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Seminars within the School of Philosophical and Historical Inquiry

Departmental Seminars

Each Department in the School of Philosophical and Historical Inquiry holds its own series of seminars. See below for links to each Department:

17th George Rudé Seminar in French History and Civilization, 14-16 July, 2010

Every two years, the George Rudé Seminar brings together specialists in French history and other areas of French studies from Australia and New Zealand with colleagues from around the world for a major conference. A selection of papers from the biannual conferences is now published in peer-reviewed format on H-France.

The 2010 Rudé Seminar will be held at the University of Sydney. Among the featured guests will be Professor Olivier Wieviorka from the Ecole Normale Supérieure (Cachan), author of numerous works on twentieth-century French history.

The general theme of the 2010 Seminar is ‘History and Memory’. However, paper proposals are invited on any area of French history, or on subjects in other areas of French studies with an historical perspective.

Proposals for papers should include a tentative title, a one-paragraph summary of the paper, a one-paragraph biographical note on the speaker and full contact details. They should be addressed by 1 October 2009 to: RUDE.2010@usyd.edu.au

If you have questions, please contact the Chair of the organising committee, Professor Robert Aldrich, Department of History, The University of Sydney, NSW 2006, Australia ().

The Antipodean Laboratory: Humanity, Sovereignty, and Environment in Southern Oceans and Lands, 1700-2009

Mellon Sawyer Seminar Sessions 2009

Session Five

Varieties of Empire in the Antipodes: Taking Over and Letting Go
3–5.30pm, Friday 30 October 2009, Holme and Sutherland Rooms, Holme Building, University of Sydney

This session will be followed by the launch of Kirsten McKenzie’s book, A Swindler’s Progress: Nobles and Convicts in the Age of Liberty. 6pm for a 6.30 launch.

Download Session Five flyer, 30th October

Convenor: Dr Kirsten McKenzie

Discussant: Angela Woollacott (Manning Clark Professor of History, Australian National University)

Emma Christopher (University of Sydney)
The non-free white men and their freed African slaves: claims to British Liberty and its realities in Australia and Sierra Leone

James Curran (University of Sydney)
The “great age of confusion”: Intellectuals and the “new nationalism” in Australia

Mark McKenna (University of Sydney)
Turning away from Britain: Manning Clark, History, Public Intellectuals and the end of Empire in Australia

Kirsten McKenzie (University of Sydney)
The Daemon Behind the Curtain: prize slaves, convict escapees and the antipodean theatres of liberty

Settler colonialism has raised profound questions about the process of imperial expansion and the limits of decolonisation. The papers in this session bookend the period from the late eighteenth to the late twentieth centuries, dealing with such diverse commentators as public intellectuals, renegade slave traders and maverick convict escapees. They explore how northern hemisphere debates about political power, social status, national identity and ideas of freedom were worked through in southern settler colonies. Battles over the nature of citizenship were fought out on the imperial periphery in ways that would profoundly shape political rights in Europe. By the end of the twentieth century new varieties of nationalism were grappling with the problem of divesting themselves of a civic identity associated with imperial models they had helped to forge.

Visit the Sawyer Seminar webpage for more information

International conference and seminar

The Atlantic World in a Pacific Field, 6-7 August, 2010

Convenors: Seminar Chair, Iain McCalman, and convening committee

Speakers:

  • Anita Herle (Cambridge University)
  • Simon Schaffer (Cambridge University)
  • Other speakers to be announced

This major international conference will consider how scientific exchanges and cultural encounters between the peoples of the Atlantic world and the Pacific reshaped knowledge of humanity, human systems, and the environment. This meeting, coming half way through our calender of sessions, will consolidate the achievements of the first half of the seminar and provide new momentum for its remainder. We hope to bring together at this conference leading Australian and international scholars as well as emerging scholars from other parts of the Pacific region.

The conference will focus on the pragmatics of comparison and analogy in the appraisal of new places and peoples. How does a strange place or people become comparable with those more familiar to the traveler or scientist? What does it take to relate a new plant or animal or person to those already well known? How does one standardize observations and mobilize things and people 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, cultural, and commercial interactions over many centuries. Moreover, it will seek ways in which to make the Pacific visible again in Atlantic and global scholarship.

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