SHAPS Digest (April 2023)
Lucyna Artymiuk (PhD candidate, History) was interviewed (in Polish) by SBS to mark the 30th anniversary of the founding of the Polish Museum and Archive in Australia
Lieve Donnellan (Classics & Archaeology) was featured on the Tides of History podcast in an episode on ‘Greek Colonies and Networks in the Iron Age‘.
Tom Kehoe (Honorary Fellow, History) was interviewed by the ABC about his work on the history of anti-smoking ads in Australia.
David Palmer (Honorary Fellow, History) was interviewed by Aftonbladet (in Swedish) about South Korean President Yoon’s agreeing to drop compensation claims of former Korean forced labourers against Japanese companies, in meeting with Japanese Prime Minister Kishida, which was met with protests in South Korea.
Alysha Redston (MA in Cultural Materials Conservation, 2017) was interviewed for the AICCM (Australian Institute for the Conservation of Cultural Material) e-news, ‘Meet a Conservator’ series. Alysha discussed her practice as a conservator and her role as the inaugural time-based media conservator at the National Gallery of Australia.
Academic Publications
Greg Burgess (Honorary Fellow, History), ‘The Ligue des Droits de l’Homme and the “Right to Life” in the 1930s’, Contemporary European History
In 1930s France, aspirations for a radical transformation of social, economic and political order stirred a movement to revise the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen. New rights expressed these new aspirations in a genre and a language of rights deeply embedded in French history.
Liam Byrne (Honorary Fellow, History), ‘Social Democracy’s Muted Revival’, The Political Quarterly
After a long malaise, social democracy is making a muted revival. What is the place of social democracy in the political and economic order that is emerging from the Covid-19 pandemic, and the economic crisis that has followed in its wake? Patterns have begun to emerge across the party family that are indicative of how social democracy is defining itself for the period to come. This article briefly surveys the revival of social democracy in three countries that have been historic bastions of the creed: Germany, Britain and Australia. It considers three particularly potent trends in this social democratic moment that reveal the movement’s current character and the challenges it faces: building an ongoing coalition amid changing electorates; seeking transformation in an era of constraint; and a lack of ideological coherence. It considers what this muted resurgence suggests about the prospects for the centre-left.
Tony Coady (Professor Emeritus, Philosophy), ‘Religious reasons, natural reasons and “exclusionism“: A commentary on Robert Audi and William Smith, “Religious Pluralism and the Ethics of Healthcare”‘, Bioethics
Susan K Foley (Honorary Principal Fellow, History), Republican Passions: Family, Friendship and Politics in Nineteenth-century France (Manchester University Press)
Republican passions demonstrates the crucial role of family and friendship networks in the creation of the French Third Republic. Based on the family archives of Léon Laurent-Pichat, journalist, Deputy and Life Senator, this study paints a rich picture of republican intimacy, sociability and political activity during the Second Empire and early Third Republic. It explores republican friendships and family connections as men and women worked together for the cause. In republican circles, as the book illustrates, the intimate and political realms were not separate but deeply intertwined and interdependent.
“Susan Foley’s Republican Passions is a beautifully written reconstruction of the life of Léon Laurent-Pichat, a man at the heart of republican politics in second half of the nineteenth century. Based on a rich trove of archival materials, it demonstrates how the new political formations of the era were supported by personal ties, emotional dispositions and cultural practices and sheds new light on the origins of the Third Republic.” – Sarah Horowitz (Professor of History, Washington and Lee University)
Shannon Gilmore-Kuziow (Teaching Associate, History), ‘Perugino’s Sistine Chapel Altarpiece: The Papal Liturgy and Pope Sixtus IV’s Promotion of the Marian Cult’, Renaissance Quarterly
This article presents the first sustained analysis of Pietro Perugino’s destroyed Assumption of the Virgin altarpiece that Pope Sixtus IV commissioned for the Sistine Chapel. The study reconstructs the frescoed altarpiece’s ritual setting and relates it to imagery associated with Sixtus’ promotion of the controversial Immaculate Conception feast.
José Antonio Gonzàlez Zarandona, Emma Cunliffe and Melathi Saldin (eds), Routledge Handbook of Heritage Destruction.
The Routledge Handbook of Heritage Destruction presents a comprehensive view on the destruction of cultural heritage and offers insights into this multifaceted, interdisciplinary phenomenon; the methods scholars have used to study it; and the results these various methods have produced.
This volume features contributions by José Antonio Gonzàlez Zarandona, whose PhD in the School of Culture and Communications was co-supervised by Louise Hitchcock, and James Lesh (PhD in History, 2018). James Lesh’s chapter (co-authored with David Nichols) examines three Melbourne examples: SX Towers, Southern Cross Hotel, and Eastern Market.
Karen Green (Honorary Professorial Fellow, Philosophy), ‘Women’s Reception of Kant, 1790–1810′, Journal of History of Ideas
This article contributes to the re-evaluation of narratives in the history of ideas that have failed to consider women’s writings. The laudatory assessment of Kant as a philosophical innovator promoted by Germaine de Staël is questioned and his moral epistemology examined in relation to that of Elise Reimarus, Catharine Cockburn, Catharine Macaulay, and Isabelle de Charrière. The moral and political philosophies of the first three, grounded in natural law, are used to undermine Staël’s claim that Kant’s moral philosophy offers a significant advance over Locke’s, a conclusion reinforced through a reading Charrière’s critique of Kant.
