A symposium at the University of Melbourne will celebrate the project to conserve the collection. Gija artists including Patrick Mung Mung, Churchill Cann, Betty Carrington, Shirley Purdie, Mark Nodea, Roseleen Park and Sadie Carrington, will talk about Warmun art and scholars from the University will talk about the conservation of the works, and current scholarship at the University on Warmun art. This will include a special viewing of selected works before they return to Warmun.

When: Saturday, 18 May 2013, 2.00pm to 4.00pm

Where:
Gryphon Gallery
1888 Building
Grattan Street
The University of Melbourne
PARKVILLE VIC 3010

• Register for this event on the InTouch website

Location: Graduate House, 220 Leicester Street, The University of Melbourne

REGISTRATION FREE BUT PLACES LIMITED

BOOKINGS ESSENTIAL on the conference registration web page.

Download the conference program (1.9Mb pdf)

This conference aims to explore the emotions that are created in response to various forms of sacred place or space in communities from the late antique to the modern period, and how these emotions are deployed or drawn upon to build, strengthen and defend different forms of community and communal identity. Attention will be paid to the many ways that emotions are elicited, practiced and elaborated – through the architecture or landscape of particular sites; through rituals and liturgies; through sermons or stories told about these sites; through art objects and music. The ways that emotions are produced and managed in response to political change will also be considered.

Email: jessica.scott@unimelb.edu.au
Phone: +61 3 8344 5152

Speaker: Simon Ditchfield

Date: Thursday, 23 May 2013
Time: 6.30 – 7.45pm
Location:
Copland Theatre, Arts West (Building 148)
The University of Melbourne
PARKVILLE VIC 3010

Admission is free.
Bookings are required.
Seating is limited.

For registration please go to the InTouch website.

Abstract

What happened to Rome and the idea of Rome in the age of the Counter-Reformation and of the missions to America and the Indies? Even as Roman Catholicism was ‘going global’ to an unprecedented extent, that pre-eminent symbol of its claims to universality, Rome, was being re-invented to a degree which arguably had not been seen since the fourth century CE. The papal Jubilee of 1575 effectively relaunched the city not only as a pilgrimage destination but also as a setting for the daily processions of what surely remains the most kinetic of world religions.

The city ceased being simply a spectacle, whose ruins inspired numerous humanists to ruminate on the fickleness of fortune, and became also a stage for the mounting of sacred spectacles that engaged both mind and body. This lecture also will examine how Roman Catholics all over the globe ‘thought with Rome’: not only via the Daily Office (and Roman Martyrology with its information about the city’s martyrs), but also via its relics which were being exported at an unprecedented rate from the late 16th century (with a veritable ‘feeding frenzy’ post 1578 and the coming on stream of that ‘mine of sanctity’ the Roman Catacombs). Additionally this lecture will examine the role played by Indulgences here, since they were an important means by which the spiritual privileges attached to particular Roman shrines could be enjoyed by worshippers all over the world as if they were praying in Rome itself. This particularisation of the universal was associated with an intensity of feeling that accompanied the collapse of time and space and where Rome was ‘present to behold’ in the devout worshipper’s mind’s eye, wherever in the world s/he physically found him/herself to be.

Short biography

Simon Ditchfield is Reader in History at the University of York, UK. He carried out his postgraduate research at the Warburg Institute, London and has been a Rome Scholar at the British School at Rome (1988-89). In 1991-94 he held a British Academy postdoctoral research fellowship at the University of York. In 1998 he was elected to membership of the Accademia di San Carlo in Milan and to the fellowship of the Royal Historical Society in the UK. In 2006-08 he held a British Academy Research Leave Fellowship.

Since 2010 he has been co-director of the AHRC-funded project: Conversion narratives in early modern Europe: a cross-confessional and comparative study, 1550-1700. He has published widely on the role of perceptions of the past in the construction of religious identity in the age of the Counter-Reformation and is currently writing a book entitled: Papacy and Peoples: the making of Roman Catholicism as a world religion 1500-1700 for Oxford University Press.

Date: Thursday, 16 May 2013
Time: 6.30 – 7.30pm
Location:
Theatre A Elisabeth Murdoch (Building 134)
The University of Melbourne
PARKVILLE VIC 3010

Admission is free.
Bookings are required.
Seating is limited.

Visit the InTouch website to register for this event.

Download the event flyer (515kb pdf)

Speaker

Professor Antonia Finnane

Abstract

In this lecture, Professor Antonia Finnane talks about history and propaganda in contemporary China, taking her point of departure from Chairman Xi Jinping’s visit to the history exhibit, “Road to Revival,” in the National Museum of China in November 2012. Widely reported in the Chinese press, that visit provided the occasion for the Communist Party’s new leader to describe his dream of a rejuvenated China. What did the exhibit tell him about China’s past? And what does it tell us about China today?

