HRC Seminar - The “All-Clear” Incarnate? Helmut Kohl’s Nationalism and the Quest for Normalcy
Seminar
This paper is about the nationalism of Helmut Kohl, the so-called Chancellor of Unity. Biography helps to understand the formation of personal nationalism, which relies on a particular repertoire of self-images that the nationalist can mobilise to represent his ideal notion of nation and himself. I…
HRC Seminar - Archive Fever: The Salman Rushdie Papers
Seminar
‘What is this compared with what I shall tell you tomorrow night if the king spares me and lets me live.’ –The Arabian Nights The Salman Rushdie papers are in the Robert W Woodruff Library [Manuscript, Archives and Rare Books Library] of Emory University. The archive was purchased for an…
HRC Seminar - What is the ‘World’ in World Literature?
Seminar
This seminar is a reflection on what it means to talk about a ‘world’ in literature that is not simply co-extensive with an ever-expanding sense of our connection with the rest of globe due to accelerated information flows; nor merely a category responding to the normative frame of a postcolonial…
HRC Seminar - Instruments as Mediators: “Social Agencies” of Australia’s Chinese Musical Instrument Collections - The Case of Bendigo’s Golden Dragon Museum
Seminar
Most scholars would agree that musical instruments serve not only as passive tools for artistic performance but also as active agents of transformation within their cultures and societies, therefore, making them logical and essential objects of ethnomusicological investigation. Large collections of…
HRC Seminar - The Anthropocentric Waiting Room: A Diagram for (In)Humanity
Seminar
To a large extent, scholarly interest in the inhuman condition has been concerned with examining how boundaries have come to be drawn around the human and how humanity has been policed by these boundaries. There is now considerable agreement on the ‘inextricability of human and inhuman’ in current…
HRC Seminar - Restocking the British World: Empire Migration and Anglo-Canadian Relations, 1919-1930
Seminar
Throughout the 1920s Canadian politicians, immigration officials, eugenicists and political commentators talked about the need to ‘Canadianize’ all migrants who arrived in the dominion, including those from the mother country. This did not mean that Ottawa was out to ‘de-Britannicize’ those…
HRC Seminar - W. E. Adams, Chartism and Republicanism in Nineteenth Century Britain
Seminar
A printer by trade and one of Chartism’s key lieutenants, William Edwin Adams (1832-1906) became well known in radical circles on both sides of the Atlantic as the editor-in-chief of Joseph Cowen’s Newcastle Weekly Chronicle. Inspired by the writings of Thomas Paine and the Italian revolutionary…