Research in the School of Philosophical and Historical Inquiry

Department of History

I work on what might be called ‘literary history from below’: I am interested in the ways literary ideas and practices are taken up and transformed in popular intellectual life, and in intellectual networks and institutions. My first book, To Exercise Our Talents: The Democratization of Writing in Britain (Harvard, 2006), examined how people from backgrounds not traditionally conducive to literary careers sought to become writers, and the different things that literature and creativity meant to them. I’m now working on ‘Leavisite’ modes of literary and cultural criticism in universities, training colleges, schools, and British culture more generally. I welcome research students in modern British history, and especially those interested in working at the intersections between historical and literary studies.

Chris Hilliard profile
History Department

Professorial Research Fellow
Department of History
and Centre for Values, Ethics
and the Law in Medicine

Kuru Project

This project examines D. Carleton Gajdusek's investigations of the disease of kuru, conducted among the Fore people of New Guinea (1950s-1960s), in order to explore the material cultures of modern science, focusing on the circulation of goods in global biomedical science. Supported by a grant from the U.S. National Science Foundation, this is a multi-sited historical study designed principally to describe and explain transactions involving local inhabitants, anthropologists and biomedical scientists, exchanges clustered around contested kuru material, principally brains, blood and corpses. The goal is to outline some of the basic features of the material cultures of late colonial, postwar scientific exchange, and to see how these material cultures structured and transformed the identities of transactors. The transaction of kuru material will also help us to think more generally about the creation of value and the circulation of goods in global science. This is essentially a historical study that addresses issues usually in the province of anthropology or sociology: it describes how scientific identities are fashioned in collection and exchange; it advances the analysis of the material cultures of late-twentieth century science; it explores new ways of describing the increasing global circulation of goods in science, and the creation of value in international scientific transactions; and it brings the Asia-Pacific region into focus in science and technology studies as an important, but previously much neglected, location of scientific production and exchange. In 2008, the Johns Hopkins University Press will publish The Collectors of Lost Souls: Kuru, Moral Peril, and the Creation of Value in Science.

Race Mixing History

Warwick Anderson will use his ARC grant to examine the character and scope of a transnational network of research on race mixing, or miscegenation, in the twentieth century. His project reveals a global scientific debate on racial segregation, assimilation, and absorption, led by U.S.-based biologists, physical anthropologists and sociologists. Between 1910 and 1940, scientists conducted more than twenty major scientific investigations of the effects of miscegenation in Australasia, the Pacific, North America, Southeast Asia, South Africa and the Maghreb. This project concentrates largely on the extensive and influential series of studies of race mixing organized through the Department of Anthropology at Harvard University, one of the major pre-World War II sites for the training of physical anthropologists. But it moves beyond these Harvard anthropologists to place their work in relation to other frontier studies of human biology in Australasia, the Pacific and elsewhere, tracing an emerging “miscegenation map” of the new world. Including these extensive studies of race mixing in the history of ideas about human difference will add to our knowledge of the decline of race in science before World War II. It will also, for the first time, provide a critical history of how biological scientists struggled (and ultimately failed) to understand how to classify and assess the racial characteristics of children of mixed descent.

Warwick Anderson profile
Department of History

Department of Classics and Ancient History

Julia Kindt joined Sydney University in 2006. She has a Ph.D. in Classics/Ancient History from the University of Cambridge and has previously taught at the University of Chicago. Her research interests include ancient Greek religion (in particular oracles), comparative approaches towards the study of religions, and historiography (both ancient and modern). Recent publications include:
(2006) “Delphic Oracle Stories and the Beginning of Historiography: Herodotus’ Croesus Logos” Classical Philology 101, 34–51; (2007) “Apollo’s Oracle in Euripides’ Ion: Ambiguous Identities in Fifth-Century Athens” Ancient Narrative 6; and (2007/2008) “Greek Religion” in Oxford Handbook of Hellenic Studies. Oxford.

She is supervising honours and postgraduate students in her areas of expertise, in particular on Herodotus and various aspects of Greek religious beliefs and practices. Her current research students explore aspects of Herodotus' philosophy of history (Sam Fancourt), wonders in Herodotus (Paul McMullen) and the cultural significance of laugher in Greek religion and beyond (Cassandra Wenman).