Adrian Howe (Honorary Principal Fellow, History), Crimes of Passion Since Shakespeare: Red Mist Rage Unmasked (Routledge)
Bringing key Shakespeare texts into dialogue with feminist socio-legal research, this book investigates the notion of a ‘crime of passion’ – indicatively, wife-killing.
Its key concern is to bring attention to a cultural and legal revolution widely overlooked even in the law field where it occurred. In 2009, the English Parliament passed a controversial law abolishing the defence of provocation. Explaining the new law, reformers said that this so-called ‘heat of passion’ defence had allowed men to get away with murder by blaming the victim. Abolishing it in cases of alleged ‘infidelity’ would ‘end the culture of excuses’. Unpacking what was at stake in the reformers’ revolutionary challenge to the English law of murder’s age-old concession to ‘human frailty’ in ‘red mist’ rage cases, this book charts passion’s progress in wife-killing cases over the centuries. It commences in the early modern era when jurists were busy distinguishing murder from manslaughter and, contemporaneously, Shakespeare set about querying culturally inscribed excuses for femicide in his plays, Titus Andronicus and Othello.
This book will appeal to feminist and socio-legal scholars, criminologists and those working in the fields of law and literature, legal theory and Shakespeare studies. More widely, it will appeal to anyone interested in so-called ‘crimes of passion’.
Thomas Keep (PhD candidate, Classics & Archaeology), ‘The Mernda VR Project: The Creation of a VR Reconstruction of an Australian Heritage Site.’ Journal of Computer Applications in Archaeology.
The Mernda VR Project is an initiative exploring applications of hypothetical digital reconstructions of rural archaeological sites, with an aim to investigate the efficacy of virtual reality as a means of fostering engagement and interest in rural archaeology. The project combined LiDAR data, photogrammetry, 3D digital modelling, and virtual tour software.
Andrew J May (History), ‘The Troubled House: Families, Heritance and the Reckoning of Empire’, Genealogy
Critical family history expands the frame of a life story beyond the accumulation of facts and figures to an acknowledgement of context, a deeper understanding of structure, a reckoning of circumstance and response and a comparison across time and space. This article explores the complexity of family history in the context of colonial pasts in British India; the possibilities offered by group analysis of colonial actors; and the moral obligation of the family historian to address difficult pasts in all their complexity. Through the migratory careers and migration stories of colonial actors—the dislocated people, objects and memories that sustain identity—a longitudinal dimension is added to family history. Taken collectively, the family history of a domiciled British community in India reveals not just important blood ties, but critical associational links and shared characteristics that structure experience and enhance power. Colonial power must always be measured by its negative effects, but is also relational, situational, variable, commutable and resisted. The article further reflects on the ways in which critical research into settler-colonial migrations delivers our family histories to the doorstep of the present; their possibilities for informing truth-telling at individual and national levels; and the need for a pedagogy of historical contextualisation and ethical citizenship.
Kate McGregor (History) and Ruth Indiah Rahayu, ‘Umi Sardjono (1923–2011) and the Quest to Build a New Society for Indonesian Women‘, in Francisca de Haan (ed), Palgrave Handbook of Communist Women Activists around the World
This chapter presents a biography of Umi Sardjono, one of the most important women activists on the political left in Indonesia in the period of the 1940s to 1960s. We focus on her ongoing efforts to build a new, more just society for Indonesian women, based on a strong commitment to the rights of working women. She believed this goal could only be achieved by ending imperialism and implementing a socialist society. As Head of one of the most progressive women’s organisations, Gerakan Wanita Indonesia (The Indonesian Women’s Movement, Gerwani), Umi Sardjono advocated for reforms and ongoing struggles against the sources of oppression to improve the position of all women in society. Using interviews with Umi Sardjono, her speeches, press articles, and reports she wrote for Gerwani and the Indonesian parliament, the chapter reflects on her views about how to achieve gender equality in the context of a country that was simultaneously engaged in an ongoing process of decolonisation.
David Palmer (Honorary Fellow, History), ‘Ignoring the History of Foreign Forced Labour at Japan’s “Sites of the Meiji Industrial Revolution”‘, in Tina Burrett and Jeff Kingston (eds), Routledge Handbook of Trauma in East Asia
This handbook explores trauma in East Asia from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century, assessing how victims, perpetrators and societies have responded to such experiences and to what extent the legacies still resonate today. Mapping the trauma-scape of East Asia from an interdisciplinary perspective, including anthropologists, historians, film and literary critics, scholars of law, media and education, political scientists and sociologists, this book significantly enhances understandings of the region’s traumatic pasts and how those memories have since been suppressed, exhumed, represented and disputed. In Asia’s contested memoryscape there is much at stake for perpetrators, their victims and heirs to their respective traumas. The scholarly research in this volume examines the silencing and distortion of traumatic pasts and sustained efforts to interrogate denial and impunity in the search for accountability across East Asia, with chapters on China, Hong Kong, Japan, Russia, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan and Vietnam.
