Successful SOPHI ARC Discovery Projects 2010
Announced 26 October, 2009
Archaeology
Prof Roland Fletcher; Prof J Riegel; Dr B Li; A/Prof C Pottier; Prof M Stark; Dr JN Miksic; Dr C Ang
Project: Greater Angkor from ancestry to abandonment: the growth, daily life and transformation of the suburbs of Angkor
2010: $ 257,081
2011: $ 196,268
2012: $ 196,000
2013: $ 123,240
2014: $ 134,904
Project Summary
Australia promotes the value of partnerships with developing Asia Pacific nations for the continued stability of our region. In Cambodia, Australia plays a significant role in assisting stability and sustainable growth. Our research has contributed greatly to the development of individual and institutional capabilities, providing engagement with world-class research expertise and facilities. This large, international, multidisciplinary team will provide a significant new approach to Angkor, the iconic Asia Pacific flagship World Heritage site and will actively work with Cambodian agencies responsible for the site in the context of the Australian Cambodian government collaboration on the "Heritage Management Framework Project" for Angkor.
Dr Martin Gibbs
Project: Beyond the New World: A 16th century Spanish colony and its impact on indigenous populations in the Solomon Islands
2010: $ 65,000
2011: $ 99,000
2012: $ 33,000
Project summary
The 16th Century Spanish explorations represent the first contacts between Solomon Islanders and Europeans. These interactions encompassed social and economic negotiations, conflicts and potential biological impacts whose longterm consequences have not yet been adequately explored or understood. However, later Solomon Islands demography and sociopolitical structures may have their roots in these exchanges. Given Australia's commitment to the security of this near neighbour, this study will provide a benchmark for understanding the longterm history and influences within Melanesian European relationships. Collaboration with the Solomon Islands Museum will strengthen and promote links between researchers and cultural and academic institutions.
Classics and Ancient History
Prof EG Csapo; Prof PJ Wilson; Em/Prof JR Green; Dr EG Robinson; Dr SG Nervegna (APD 4 years)
Project: The Theatrical Revolution: The Expansion of Theatre Outside Athens
2010: $ 195,000
2011: $ 209,000
2012: $ 206,000
2013: $ 124,000
2014: $ 96,000
Project Summary
The growth of the Greek theatre has valuable insights for contemporary Australian concerns. The world's first medium of mass communication rapidly shaped Greek national identity, but also contributed to Athenian cultural and political hegemony. For its power to transform political practices, business, personal relationships, and ideas, the spread of theatre has been illuminatingly compared to the growth of the internet. Understanding this process is of clear concern to small nations struggling to conserve their national interest while adapting to global culture.
Dr Andrew Hartwig (APD 4 years)
Project: Plato Comicus and Greek comedy: a study of his dramatic career
2010: $ 62,000
2011: $ 75,000
2012: $ 60,500
2013: $ 60,500
Project Summary
The experience of Greek comedy offers numerous points of contact with our own society. This project analyses an author and genre that flourished within a robustly democratic society, touching on perennial matters of social and political importance and raising pertinent questions about censorship, free speech, even good taste. Such a study can enlarge reflection on our own values, contributing cultural perspectives necessary for constructive public debate and a healthy democracy. The project will also make a significant contribution to current trends in international classical scholarship. Its ambitious scope will contribute to research excellence within Australian Classics and further promote its reputation overseas.
History
Dr Emma Christopher (ARF 5 years)
Project: Slavery, freedom and colonial development: Robert Bostock and his legacy
2010: $ 150,000
2011: $ 150,000
2012: $ 135,000
2013: $ 135,000
2014: $ 140,000
Project Summary
Understanding our nation and our world is one of the major challenges facing Australia in the present day. West Africa, a region perceived by most Australians to be distant and incomprehensible, increasingly has an effect on Australia and other western nations which is little understood. This project will help to ensure that Australian scholarship remains at the cutting edge of research into slave studies and colonial history more generally, and will bolster international networks of scholars working in this area. It will ensure national input into an issue of major international importance human trafficking and promote academic leadership more generally
Dr James B Curran
Project: Australian/American relations in the era of the new nationalism
2010: $ 33,000
2011: $ 11,000
2012: $ 16,000
Project Summary
How has Australia used the American Alliance to further its own national interests? This project has a special significance for how Australians understand the history of their country's relationship with the United States and the origins of Australia's comprehensive engagement with Asia. The delicate task of balancing close ties with both the United States and Asia, especially China, is seen as the central foreign policy challenge facing Australia today. Analysis of the history behind this present predicament extends our understanding and interpretation of Australia's role in this region and the world. It will show the continued relevance of the past to the choices that face current policymakers.
