Events in the Department of History

Seminar Series for Postgraduates and Faculty
Held at 12.10-1.30 in the Kevin Lee Room, Level 6, Lobby H, Main Quad
Coordinator: Professor Richard Waterhouse

28 July | Saliha Belmessous (University of Sydney)
Law as an Engine of Civilisation: Saxe Bannister’s Crusade for the Assimilation of Aboriginal Peoples

4 August | Alan Atkinson (University of New England/University of Sydney)
Australia in Fragments; or, Disassembling the National Story

11 August | Jane Caplan (University of Oxford)
Illegibility: Reading and Insecurity in Nineteenth Century History, Law and
Government

18 August |Sheila Fitzpatrick (University of Chicago)
Putting yourself in - or not? Thoughts on Authorial Presence in biography and history

25 August | Matthew Connelly (Columbia University)
The Perils of Global Governance, the Imperatives of Global History

1 September | Kit Candlin (University of Sydney)
Poison, Slavery and Suicide

8 September | Iain McCalman (University of Sydney)
Darwin’s Armada. The Story of Four Voyagers to the Southern Oceans and Their Battle for the Theory of Evolution

15 September | Stephen Gaukroger (University of Sydney)
The Academie des Sciences and the Republic of Letters: Fontenelle and the Shaping of a New Natural-Philosophical Persona, 1699-1734

22 September | John Hirst (La Trobe University/University of Sydney)
The Shortest History of Europe

13 October | Martin Thomas (University of Sydney)
The Hilarity of Race: Humour and Cross-Cultural Interaction During the Arnhem Land Expedition of 1948

20 October | Warwick Anderson (University of Sydney)
Racial Laboratories and Reproductive Frontiers: The Science of Race Mixing in the Pacific

27 October | Meredith Lake (University of Sydney)
‘Such Spiritual Acres’: Protestantism and the British Colonisation of Australian Land

CONVERSATION:

History in the Conflict Zone: Nigel Worden and Nigel Penn on apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa.

How have historians engaged with the ‘rainbow nation’ since the first democratic elections were held in South Africa in 1994? Have the promises of the anti-apartheid struggle been fulfilled? How is the new South Africa representing, commemorating and remembering its own past? What has the impact been on university teaching and student experience? Many of these developments have resonances with Australia’s ‘History Wars’. Nigel Worden and Nigel Penn (University of Cape Town) have been teaching and writing history in South Africa since the 1980s. In this conversation with SOPHI students and staff they will discuss the relationship between historians, activists and the state in our changing political landscapes.

Where: SOPHI Common Room, Brennan MacCallum Building (opposite the lifts).
When: 4-6pm Monday, 1 September.
Refreshments courtesy of the History Students Society


SEMINAR:

The Masterlink of Connection: Unfree Labour in Australia and South Africa

• Emma Christopher, ‘What the Convict Ship Captains Did Next: Illicit Slave Importation at the Cape, 1797-1803’
• Nigel Worden, ‘Armed with ostrich feathers: Order and disorder in the Cape slave uprising of 1808’
• Kirsten McKenzie, ‘The Daemon Behind the Curtain: William Edwards and the antipodean theatres of liberty.’
• Nigel Penn, ‘Close and Merciful Watchfulness’: The Origins and Nature of John Montagu’s Convict System in the Mid-Nineteenth Century Cape Colony.’

Chair: Iain McCalman

Where: Kevin Lee Room
When: Wednesday 3rd September, 12:00-2:00pm
Feel free to bring your lunch. Coffee, cake and fruit will be provided.

ABOUT THE VISITORS

Nigel Worden and Nigel Penn are two of South Africa’s foremost historians. Worden has published nine books on subjects including the history of Cape Town, slavery at the Cape, and the VOC. He is at the leading edge of heritage studies in South Africa and heads a major inter-disciplinary initiative on social identities in the VOC. Penn has published work on Cape slavery, on Cape Town’s ‘Rogues, Rebels and Runaways’, and about Khoisan-settler relations along the Orange River, a region to which he runs regular student fieldtrips. His current research on convict labour in Cape Colony draws on connections with Australian history.

Annual JM Ward Memorial Lecture

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. The 2007 lecture was delivered by Richard J. Evans FBA, Professor of Modern History at Cambridge University. Details of the 2008 lecture will be announced soon.

Making Empire Visible in the Metropole: Comparative Imperial Transformations in America, Australia, England & France, University of Sydney, 3-4 July 2008

Through six plenary panels during a two-day colloquium, we will explore empire's role in the transformation, not of the colonial periphery, but of empire's epicenters–in effect, turning the telescope of foreign area studies into a microscope for a closer study of metropolitan histories. In this effort to make empire visible in the metropole, panels will compare two societies that have made colonialism central to their national narratives, England and France, with two that have obscured, even denied its influence, America and Australia.

For more information contact: Visit the conference web site or contact Clare Corbould () or Warwick Anderson ().

ANZASA Biennial Conference, July 4-7 2008

The Australian and New Zealand American Studies Association will hold its biennial conference at the Womens College, University of Sydney, July 4-7. The conference features keynote addresses by George Chauncey, Susan Douglas, Amy Kaplan and Ian Tyrrell, more than 120 papers, and a roundtable on Australian attitudes towards the United States.

