News

A collection of scholars from the University of Sydney – and chiefly from the Department of History – has been awarded a prestigious John E. Sawyer Seminar Grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The grant is to be used for a cross-disciplinary project during 2009-10 on “The Antipodean Laboratory: Humanity, Sovereignty, and Environment in Southern Oceans and Lands, 1700-2009.” The University of Sydney is the first and thus far only Australian recipient of this award. Further Information

Naomi Hart has been awarded the 2008 Norman Harper Prize for the best undergraduate essay in American Studies by the Australian and New Zealand American Studies Association. Her essay, "'Exercising 'those faculties which they desire in their offspring': Enlisting parents in the crusade against vice," will be published in the July 2008 issue of the Australasian Journal of American Studies. This is the fourth consecutive year that a University of Sydney student has won this prize.

Michael McDonnell and Shane White have been appointed to the Organization of American Historians Distinguished Lectureship Program. Chosen by the president of the organization, this appointment recognizes "outstanding speakers who have made major contributions to the study of American history." Lecturers give at least one lecture a year and agree to designate their fees as donations to the organization.

Congratulations to outstanding Postgraduate Researchers:

• Briony Neilson, awarded the Ian Cameron Travelling Scholarship, for research in Paris.
• Alecia Simmonds, awarded the Nation Empire Globe Travelling Scholarship, for research in the UK.
• Jamie Miller, awarded the Pioneer Prize for best honours thesis in Australian History, proceeding to a PhD candidature in History at University of Sydney.

Cam MacKellar, a postgraduate student in the department, was awarded a 2007 Faculty of Arts Tutoring Excellence Award.

David Smith, a recent graduate of the department, has won the 2007 Jean Monnet Thesis Prize, awarded by the Contemporary Europe Research Centre at the University of Melbourne, for his PhD thesis, "Ecology and non-violence across the species barrier?: the German Greens and the politics of animal protection."

Tony Moore, a postgraduate student in the department, won the 2007 NSW History Fellowship, a $20,000 award which enables a NSW historian to research an aspect of the state’s history, to complete the project "Death or Liberty: Rebels in Exile," the first narrative and analytical history of political prisoners exiled as convicts to Australia.

Warwick Anderson, Emma Christopher, Nick Eckstein, and Stephen Robertson were awarded Australian Research Council Grants to commence in 2008, for the following projects:

• Warwick Anderson, Reproductive Frontiers: The Twentieth-Century Sciences of Human Hybridity [Discovery Grant]
• Emma Christopher, Sierra Leone and Australia: a case of the vanishing twin [Discovery Grant] (with Dr MS Delofski and Prof PE Lovejoy)
• Nick Eckstein, The Anatomy and Physiology of Renaissance Florence: the Dynamics of Social Change in the Fifteenth Century [Discovery Grant]
• Stephen Robertson, Private Eyes and Ears: Covert Surveillance in American Life, 1865-1941 [Discovery Grant]

Warwick Anderson was awarded both a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship and a National Science Foundation Fellowship (US) for research into the history of the scientific investigation of race mixing.

Books by three staff members were shortlisted for the 2007 NSW Premier's History Awards:

• Christopher Hilliard's To Exercise Our Talents: the Democratization of Writing in Britain and Jonathan Walker's Pistols! Treason! Murder! The Rise and Fall of a Master Spy were shortlisted for the General History Prize
• Cassandra Pybus' Black Founders: the Unknown Story of Australia's First Black Settlers was shortlisted for the Australian History Prize

Shane White was invited to give the 13th Annual Bernard Bailyn Lecture, at La Trobe University, on August 8, 2007. Since 1995, the Bernard Bailyn Lecture has been presented annually by La Trobe University to mark the University’s expertise in North American studies, and to provide an opportunity for a distinguished scholar in a relevant discipline to visit La Trobe University.

Robert Aldrich was awarded a fellowship at the Columbia University Institute for Scholars in Paris, where he will spend the first half of 2008.

Dirk Moses was awarded a Humboldt Fellowship for 2008, which will allow him to spend the entire year doing research in Germany.

Iain McCalman was awarded an Order of Australia, Officer (AO), "For service to history and to the humanities as a teacher, researcher and author, and through administrative, advocacy and advisory roles in academic and public sector organisations."

Michael McDonnell's article, "Class War? Class Struggles during the American Revolution in Virginia," was awarded the 2006 Lester Cappon Prize for the best article published in the William and Mary Quarterly, the leading journal of early American history, and selected by the Organization of American Historians to be included in The Best American History Essays 2008, published by Palgrave Macmillan.

