traveled around the world. These travels should be prime evidence of humanity's increasing command over the planet. But the humans who have gone around the world have often concluded that the planet controls them. To circle the Earth, humans must remove themselves from environments where they ordinarily live. That removal has been painful: early-modern sailors suffered from scurvy, clipper-ship passengers vomited from seasickness, frequent-fliers are plagued by jet-lag, and astronauts struggle with Space Adaptation Syndrome. Testimony about those bodily experiences has been historically important for the definition of humans as terrestrial creatures, beings that are distinctively adapted to the earthly parts of a terraqueous globe.
War on the Web: The BBC 'People's War' Website and Memories of Second World War Britain
Dr Lucy Noakes
Department of History
University of Brighton
Dr Noakes’ work focuses on the relationship between war, memory, gender and nationhood in 20th century Britain and her publications include War and the British: Gender and national identity 1939-1991 (1998) and War and the Gentle Sex: Women and the British Army 1907-1948' (2006).
Thursday, 29 July 2010
4.00-5.30 pm
Kevin Lee Room, Brennan-MacCallum Building
For further information, please contact Professor Robert Aldrich .
History Week
September 3-11 2011
The theme for History Council of New South Wales’ History Week 2011will be ‘EAT History’. Staff from the Department of History will be presenting a series of fascinating talks during this year’s History Week, which 'will bring to the table the Edible, Appetising and Tasty history of food. Who ate what and where in the past? How did we cook and where did our food come from? History Week 2011 will be a smorgasbord of delectable delights!'.
Information about the Department of History's History Week events is posted in July/August each year. See the History Council website for more information.
Conferences
Empire and International History: the 4th International History Postgraduate Intensive
26-27 July, 2012
The fourth International History Postgraduate Intensive will be held at the University of Sydney on July 26 - 27, 2012. The theme is 'Empire and International History'. It will be convened by
- Professor Glenda Sluga, University of Sydney
Participating Faculty members include
- Professor David Armitage (Harvard/Sydney),
- Professor Joyce Chaplin (Harvard),
- Professor Sir Christopher Bayly (Cambridge),
- Professor Gilles Pecout (École Normale Supérieure, Paris),
- Professor Marilyn Lake (Latrobe).
Empire and International History
Places will be offered to 20 graduate research students who will be invited to reflect on the significance of empire in modern history, in international and transnational contexts. Participants will be drawn from those working in cultural, social, political, economic, and intellectual history, and in any of the many international contexts in which questions of empire have been of importance, whether the history of internationalism, or development, nationalism or trade, slavery, or anti-slavery, or indeed the history of ideas of liberalism, or colonialism, or decolonization, human rights, or women’s rights, race, class or gender. Students will be encouraged to consider the broad historiographical implications of their work, and in some way engage with the literature on international historiography.
Click here for more information
17th George Rudé Seminar in French History and Civilization, 14-16 July, 2010
Every two years, the George Rudé Seminar brings together specialists in French history and other areas of French studies from Australia and New Zealand with colleagues from around the world for a major conference. A selection of papers from the biannual conferences is now published in peer-reviewed format on H-France.
Further information
States of Statelessness: The 3rd International History Post-Graduate Intensive, University of Sydney, July 2010
Postgraduate students are invited to submit proposals for the third International History Postgraduate Intensive at the University of Sydney on July 21 - 23, 2010. Its theme is 'States of Statelessness'.
In recent years, historians have begun to reconsider the lenses through which the past may be viewed, and to restore an emphasis on the breadth of human experience beyond national and statist contexts. In particular, they are increasingly engaged in examining the complex transnational nature of economies, cultures, societies and politics.
The Postgraduate Intensive ‘States of Statelessness’ invites graduate students to reflect on ways of seeing beyond the state and beyond the nation. The remit is broad, and we are interested in students working on the history of migration, movement, mobility, and memory, and in fields including, but not limited to: diplomatic history, international history, economic history, environmental history, gender history, black diaspora history, migration history, histories of empire, human rights, legal history, histories of social movements.
There is no restriction on the regions or periods covered. However, students should be open to a consideration of the broader historiographical implications of their work, and in some way engage with the literature on transnational and or international historiography.