Registration closes March 31, 2008.

For further information see the ANZASA web site

The History of International Thought Workshop, 17 July, 2008

Speakers are:
Glenda Sluga (Sydney)
David Armitage (Harvard)
Duncan Bell (Cambridge)
Richard Bourke (Queen Mary College, London)
Ian Hunter (University of Queensland)
Andrew Fitzmaurice (Sydney)

Location: Kevin Lee Room, Main Quadrangle. Times: 10am-4pm

THE 2ND NATION EMPIRE GLOBE POST-GRADUATE INTENSIVE
23 - 25 July 2008




Postgraduate students are invited to submit proposals for the second Nation Empire Globe Postgraduate Intensive to be held at the University of Sydney on July 23 - 25, 2008. Its theme is “Transnational / International History.”

More information can be found at the NEGRC web site

Applications must be received by February 28, 2008

Our University of Sydney Sawyer Seminar will explore the history of how the Antipodes, and especially the Indo-Pacific lands and oceans, has constituted a laboratory for the Atlantic world over the three centuries from 1700 to 2009. It focuses on Atlantic-derived conceptions and experiences within the Antipodes that bear especially on the themes of humanity and cultures, sovereignty and imperialism, and environment and ecology. Our prime method will be comparative: the intellectual and social colonization of the Antipodes was never a simple one-way process of control and exploitation. Ideas also flowed in reverse, moving from periphery to metropole, from Indo-Pacific fields to Atlantic worlds, and with consequences that could be conservative, subversive or much else. In short, we will be investigating the reciprocal exchange of selected discourses and practices between these two great geo-political spheres from the early modern period to the present. At the same time we are interested in investigating whether, and to what extent, local concerns and ideas have been able to achieve autonomy from the long reach of Atlantic influence.

Structure
The seminar will consist of a series of up to ten sessions, each focused on a particular problem of the Antipodean Laboratory. Participants include Australian and international experts in the respective field, both senior scholars and mid- and early-career researchers. Some participants include Bill Gammage of ANU, Barbara Brookes of Otago, Kay Anderson of UWS, Angela Woollacott of Macquarie, Lisa Ford of UNSW, Lee Wallace of Auckland, Ron Day from the Torres Strait, and many others. Each session will be open to the public and warmly encourages scholars of all disciplines to attend. Some session subjects include

• The Impact of the Antipodes on Ecological Thought
• Human Biology and Health in the Pacific Field
• The Experience of the Ocean: Transformative Voyages in the Antipodes
• Atlantic Justice in the Pacific World
• The Antarctic Laboratory: Science, Culture, and Law

The first seminar session will be held on 27th March 2009 at the Macleay Museum on ‘The Impact of the Antipodes on Anthropological Thought’ and include Elena Glover, Sino Konishi, Ron Day, Helen Gardner, and Jude Philp as speakers.

The seminar will also host a large international two day conference in July or August of 2010 on “The Atlantic World in a Pacific Field”. At least two internationally leading scholars will be invited to attend.

As per usual practice, this Sawyer Seminar will in addition appoint a Postdoctoral Fellow for one year to research a topic related to the seminar’s themes and goals, as well as provide financial assistance to two graduate students.

Contacts
The University of Sydney’s Sawyer Seminar is organised by a modest committee of scholars from disparate fields, including Professors Warwick Anderson, Alison Bashford, Roy MacLeod, Duncan Ivison, Cassandra Pybus, and others. It is headed by Professor Iain McCalman AO. The committee will very soon be appointing an administrative officer to oversee the seminar and to receive queries. Until that time, further information can be sought from . Once administrative support has been secured, a website devoted to this Sawyer Seminar will be established that will provide information about the seminar sessions, the conference, the application process for the postdoctoral appointment, and other relevant matters. Watch this space for more information!

• Professor David Christian (San Diego State University), is a distinguished historian of Russia, of world and environmental history, and has worked on the rich idea of "Big History," publishing a survey of that topic, Maps of Time, in 2004. He is currently working on the second volume of his history of Inner Eurasia.
  – Visiting scholar, January-June 2008; presenting at History on Monday on June 2.
• Professor David Armitage (Harvard University), is the author of The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (2000), Greater Britain, 1516–1776: Essays in Atlantic History (2004), and The Declaration of Independence: A Global History(2007)
  – Visiting in July 2008.
• Professor Akira Irye (Harvard University), is the author of numerous works on American diplomatic history and Japanese- American relations, including The Globalizing of America (1993) and Cultural Internationalism and World Order (1997).
  – Visiting in July 2008.
• Associate Professor Matthew Connelly (Columbia University), works in international and global history, and is the author of A Diplomatic Revolution: Algeria’s Fight for Independence and the Origins of the Post-Cold War Era (2002). His next book, "Fatal Misconception: The Struggle to Control World Population," will be published by Harvard University Press in 2008
  – Visiting July-August 2008.
• Professor Sheila Fitzpatrick (Bernadotte E. Schmitt Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago). Among her publications are Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times – Soviet Russia in the 1930s and Tear off the Masks! Identity and Imposture in Twentieth-Century Russia.
  – Visiting Honorary Professor, July 21– August 21, 2008.