Work-in-Progress Seminar - ‘Making up People’: biography and the sensory turn in Humanities
Seminar
This seminar explores how biographers might utilise the new research in the senses which first understands the visual trace as a particular way of knowing the subject. Since all of the five senses (sight, sound, smell, taste and touch) are essential to human experience it is little wonder that…
Work-in-Progress Seminar - Constructing the Self, Imagining the Other: Negotiating Visual Culture in Medieval Iberia
Seminar
The invasion of Iberia in 711 and the establishment of the kingdom of al-Andalus inaugurated a Muslim presence on the peninsula that endured for almost eight centuries, and still resonates in Spanish culture today. Under Islamic, and later Christian, political domination, Iberian Muslims,…
Friday Forum - Biography on the Edge
Seminar
“Human beings are too important to be treated as mere symptoms of the past. They have a value which is independent of any temporal process” wrote Lytton Strachey in 1918. Although biography had long been dismissed by academics as a dubious undertaking, its position within the university has more…
Freilich Foundation - Inaugural Professorial lecture - Where to from here? Australia’s role in refugee protection
Lecture
Australia’s handling of the asylum-seekers on board the Oceanic Viking has sparked vigorous and ongoing debate. In her inaugural lecture as the Freilich Foundation professor, Penelope Mathew will take a look at Australia’s past and present policies against the backdrop of global refugee…
Work-in-Progress Seminar - Bertrand Russell, Lytton Strachey, G.M Trevelyan and the defence of literary history
Seminar
In January 1903, the new Regius Professor of History at Cambridge, J.B. Bury, delivered a famous inaugural lecture on ‘the Science of History’, proclaiming the virtues of collective research and scholarship over the traditional belletristic qualities of English historical writing, reaching back to…
Friday Forum - The Politics of Exhibitions
Seminar
In what ways and to what extent are exhibitions shaped by implicit and explicit political forces? Censorship, national pride, geopolitics, cultural inclusion and religion are some of the issues that will be explored in this forum on the politics of exhibitions. Jackie Menzies will bring a world…
Work-in-Progress Seminar - Art as a site of engagement: Indian Portraits
Seminar
Encounters between Indians and foreigners from the late 18th century through to the present have produced a body of potent graphic images that reflect national and personal relations through periods of colonization, rapid urbanisation and social change. New technologies such as lithography,…