Short biography

Professor Antonia Finnane is a historian of China, with interests in social and cultural change from early modern to contemporary times. She graduated with a PhD from the Department of Far Eastern History at the ANU in 1985, accepting a fractional position in the History Department at the University of Melbourne in the same year. Her publications include Far From Where? Jewish Journeys from Shanghai to Australia (Melbourne University Press, 1999), Speaking of Yangzhou: A Chinese City, 1550-1850 (Harvard University East Asia Series, 2004), and Changing Clothes in China (Columbia University Press, 2008).

In 2006 she won the Joseph Levenson Award for a work on pre-1900 China, awarded by the Association of Asian Studies (USA), and in 2007 the Woodward Medal for Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Melbourne. She has recently returned to Melbourne from a period of residence in Beijing, during which she taught in the Yale – Peking University joint undergraduate program while undertaking research on Beijing in the early 1950s.

Date: Wednesday, 22 May 2013
Time: 6.00pm – 7.30pm
Location:
Theatre G08
Law (Building 106)
185 Pelham Street

Admission is free.
Bookings are required.
Seating is limited.

Visit the InTouch website to book for the event.

Speaker: Glenda Sluga, Professor of International History, University of Sydney

Information:

When Australia recently earned a long-anticipated seat on the UN Security Council, there was some discussion of its relevance, but little recognition of its historical significance, despite the fact for more than a century Australians have been deeply involved at popular and governmental level in international institutions and international politics and in the conceptualization of international law and human rights.

In this lecture, Professor Glenda Sluga will map a new chronology of the twentieth century around the concept of internationalism, with specific attention to the 1940s and the early years of the United Nations as the ‘apogee of internationalism’. Her aim is to explore the possibilities of the new international history that has appeared on the horizon and that is already changing the way we understand the significance of internationalism in the present.

Brief Biography

Professor Glenda Sluga, a graduate of The University of Melbourne and Sussex University is Professor of International History at the University of Sydney. Her most recent book is Internationalism in the Age of Nationalism published by UPenn Press in 2013.

The first three will be held in the South Lecture Theatre and all others in the Atrium.

For further information contact Dr Helen MacDonald.
Download this information: Brown Bag seminar series semester 1, 2013 (80kb pdf)

Date/Time: Thursday 21 March, 1-2pm
Location: South Lecture Theatre
Title: Considering Death: The Third British Heart Transplant, 1969
Presenter: Dr Helen MacDonald (ARC Future Fellow, History, SHAPS)

Easter Break

Date/Time: Thursday 11 April, 1-2pm
Location: South Lecture Theatre
Title: ‘Men Loving Boys Loving Men’:  Gay Liberation, Child and Youth Sexuality, and The Body Politic Affair
Presenter: Scott de Groot (Endeavour Research Fellow, SHAPS and PhD Candidate, Department of History, Queen’s University, Canada)

Date/Time: Thursday 18 Apri, 1-2pm
Location: South Lecture Theatre
Title: International and Transnational History
Presenter: Professor Marilyn Lake (History, SHAPS)

Anzac Day (25 April)

Date/Time: Thursday 2 May, 1-2pm
Location: Atrium
Title: ‘We Earnestly Desire to Have These Children Live with US’:  Private Immigration Laws and the Early Days of Transnational Adoption to the United States, 1945-1961
Presenter: Associate Professor Karen Balcom (Department of History, McMaster University, Canada)

Date/Time: Thursday 9 May, 1-2pm
Location:
Title: To be advised
Presenter: 

Date/Time: Thursday 16 May, 1-2pm
Location: Atrium
Title: A Sinophile in Grub Street: Thomas Gordon on China and England
Presenter: Dr Giovanni Tarantino (Postdoctoral Fellow, ARC Centre for Excellence for the History of Emotions)

Date/Time: Thursday 23 May, 1-2pm
Location: Atrium
Title: Commemorating Childhood
Presenter: Professor Kate Darian-Smith (History, SHAPS)

Date/Time: Thursday 30 May, 1-2pm
Location: Atrium
Title: Crossing the Boundaries between History Writing and Archival Description: Stories in Stone: The Collection and Papers of Ernest Westlake
Presenter: Dr Rebe Taylor (ARC Postdoctoral Fellow, SHAPS) with Associate Professor Gavan McCarthy and Michael Jones (University Library)

Winter Recess (3 June to 28 July)

Date: Thursday, 21 March 2013
Time: 6.15pm – 7.30pm
Location:
Theatre 230
234 Queensberry Street (Building 263)
The University of Melbourne
CARLTON VIC 3053

Admission is free.
Bookings are required.
Seating is limited.

Visit the InTouch website to register for this event.