Julia Kindt profile
Department of Classics and Ancient History

Department of History

My current research projects all relate to modern international history. I am currently completing an ARC-funded book on how ideas of race, nation and human rights influenced international affairs after the Second World War. This includes understanding how a new international sphere in which UN organisations, staff, and their ideals were important players, changed the status of those same ideas. I am also interested in how the international arena becomes important to politics in the modern world, from the early nineteenth century, and more specifically the role that women play in that arena. This interest shapes my newest project on Gender and Nation at the Congress of Vienna.

Overall my work brings together a number of historiographies that have conventionally remained detached, but when looked at as intersecting histories reveal new and exciting perspectives on the ways in which international politics has operated in the past, and the significance of that past to our own world. These historiographies include: International relations, feminism, transnationalism, ideas, and nationalism. I am keen to supervise students in any of these areas of historical research.

Glenda Sluga profile
Department of History

Department of Archaeology

My key research interests lie within the ancient Near East and Central Asia. Within this broad framework I have focused on a wide variety of more specialized areas of study, mostly stimulated by my archaeological fieldwork. I began my research career exploring the later prehistory of the deserts of eastern Jordan. This led to an interest in the wider history and archaeology of nomadic peoples and sidelines in rock art and specialized hunting traps. An early fascination with Central Asia was fostered by student participation in excavations at Old Kandahar in Afghanistan in 1978. In 1992, the collapse of the Soviet regime in Central Asia allowed me to start work there on a collaborative project with the Uzbek Academy of Sciences, examining the monumental remains of ancient Chorasmia, south of the Aral Sea. Out of this has grown new interests in the early development of Zoroastrianism, the archaeology of the nomads of the Eurasian steppes and, most recently, the influence of Eurasia on China in the Bronze Age.

Alison Betts profile
Department of Archaeology

Edwin Cuthbert Hall Professor of Middle Eastern Archaeology
Department of Archaeology

I am deeply curious about all periods in the pre-modern Near East, especially Iran, parts of Afghanistan and Pakistan, Iraq and all of the Arabian peninsula. I started life as a specialist in the Bronze Age, working in Iran, but later spent many years doing archaeological research in eastern Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, and am now back in Iran, running a joint expedition with our Iranian colleagues in the Mamasani district of western Fars. I am interested in everything from the Neolithic to the pre-modern era, and in the last few months have written on topics as diverse as donkey domestication (based on our excavated evidence from Tol-e Nurabad, c. 5000 BC); the Portuguese on the Iranian island of Qeshm in the 16th and 17th centuries AD (based on a visit there in 2004); Elamite political culture and behaviour c. 800-600 BC (just one aspect of a strong interest in Elam and the Elamites, the major cultural group and early state in southwestern Iran between c. 2500 and 539 BC); technology transfer in Eurasia, particularly looking at metallurgical developments in Iran, Central Asia and Xinjiang during the Bronze Age; nomadism in the prehistoric archaeological record of Iran and the problems of using ethnographic analogies based on early modern and modern nomadic societies in Iran; the Achaemenid Persians in southwestern Iran (based on our most recent fieldwork at Jinjun, an Achaemenid way-station along the Royal Road between Persepolis and Susa, partially excavated by us in 2007); pre-Islamic coinage of eastern Arabia (old work to which I recently returned, based on a study of finds from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates); Darius the Great’s campaigns against the Armenians in the late 6th century BC; the identification of religious practices and traditions using archaeological evidence in Mesopotamia and Bahrain; Kassite Mesopotamia and the Elamites, their political and kin relations; the XIVth satrapy of the Persian Empire (the Persian Gulf islands, in particular); and bevel-rim bowls and their meaning, a key problem in our understanding of social and economic developments in 4th millennium BC Iran and Mesopotamia. The key to all this is curiosity and a willingness to look into topics and areas about which I know nothing, but which add to my appreciation of the early cultures that inhabited this part of the world.

I am happy to supervise students wishing to work on almost any aspect of Mesopotamian, Iranian or Arabian archaeology and early history, preferably pre-Islamic and post-Palaeolithic.