Dr Chris Hilliard (QEII 5 years)
Project: The politics of reading: Citizenship, law, and literacy in England, 1867-1960
2010: $ 61,000
2011: $ 73,000
2012: $ 72,000
2013: $ 73,000
2014: $ 60,000
Project Summary
This research addresses problems that resonate powerfully in contemporary debates: the relationship between freedom and responsibility, and the relationship between political rights, education and literacy. Knowing how people living in another age and a different society but one to which Australia is bound by a complex of legal, political and cultural traditions wrestled with questions that are still with us will add depth and sensitivity to our understanding of the bases and limits of a democratic culture.
Dr Martin Thomas; A/Prof LM Barwick; Prof AJ Marett
Project: Intercultural inquiry in a transnational context: Exploring the legacy of the 1948 American Australian Scientific Expedition to Arnhem Land
2010: $ 142,000
2011: $ 140,000
2012: $ 148,000
2013: $ 135,000
2014: $ 139,000
Project Summary
In terms of National Research Priorities, the project will encourage cultural health and cohesiveness in Arnhem Land by providing access to cultural property held until now in remote archives. It will enhance understanding of our region and the world by studying crosscultural interactions within Australia. Furthermore, it will illuminate how Aboriginal territory and knowledge were used to shore up the Australia US relationship at a formative historical moment.
Mr Richard White
Project: Touring the past: tourism and history in Australia 1850-2010
2010: $ 64,300
2011: $ 51,500
2012: $ 50,000
Project Summary
This project contributes to understanding our region and the world by investigating how Australia's past has attracted tourists historically. It analyses not only the ways Australians have popularly understood their own past, but how that past has been interpreted to the world. Given tourism's traditional focus has been nature rather than culture in Australia, it has often put pressures on a fragile environment. Cultural tourism is developing as a major industry in Australia, destined to be even more significant in the future. History tourism is of particular benefit to rural communities, often under stress from economic and environmental pressures, and contributes to healthy active leisure.
Gender and Cultural Studies
Dr Natalya Lusty; Dr HG Groth
Project: Dreams: A Cultural History, 1840-1940
2010: $ 60,000
2011: $ 45,000
2012: $ 75,000
Project Summary
This project will produce a groundbreaking history of the emergence of the dream as a fundamental aspect of identity in the period 18401940, when the contours of modern psychology were being dramatically transformed. By tracking the vital relationship between an emerging science of the mind and the rapidly evolving cultural arts in this crucial period, this project will ensure Australia's place at the forefront of innovative interdisciplinary research across the humanities and sciences. The enduring popular and scholarly fascination with dreams will stimulate broad discussion about an area of psychic life that continues to inform the relationship between a science of the mind and everyday cultural life.
Philosophy
Prof Stephen Gaukroger; Dr Anik Waldow
Project: The rise of empiricism and the attempt to produce a unified understanding of the world, 1680-1750
2010: $ 89,000
2011: $ 94,000
2012: $ 90,000
Project Summary
Empiricism is often regarded as the characterising feature of modern scientific method, and, in those approaches to psychology and the social and economic sciences that seek to model themselves on successful scientific practice in the physical and life sciences, it often acts as a model of good practice. The project examines the original form of empiricism and shows how it was able to directly engage questions of value in a novel and revealing way, and how its connection with 'hard' sciences was not merely to provide a methodological gloss on these, but went to the core of what scientific explanation consisted in.
Success for SOPHI in ARC Future Fellowships
The Australian Research Council (ARC) recently announced a new scheme, ARC Future Fellowships. A total of 200 outstanding national and international mid-career researchers have been chosen as the first ARC Future Fellows.
SOPHI congratulates its two successful fellows, Fiona Allon from the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies, and Dr Martin Thomas from the Department of History.
Dr Fiona Allon
Project title: The Wealth Effect: A cultural analysis of prosperity, financialisation and everyday life in contemporary Australia
2009 : $ 82,550
2010 : $ 167,200
2011 : $ 168,100
2012 : $ 164,500
2013 : $ 81,050
Dr Martin E Thomas
Project title: Expedition to Arnhem Land: Intercultural inquiry in a transnational context
2009 : $ 84,023
2010 : $ 158,679
2011 : $ 149,352
2012 : $ 149,058
2013 : $ 74,361
Read the full article here
Success for SOPHI in ARC Discovery Projects
The School of Philosophical and Historical Inquiry (SOPHI) was exceptionally successful in this round of funding. SOPHI was awarded a total of nineteen new grants out of the Faculty of Arts' twenty-two and this included nine Fellowships out of the Faculty's eleven.