Further information
The Impact of the Declaration of Independence – Symposium 11-12 August, 2010
Generously sponsored by the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, (USA) and
the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, University of Sydney
Thomas Jefferson’s virtuoso performance in drafting the Declaration of Independence has secured him a special place in world history. For nearly 250 years his words have been a source of inspiration and adoration, as well as exasperation and revulsion. The potency of this document in United States is without parallel and Jefferson’s declaration has been a powerful force in the intellectual, moral and political life of many other nations. As the inspiration for anti-imperial movements, Jefferson’s declaration was echoed in 1790 when rebels in the Austrian Netherlands declared their province a free and independent state; in 1811 when Francisco de Miranda proclaimed the United Provinces of Venezuela; in 1918 when the Declaration of Independence of the Czechoslovak Nation was declared; in 1945 when Ho Chi Minh issued the Vietnamese Declaration of Independence; in 1965 when the white minority government of Southern Rhodesia issued a Unilateral Declaration of Independence.
This symposium aims to stimulate discussion about the intended and intended consequences of Jefferson’s most famous contribution to world history. It will be an informal affair where guest scholars will speak briefly to particular themes, with the aim of producing a cumulative conversation among participants. The numbers of participants is strictly limited.
Symposium guests are:
- Richard Drayton, Rhodes Chair of Imperial History, Kings College London, author of Nature's Government: Science, Imperial Britain and the Improvement of the World;
- Frank Cogliano, Professor of History, University of Edinburgh, author of Thomas Jefferson :Reputation and Legacy;
- Maya Jasanoff, Associate Professor in History at Harvard, author of Edge of Empire: Lives, Culture, and Conquest in the East, 1750-1850;
- Jorge Canizares-Esguerra, Alice Drysdale Sheffield Chair of History, University of Texas author of Nature, Empire, and Nation. Explorations of the History of Science in the Iberian World;
- Peter Onuf, Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation Professor, University of Virginia, author of Jefferson's Empire: The Language of American Nationhood;
- Andrew O’Shaughnessy, Director Saunders International Center for Jefferson Studies, editor of The Old World, New World: America and Europe in the Age of Jefferson;
- John Keane, Professor of Politics, University of Sydney, author of The Life and Death and Democracy;
- Rhys Isaac, Professor Emeritus, College of William and Mary, author of The Transformation of Virginia;
- Michael Kranish, journalist and author of Flight from Monticello.
Registration:$ 120 for academics and $80 for postgraduates [includes morning tea and dinner on 11 Aug]. To register contact Professor Cassandra Pybus: before 30 July.
Venue: Holme and Sutherland Room, Holme Building, University of Sydney
9am, Wednesday 11 August, 2010.
Please note: The seminar will conclude at 1.30pm on Thursday 12 August.
University of Sydney Sawyer Seminar
The University of Sydney is the proud host of the first Mellon Sawyer Seminar to be held in Australia. The seminar will run from March 2009 to August 2010, consisting of eight special seminar sessions and one international conference. Its theme is The Antipodean Laboratory: Humanity, Sovereignty and Environment in Southern Oceans and Lands, 1700-2009.
Sydney Sawyer Conference: The Atlantic World in a Pacific Field
Thursday 5 to Saturday 7 August, 2010
How does a strange place or people become comparable with those more familiar? What does it take to relate a new plant or animal to those already well known? How does one standardize observations and mobilize things and people and situations so they have meaning elsewhere? That is, how was the Pacific made into the obligatory site for exploring the issues that mattered in the Atlantic world? In particular, this conference will examine the ways in which both oceanic regions were co-produced through a complicated series of intellectual and practical interactions over many centuries. Moreover, it will seek ways in which to make the Pacific visible again in global scholarship.
Speakers:
- Alison Bashford, Sydney
- Janet Browne, Harvard University
- Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, Texas
- Joyce Chaplin, Harvard University
- Ann Curthoys, Sydney
- Sheila Fitzpatrick, Chicago
- Anita Herle, Cambridge
- Chris Hilliard, Sydney
- Julia Horne, Sydney
- Michael McDonnell, Sydney
- Joseph Meisel, Mellon Foundation
- Andrew Moutu, Adelaide
- Damon Salesa, Michigan
- Simon Schaffer, Cambridge
- Katerina Teaiwa, ANU
For the program, abstracts, registration and information on postgraduate bursaries please visit the website or contact Katherine Anderson by or Phone: 02 9036 5347.
Visitors
Selina Todd (University of Manchester) (March/April 2009)
An International Visiting Research Fellow collaborating with Chris Hilliard, presenting in History on Monday, and presenting a master class for postgraduate students
Sheila Fitzpatrick (University of Chicago)