SHAPS Research Celebration

In April, students and staff from the School of Historical & Philosophical Studies came together to celebrate the rich diversity of research undertaken across the School over the last three years. 

The inaugural SHAPS Research Celebration, held in the Forum Theatre on the evening of 20 April 2023, provided a unique opportunity to recognise the achievements of SHAPS staff and postgraduate students, and to share research with colleagues across the School. In the midst of the pandemic in 2020–2023, the School’s scholarship continued to flourish despite the many difficulties of travel restrictions. Indeed, several projects featured were sustained in the midst of lockdown between collaborators across the world’s leading institutions.

Introduced by Discipline Chairs in Classics & Archaeology, the Grimwade Centre for Cultural Materials Conservation, History, History & Philosophy of Science, and Philosophy, the evening included a manifold list of outstanding scholarship including awards won, books and papers published, as well as milestones in ongoing work during the last few years.

Several awards and achievements of the School’s stellar PhD cohort were honoured, including the W.F. Albright Prize won by Archaeology PhD candidate Madaline Harris-Schober for her work on Iron Age Philistine Architecture, and the new book Birds in Roman Life and Myth (Routledge) based on Dr Ashleigh Green’s PhD thesis in Classics.

Among work featured from the Grimwade Centre was an important new book by the Centre’s Director, Professor Robyn Sloggett, Climatic and Environmental Threats to Cultural Heritage (Routledge).

A tranche of major new work in History was celebrated including a number of new books from honorary fellows. Dr Susan Foley’s Republican Passions: Family, Friendship and Politics in Nineteenth Century France (Manchester University Press) was hot off the press and Dr June Factor’s continuing contributions to Australian History were celebrated. June’s newest book Soldiers and Aliens: Men in the Australian Army’s Employment Companies during WWII appeared with Melbourne University Press in 2022.

From History & Philosophy of Science, the impressive continued achievements of the repliCATS team in History & Philosophy of Science – led by Professor Fiona Fidler – were recognised. repliCATS won the University of Melbourne Excellence Award for Interdisciplinary Research in 2022 and secured a major new grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to continue their important work evaluating the replicability and robustness of scientific publications.

The celebration concluded with the work of Philosophers including a new book by Dr Tristan Grøtvedt Haze, Meaning and Metaphysical Necessity (Routledge) and Head of School, Professor Margaret Cameron’s, new two-volume edition and study of Jean-Baptiste Du Bos’s Critical Reflections on Poetry and Painting (Brill).

A highlight of the evening was the donation by Professor David Runia (Professorial Fellow in Classics) of his monumental recent edition of the Placita of Aëtius to the Classics Library. This four-volume edition with extensive commentary is the culmination of over 30 years research and collaboration with Professor Jaap Mansfeld at the University of Utrecht.

As Dr Matthew Champion, the SHAPS Research Committee Chair explained in his opening address (reproduced below), from Academic Staff and Honorary Fellows to Teaching Associates and PhD students, research in SHAPS “speaks urgently to our identities, our ethics, our place in history, the kinds of people we want to be, the worlds we might seek to build, to honour, and to critique”.

Dr Matthew Champion’s Welcome Address on the Value of Humanities Research

Margaret has asked me tonight to speak about why humanities research matters. There are more answers to this question than humanly imaginable … and I have three minutes.

My first answer is simple: stick around tonight to learn! The humanities research here in SHAPS is its own answer: we are a rigorous, committed community of educators who write to advance knowledge in our respective fields, to speak to diverse audiences – academics, students (through our writing and our research-led teaching), the general public, policy makers, professionals and more.

Another path to follow might be to zero in on the ways in which our research allows us to pay attention to and conserve things that might otherwise be lost, avoided, silenced or written away. Why should we bother to engage with peoples, things, ideas, places, concepts, methods from other times and places? Even to pose that question is to enter the domain of humanities research, to ask questions that speak urgently to our identities, our ethics, our place in history, the kinds of people we want to be, the worlds we might seek to build, to honour and to critique.

Critique, is, of course central to all our disciplines. Our job in our research is to clarify our thinking; to seek out the ways that we delude ourselves, harm the world, exclude, and even in our inclusions sometimes also make new exclusions. But we also seek to build, to grow through our research. Sometimes that is through developing new conceptualisations, new methods; sometimes that is by mediating and translating between our world and other worlds where sense was, and continues to be, made differently.

One way in which we often do this in this School is through thinking about a fuller conception of time itself. The day-to-day world we inhabit often performs rites of purification, erasing the past, and allowing disturbing phantoms or projections of history to be summoned into being.

Humanities research is a site of powerful resistance here. If time is deeper than the now – our thoughts, practices, habits remaining shaped by so much more than the last minute – then we need people who spend time with times beyond the fleeting present moment. If we want to understand that with any nuance, and to think about how our being-in-time constrains and enables us to live well in the world, then we need to listen carefully to – and celebrate – the kind of humanities research we will encounter this evening.

Thanks to Prof. Margaret Cameron, Prof. Andy May, Discipline Chairs, and, in particular, Leanne Hunt, for their support and organisation of the event. Thanks also to photographer Carmelina Contarino.

 

Feature image: Dr Ashleigh Green (top right) with her book, Birds in Roman Life and Myth, flanked by PhD and ECR colleagues (clockwise from bottom right: Thomas Keep, Elena Heran, Maddi Harris-Schober, Dr Becky Clifton, and Larissa Tittl