John Wilkins (Honorary Fellow, HPS), Understanding Species (Cambridge University Press)
Are species worth saving? Can they be resurrected by technology? What is the use of species in biomedicine? These questions all depend on a clear definition of the concept of ‘species’, yet biologists have long struggled to define this term. In this accessible book, John S. Wilkins provides an introduction to the concept of ‘species’ in biology, philosophy, ethics, policy making and conservation. Using clear language and easy-to-understand examples throughout, the book provides a history of species and why we use them. It encourages readers to appreciate the philosophical depth of the concept as well as its connections to logic and science.
‘The species problem is a vexing and important one, and John Wilkins has done more than anyone else to dig into its history and integrate it with philosophy past and present. Thus he was the perfect author for this book, which is a wonderful, accessible entryway to the diverse set of issues bearing on why species have been such a ‘thing’ for 2000 years. My own conclusion is to follow Darwin and acknowledge the species rank is a meaningless human construct – the full tree of life is what matters, not just the single level within it arbitrarily called species. But to decide whether to agree with me or not, you need to absorb the content in this book.’ — Brent D. Mishler (author of What, if Anything, are Species?, Distinguished Professor of Integrative Biology, University of California, Berkeley)
‘The species problem is one of the most complex issues in evolutionary biology and philosophy of biology, and not many would have succeeded in producing a comprehensive overview of it and doing justice to both science and philosophy. Written by one of the most eminent scholars in the field, Understanding Species is an informative and, due to the author’s eloquent writing style, at the same time also very entertaining read. It both quenches your thirst for knowledge and makes you want to dive deeper into the topic. What more can you ask of a book? Highly recommended!’ — Frank E. Zachos (Natural History Museum Vienna, Austria, author of Species Concepts in Biology (2016))
‘A species is like jazz: you know one when you meet it, but on closer inspection it’s very hard to define. In this engaging book, John Wilkins guides us deftly through the philosophical minefield of what species are, how you recognise them, and how trying to find definitions for species is increasingly important for science and conservation.’ — Henry Gee (author of A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth)
‘This book is a stunning achievement, and I think nobody other than Wilkins could have tied together the disparate perspectives needed to write it. Species problems are notoriously thorny and multi-disciplinary, yet Wilkins manages to shine great light on them. Most impressively he does this in ways that many people, rather than just species experts, can understand, engage, and enjoy. The writing is snappy, the choice of topics smart, and the rewards for readers will be many.’ — Matthew J. Barker (Associate Professor of Philosophy, Concordia University, Montréal)
Appointments
Melissa Afentoulis (PhD in History, 2019) has been elected to the University’s Alumni Council.
Fiona Fidler (HPS/Faculty of Science) will serve as Deputy Associate Dean Research Grants next semester.
Awards
Nicole Davis (PhD in History, 2023) is a recipient of a 2023 Jack Cross Fellowship, awarded annually by the Friends of South Australia’s Archives to support researchers of South Australian history to pursue research in archives, with a focus on the use of South Australian resources. Nicole will use the fellowship to examine the undigitised material in institutions such as State Library South Australia and City of Adelaide Archives relating to the Adelaide and Gays Arcades, a heritage complex in Rundle Mall. It will look at their significance of these buildings to the city of Adelaide through to the present day, as part of a larger project exploring the nineteenth-century arcades of Australia, following on from the research in Nicole’s PhD thesis.
PhD completions
Nicole Davis (PhD in History, 2023), ‘Nineteenth-Century Arcades in Australia: History, Heritage & Representation’
This thesis explores the social and spatial histories of Australia’s nineteenth-century arcades from their beginning in Melbourne in 1853, with an emphasis on their first half century of development. It explores the retail, leisure and business activities they hosted and the lived experiences of the people who worked and played in these spaces. The thesis explores their current place in the Australian urban imagination and how the historic representation of the arcades shapes our present-day understanding and perceptions of these buildings.
The work examines how the arcade form was idealised in print and visual culture to represent particular notions of civilisation, progress, modernity, and cosmopolitanism in Australia during the second half of the nineteenth-century. Undertaking close analysis of a wide range of sources, it works to challenge and disrupt nostalgic perspectives that developed during this period and that continue to influence our perception in the present day. It argues that the histories of the arcades in Australia (as elsewhere) are far more nuanced than has previously been understood. Rather than rarefied sites of leisure and pleasure for the middle classes, they were sites where Australians from all walks of life played, worked and experienced the diversity of urban life and what urban life had to offer.
The thesis breaks down dichotomies of metropole and periphery that often characterise Australian urban spaces in juxtaposition to the metropoles of Britain, Europe or North America. To do this, it locates the Australian arcades within a transnational context, seeing them as nodes within global networks of exchange: of ideas, people, and things. Further, it explores the arcades not only of the coastal capitals but also considers those constructed in regional areas with a view to broadening our understanding of what it meant to be urban in this period in Australia.
Supervisors: Professor Andrew May, Professor David Goodman
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