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Archaeology
Dr T E Doelman; Dr P Jia
Crossing Borders: The Use and Distribution of Volcanic Glass Artefacts in Northeast Asia
2009 : $ 95,000
2010 : $ 40,000
Dr MJ Hendrickson; Dr C Pottier; Prof Dr HJ Leisen; Dr DE Cook; Dr Q Hua (APD Dr MJ Hendrickson)
Industries of Angkor: Material Production and the Decline of the Khmer Empire (11th to 15th centuries CE)
2009 : $ 128,000
2010 : $ 108,000
2011 : $ 93,000
Dr D O'Reilly; Dr RA Armstrong; Dr KM Domett; Dr LG Shewan; Prof CF Higham; Prof R Chhem; Dr N Beavan Athfield; Dr C Pottier
History in their bones: A diachronic, bioarchaeological study of diet, mobility and social organisation from Cambodian skeletal assemblages
2009 : $ 74,000
2010 : $ 56,000
2011 : $ 24,000
Prof DT Potts (APF)
From village to empire in the Zagros highlands:
Archaeological investigations at Tole Nurabad (Fars Province, Iran)
2009 : $ 104,000
2010 : $ 104,000
2011 : $ 104,000
2012 : $ 78,590
2013 : $ 104,000
Dr R Torrence; Mrs NA Kononenko; Dr EA Carter (APD Mrs NA Kononenko)
Valuing Stones: obsidian stemmed tools in the creation of social complexity in Papua New Guinea
2009 : $ 149,000
2010 : $ 100,000
2011 : $ 101,000
2012 : $ 107,000
Gender and Cultural Studies
Dr CA Driscoll; Dr K Bowles; Prof K Darian Smith; A/Prof CR Gibson; Dr D Nichols; A/Prof G Waitt
Cultural sustainability in Australian country towns: amenity, mobility, and everyday life
2009 : $ 97,000
2010 : $ 68,486
2011 : $ 158,000
Prof EC Probyn
Taste and Place: the transglobal production and consumption
of food and drink
2009 : $ 79,000
2010 : $ 70,000
2011 : $ 75,000
History
Prof WH Anderson; Dr RL Jones (APD Dr RL Jones)
Anatomies of Empire: Race, Evolution and Scientific Networks in the Twentieth Century British World
2009 : $ 120,000
2010 : $ 110,000
2011 : $ 90,000
A/Prof AC Bashford; Dr J McAdam; Dr SS Amrith
Immigration Restriction and the Racial State, c. 1880 to the present
2009 : $ 95,000
2010 : $ 120,000
2011 : $ 78,000
2012 : $ 50,000
Dr MA McDonnell
Charles Langlade, the Anishinaabeg, and the making and unmaking of the Atlantic World
2009 : $ 60,000
2010 : $ 20,000
2011 : $ 21,000
Dr AD Moses
Genocide: Critical History of an Idea
2009 : $ 70,000
2010 : $ 28,000
2011 : $ 33,000
Prof CJ Pybus; Prof RL Isaac; Prof I Berlin; Prof OV Burton; Prof J Sidbury
Interrogating the Book of Negroes: explorations of slavery and freedom in the Atlantic world in the era of the American Revolution.
2009 : $ 130,000
Prof PJ Read (APF)
A history of Aboriginal Sydney since 1788
2009 : $ 130,000
2010 : $ 120,000
2011 : $ 120,000
2012 : $ 79,000
2013 : $ 186,000
Prof GA Sluga
The International History of Cosmopolitanism and Nationalism, 1814-1822
2009 : $ 70,000
2010 : $ 57,028
2011 : $ 70,000
2012 : $ 88,000
Philosophy
Prof SW Gaukroger (APF)
Science and the Shaping of Modernity, 1690-1755
2009 : $ 141,000
2010 : $ 100,000
2011 : $ 107,000
2012 : $ 79,000
2013 : $ 191,000
Dr KL Miller
Fundamental Ways the World Could Be: Challenging Metaphysical Orthodoxy
2009 : $ 33,000
2010 : $ 31,000
2011 : $ 45,000
Prof PM Redding; Dr PD Bubbio (APD Dr PD Bubbio)
The God of Hegel's PostKantian Idealism
2009 : $ 151,000
2010 : $ 108,000
2011 : $ 151,000
2012 : $ 32,972
Dr JS Wilkins; Prof PE Griffiths (APD Dr JS Wilkins)
Contemporary scientific explanations of religion: A methodological and philosophical analysis
2009 : $ 87,195
2010 : $ 88,506
2011 : $ 88,446
Dr D Rickles (ARF)
The Development of Quantum Gravity
2009 : $ 127,500
2010 : $ 124,000
2011 : $ 124,000
2012 : $ 124,000
2013 : $ 118,000