Sydney academic appointed to UNESCO Committee

A University of Sydney academic has been appointed to the International Scientific Committee for the UNESCO Intellectual History Project.

Associate Professor Glenda Sluga

Associate Professor Glenda Sluga of the Department of History will be one of twelve members of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization Committee, which is based at Paris.

Committee members are recognized specialists in the history of international relations or related disciplines. They include Professor Emma Rothschild from Cambridge University, Professor Thomas Weiss from CUNY, and Professors Robert Frank and Jean-François Sirinelli from the Sorbonne.

Professor Sluga's five-year appointment is related to her research into the United Nations, as part of an ARC-funded project on the ideas of the nation, race, and rights after the Second World War.

The UNESCO Intellectual History Project was launched by the Director-General of UNESCO on 30th April 2004. The project supports research on UNESCO's history and encourages reflection on the Organisation's history, past orientations, activities and results.

Professor Sluga said the UNESCO project coincides with a resurgence of interest in political history.

"In the last decade there has been a resurgence of interest in transnational, world, and global history, which has led historians back to the study of the League of Nations and the United Nations," she says.

Professor Sluga's recent research and writing has introduced cultural and gender analysis to areas of international history and the history of diplomacy and peacemaking. She has shown how ideas about nation, nationality, and nationalism have had distinctive repercussions for men and women, offering them different and unequal forms of political agency.

Her most recent book in this area is The Nation, Psychology, and International Politics, 1919-1870, to be published later this year.

In 2002 she was awarded the Max Crawford Medal by the Australian Academy of the Humanities, a biennial national award for excellence in contributions to the humanities and cultural life in Australia.

Contact: Christine Fogg

Phone: 02 9351 2261 or 0423 782 603