Dan Potts profile
Department of Archaeology

Department of Philosophy

My research deals with topics across a range of areas of philosophy (metaphysics, ethics and political philosophy, philosophy and psychology of wellbeing) that I think are often connected in interesting and sometimes unexpected ways.

Much of my recent research has focused on the philosophical problem of personal identity (what makes a person now one and the same person as someone in the past?), as part of an ARC-funded project on 'Personal Identity, Consciousness and Agency'. I am especially interested in the connections between views about the nature of personal identity and issues in ethics and political philosophy: such as the nature of autonomy or self-determination; when it is appropriate to hold people
morally or legally responsible for past actions; and how self-concern differs from moral concern.

I also work on freedom of speech; and am currently writing a book on Happiness, under contract with Routledge. I am especially interested in the connections between philosophical views about the nature and value of happiness and recent scientific work on the topic.

I am currently supervising a number of honours and postgraduate students in these areas; and welcome enquiries from prospective students interested in working in these areas.

Caroline West profile
Department of Philosophy

I have worked on a range of different philosophical problems. Most of my research can be unified under the guiding idea of trying to make progress in philosophy by developing and applying formal tools and techniques, from areas such as logic and probability theory. Topics that I work on include time travel (Is there any logical incoherence in the idea of visiting the past? — I think not); truth and the Liar paradox (What is truth? What lessons are to be drawn from consideration of the famous Liar sentence 'This very sentence is not true'?); vagueness (How can we give a rigorous account of the logic and semantics of vague terms such as 'tall' and 'bald' — terms which allow us to make statements which are apparently fully
meaningful, and yet neither true nor false?); and the history of logic (Frege is often seen as the inventor of modern logic — so why do some of his views about what is essential to logic seem so odd to us today?). I am always keen to supervise honours and postgraduate students in any area of logic, philosophy of language, or metaphysics.

Nicholas J.J. Smith profile
Department of Philosophy

Elspeth Probyn is the Professor in the Department of Gender & Cultural
Studies where she teaches at the undergraduate and postgraduate
levels. Her PhD is in Communication and Media, and she is passionate
about how culture informs our everyday lives. She has many ongoing
research projects, and has written several books and numerous articles
on issues as diverse as shame, sport, belonging, eating and bodies.
Elspeth has supervised several PhDs on very different subjects -
surfing, everyday culture, terror, emotional geography .... She serves
on the editorial boards of 17 international academic journals and is
co-editor of a new journal on Emotion, Society & Space.

Elspeth Probyn profile
Department of Gender and Cultural Studies

William Ritchie Professor of Classics
Chair of the Department of Classics & Ancient History

My research spans widely over Greek literature and culture, from Homer to the Hellenistic period.

Currently I have two major programmes of study – the sociology of Greek music and the history of the Classical theatre. In the first I have moved the analysis of Greek music away from its traditional narrow focus on reconstruction and theory towards a more integrated approach that seeks to understand music in a Greek sense – as a deeply social and performative phenomenon to which poetry, religion, the creation of the past and questions of social, ethnic and political identity are all central.

My second and main research endeavour is writing a new History of the Classical Theatre (c. 500 – 300 BC). With Eric Csapo, I am the co-director of a large-scale and long-term project, currently funded by the Australian Research Council and drawing on extensive consultative collaboration with a large international network of scholars. This aims to produce a new history of the Classical Greek theatre that provides a proper understanding of its social and economic, as well as its strictly performative, dimensions.

It proceeds by a dual approach. The first is a complete overhaul of the documentary evidence for the operation of the Classical theatre – all the relevant inscriptions, literary texts and material remains – something that has not been attempted for the best part of a century. This involves the creation of large corpora of the available evidence; the collection of new and neglected items; editing and autopsy examination where necessary; detailed analysis of each, and translation into English of all the text-based documents. We have had specialised software developed by colleagues in Italy (http://www.fusisoft.it) for the optimum presentation of this extensive material. The second major avenue in this project is the writing, on the basis of this full re-assessment of the documentary evidence, of a diachronic history of the Classical dramatic festivals, their institutions and operation, their personnel and practices.

I am happy to supervise students wishing to work on most aspects of the Greek theatre and performance culture.
Peter Wilson profile
Department of Classics and Ancient History