Mellon Sawyer Seminar
The Antipodean Laboratory: Humanity, Sovereignty, and Environment in Southern Oceans and Lands, 1700-2009
Upcoming Seminar sessions
Session Six
Sexuality in the South Seas
Friday 19 March, 2010
1-5pm, Holme & Sutherland Rooms, Holme Building, University of Sydney
Download Session Five flyer, 30th October
Convenor: Robert Aldrich
Chris Brickell (University of Otago)
Yorick Smaal (University of Queensland)
Lee Wallace (University of Auckland)
(Fourth speaker to be advised)
Ever since the first visits by European explorers, the sexual mores of the South Seas have fascinated, attracted and appalled foreigners. From seamen who believed that they had found a sexual paradise and missionaries who endeavoured to stamp out vice, through to the research of Malinowski and Mead, and on to the imagery of contemporary tourist brochures advertising the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras, the South Pacific has been a laboratory for the investigation of sexual behaviours, the projection of foreign fantasies and the metamorphosis of sexual cultures. This interdisciplinary session will examine the history and historiography of sexuality in Oceania and Australasia in the period of culture contact and after.
Session Seven
Human Biology and Health in the Pacific Field
Friday 14 May, 2010
Convenor: Warwick Anderson & Hans Pols
Warwick Anderson (University of Sydney)
Barbara Brookes (University of Otago)
Hans Pols (University of Sydney)
This seminar will consider how Western European and North American intrusions and empires re-shaped the disease environment of the Pacific as well as produce new knowledge about humans and the pathological consequences of their interpersonal and ecological interactions. We will go beyond the conventional account of "ecological imperialism" and "virgin-soil" epidemics to look at how the Pacific provided a more complex epidemiology, human biology and disease ecology.
Session Eight
The Antarctic Laboratory: Science, Culture, and Law
Friday 25 June, 2010
Convenor: A/Prof. Andrew Fitzmaurice
From the eighteenth to the twenty first centuries the polar regions have had profound and often unexpected impacts upon science, law and our understanding of human cultures. As an uninhabited and vast continent, the Antarctic has had a particularly deep influence upon our understandings of property and sovereignty. Is occupation the origin of property and, ultimately, sovereignty? If so does the Antarctic reveal the limits of these fundamental political notions or can other bases for title to this continent be convincingly established? The history of such questions is increasingly crucial to the present. It is from the problems of occupation posed by the Antarctic that we have approached the question of whether property can be established in 'Outer Space'. Even more pressing are the problems now posed by global warming to the verdicts of history. Prior to the twentieth century, ice was understood to be equivalent to the sea - a mutable substance which could not be owned. The scientific realisation that ice sheets in the Antarctic were up to four kilometres thick, and that the continent contains 90% of the world's ice, challenged these legal assumptions and the principle of ownership and even sovereignty over ice was agreed in international law. But the rapid melting of ice, in both of the poles, now brings these historical decisions back to court. In such ways, globally relevant science and law have converged over the contested space of the Antarctic.
International conference and seminar
The Atlantic World in a Pacific Field, Friday 6 & Saturday 7 August, 2010
Convenors: Seminar Chair, Iain McCalman, and convening committee
Guest speakers:
Janet Browne, Aramont Professor of the History of Science at Harvard University
Joyce Chaplin, James Duncan Phillips Professor of Early American History and Director of the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard University
Sheila Fitzpatrick, Bernadette E. Schmitt Distinguished Service Professor of Russian History at the University of Chicago
Anita Herle, Deputy Director of and Curator for World Anthropology in the Museum for Archaeology and Anthropology at Cambridge University
Joseph Meisel, Program Officer in Research Universities & Humanistic Scholarship at the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
Simon Schaffer, Professor of the History and Philosophy of Science at Cambridge University
others tba
Speakers from the University of Sydney:
Warwick Anderson
Alison Bashford
Ann Curthoys
Kate Fullagar
Julia Horne
Michael McDonnell
Where the earlier sessions showcased the research of many different scholars – from postdoctoral fellows to senior professors, mostly from the Australasian region – the conference aims to draw together international experts in relevant fields in order to connect our regional network to the rest of the globe.
The conference will focus on the pragmatics of comparison in the appraisal of new places and peoples. 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.
Contact
Katherine Anderson
Department of History
SOPHI
H3.04, Main Quadrangle (A14)
University of Sydney
NSW 2006
Phone: 02 9036 5347