Clare Corbould was awarded a Writing Fellowship for semester 2, 2007, by the University of Sydney Research Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences (RIHSS), to complete her book, Becoming African Americans, 1919-1939, which will be published by Harvard University Press in 2008.

Chris Hilliard has won the Max Crawford Medal for 2006. The Australian Academy of the Humanities awards the Crawford Medal every two years to an outstanding early career researcher in the humanities. This is the third time in as many awards that the medal has gone to a member of the Department of History: Dr Kirsten McKenzie won the medal in 2004; Associate Professor Glenda Sluga won in 2002.

Cindy McCreery, Michael McDonnell, and Kirsten McKenzie were awarded University of Sydney Research and Development Grants for 2007, for the following topics:

• Cindy McCreery, English Humour and British Civility: Constructing and Contesting Identity in the British Empire, 1867-70
• Michael McDonnell, Between Borders: Refugees, Empires, and Nations
• Kirsten McKenzie, Social status and political power at the Cape of Good Hope: the cross-colonial connections of William Edwards/Alexander Lockaye

Andrew Fitzmaurice, Chris Hilliard, Iain McCalman, Margaret Poulos, and Cassandra Pybus were awarded Australian Research Council Grants to commence in 2007, for the following projects:

• Andrew Fitzmaurice, Understanding the concept and meaning of freedom in Western history [Discovery Grant]
• Chris Hilliard, Complex Words: Literary Judgments in the British Commonwealth, 1920-1970 [Discovery Grant]
• Iain McCalman, Scientific voyages in the Antipodes: Thomas Huxley, John McGillivray and the Darwinian Revolution [Discovery Grant]
• Margaret Poulos, A New History of 1968: Feminism and Student Revolt in the Colonels' Greece (1967-1974) [Postdoctoral Fellowship]
• Cassandra Pybus, Recovered Lives as Windows on the Anglo Colonial World, 1750-1850 [Professorial Fellowship]

Stephen Robertson was awarded a 2006 Carrick Institute Australian Award for University Teaching Citation for Outstanding Contributions to Student Learning

A. Dirk Moses, German Intellectuals and the Nazi Past (Cambridge University Press, 2007)

Michael McDonnell, The Politics of War: Race, Class and Conflict in Revolutionary Virginia (Omohundro Institute for Early American Studies/University of North Carolina Press, 2007)

Robert Aldrich (editor), Gay Life and Culture: A World History (Thames and Hudson, 2007)
Launched at Ariel Booksellers, 42 Oxford St, Paddington, February 21, 2007

Jonathan Walker, Pistols! Treason! Murder! The Rise and Fall of a Master Spy (Melbourne University Press, 2007)
Launched at the Nicholson Museum, University of Sydney, February 20, 2007

Glenda Sluga, The Nation, Psychology and international Politics, 1870-1919 (Palgrave, 2006)

Warwick Anderson, Colonial Pathologies: American Tropical Medicine, Race, and Hygiene in the Philippines. Durham NC: Duke University Press; 2006; and Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press; 2007.

Warwick Anderson, The Cultivation of Whiteness: Science, Health and Racial Destiny in Australia, first published 2002, reissued in 2006 by Duke University Press

Lynette Olson, The Early Middle Ages: The Birth of Europe (Palgrave, 2006)

Chris Hilliard, The Bookmen's Dominion: Cultural Life in New Zealand 1920-1950 (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2006)

Chris Hilliard, To Exercise Our Talents: The Democratization of Writing in Britain (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006).
Launched at the Nicholson Museum, University of Sydney, May 24, 2006

Julia Horne, The Pursuit of Wonder: How Australia's landscape was explored, nature discovered and tourism unleashed (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2005)

Robert Aldrich, Vestiges of Colonial Empire in France: Monuments, Museums and Colonial Memories (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005)
Launched at the European Studies Postgraduate Conference 2005

Stephen Robertson, Crimes against Children: Sexual Violence and Legal Culture in New York City, 1880-1960 (University of North Carolina Press, 2005)
Launched at Gleebooks, May 31, 2005

Richard Waterhouse, The Vision Splendid: A Social and Cultural History of Rural Australia (Curtin University Press, 2005)
Launched at Gleebooks, May 26, 2005

Richard White (with Sarah-Jane Ballard, Ingrid Bown, Meredith Lake, Patricia Leehy, Lila Oldmeadow), On Holidays: A History of Getting Away in Australia (Pluto, 2005)
Launched at Gleebooks, May 16, 2005

Shane White and Graham White, The Sounds of Slavery: Discovering African American History Through Songs, Sermons and Speech (Beacon, 2005)