Speaker: Professor Richard Immerman

Information:

Professor Immerman’s intimate knowledge of the U.S. intelligence community is founded on three decades of scholarship and a rare first-hand look at intelligence operations in a high-level, two-year stint at the office of the Director of National Intelligence. His writings have shaped debates about the use of intelligence in the United States and elsewhere. In this talk, he shows that because the designers of the CIA did not intend covert operations to fall under its mandate, the CIA assumed this responsibility without adequate training and at the expense of its primary mission: intelligence collection and analysis. The result has been a history of operational and estimative failure, extending up to the Obama administration.

Brief Biography

Professor Richard Immerman is the Edward J. Buthusiem Family Distinguished Faculty Fellow in History and the Marvin Wachtman Director of the Center for the Study of Force and Diplomacy at Temple University. He has served as a high-ranking intelligence officer in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and has authored, coauthored and edited nine books, including prizewinning studies of the Eisenhower administration and of CIA covert operations. His latest book, to be published by Wiley Blackwell at the end of this year, is a history of the CIA titled The Hidden Hand.

Date: Tuesday, 12 March 2013
Time: 6.00pm – 7.30pm
Location:
Theatre 1, Old Geology (Building 155)
The University of Melbourne
PARKVILLE VIC 3010

Admission is free.
Bookings are required.
Seating is limited.

Visit the InTouch website to book for the event.

Speaker: Julia M. Brennan

Information:

In 2012 Thailand’s first royal textile museum and textile conservation lab opened in Bangkok. The Queen Sirikit Textile Museum represents the culmination of Her Majesty’s lifelong effort to revive the production of indigenous textiles and preserve Thailand’s diverse textile heritage. Establishing Thailand’s first national textile conservation lab and training centre affirms her commitment to long-term preservation of this heritage.

Since 2008, Julia has been the conservation consultant to the Queen Sirikit Museum of Textiles, Bangkok, Thailand. Conservation efforts focused on the problems inherent to the preservation of textiles in a tropical climate. The highlights of a multi-year effort included the preparation of over one hundred textiles for the inaugural exhibitions ; implementing the integrated pest management program and mitigation of a major mould and insect infestation; establishment of the humidity and temperature monitoring systems; training of the museum conservators; and the conservation team’s advisory and training role for implementing sustainable and practical solutions for the long term storage of textiles housed both at the museum and in the inner court’s traditional treasuries; and the conservation outreach and training objectives within Thailand and Southeast Asia.

Biography

Julia M. Brennan has worked in the field of textile conservation for over 26 years. Her company, Textile Conservation Services, founded in 1996, is based in Washington DC. She does a full range of textile treatments, display, installations, storage and survey work for institutions, historical sites and private clients. She frequently lectures to historical societies and collector groups on the care and display of textiles and is passionately committed to conservation outreach and the protection of cultural property. From 2000 to 2008, she led four textile training workshops in Bhutan, and did workshops in both Madagascar and Algeria. She is currently training a new generation of textile conservators in Thailand, and helping to establish the Queen Sirikit Museum of Textiles in Bangkok. Julia Brennan is a Professional Associate of the American Institute for Conservation, a Director of the Washington Conservation Guild, and founder of the Collections Care Network CCN. She received her Masters in art crime from ARCA The Association for Research in Crimes Against Art, 2010.

Date: Tuesday, 26 February 2013
Time: 7.30 – 9.30pm
Location:
Walsh Street House 290 Walsh Street, South Yarra

Information:

Zeitgeist I concerns the discipline of architecture. Architects choose how a building is made, what it is made from, and how it appears. These decisions call upon entirely different conditions of style. Ten architects from across Australia will describe how the necessity of style is answered directly in the medium of construction (materials, fabrication and the technique of building).

Inaugural speaker:
Brian Donovan, Principal BVN Donovan Hill / Adjunct Professor University of Queensland

Brian’s opening talk will describe the intelligence and processes which embed buildings with the knowledge of its designers and makers.

Date: Wed 12th of December
Time: 1.00-2.00pm
Location: Room 213, Old Arts (Building 149)

Free – all welcome!

Speaker: Dr Michael Lynch, Honorary Fellow in the School of Historical Studies at the University of Leicester, UK

Information:

Drawing on his recently published Routledge biography of Hitler, Dr Michael Lynch examines some of the myths concerning the emergence of Adolf Hitler as Nazi leader and his relationship with the German people during the Third Reich.

Short biography

Dr Michael Lynch is an Honorary Fellow in the School of Historical Studies at the University of Leicester, UK. His research interests are in modern European and Chinese history and his recent publications include: Mao (2004), Modern China (2006), Autocracy to Communism: Russia 1894-1941 (2008), and Nazi Germany (2012).
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Michael Lynch. ‘Hitler’ London and New York: Routledge, 2012