SHAPS Digest (July 2024)

The inaugural Australia-Georgia Symposium held in March to celebrate the longstanding ties between Georgia and the University of Melbourne, featured in the Faculty of Arts online news. The Symposium was co-hosted by SHAPS and the Faculty of Arts Research Initiative on Post-Soviet Space, in partnership with the Embassy of Georgia to the Commonwealth of Australia, the Honorary Consul of Georgia in Melbourne and the Georgian National Museum in Tbilisi.

Oleg Beyda (Hansen Lecturer in Russian History) published an article, ‘I Lived Hard and Fast but Good‘, in Hoover Digest on his work in the Hoover Collection at Stanford University, examining the life of Boris Pashkovskii, or “Pash”: nemesis of Robert Oppenheimer, fervent anti-communist, and cold-blooded spy chief.

Julia Bowes’ (History) commentary marking the tenth anniversary of Julia Gillard’s famous speech on misogyny was included in the Weekend Australian‘s round-up on Making Modern Australia (behind paywall).

Joy Damousi (History) was interviewed (in her capacity as a Collingwood football club supporter) on the ABC TV show ‘I Was Actually There‘, on AFL footballer Nicky Winmar’s 1993 stand against racism.

Spiridoula Demetriou (PhD in History, 2020) contributed to a series of essays in the exhibition catalogue for The Spirit of Byron: Philhellenism and the Greek War of Independence, currently showing at the Hellenic Museum. The exhibition ‘features a curated selection of works on paper from the Robertson Collection, tracing the politicised Philhellene movement prior to the outbreak of the revolt, its progress through the course and conclusion of the conflict, and Byron’s leading and guiding spirit throughout’.

The research of Jackie Dickenson (Honorary Fellow, History) on minute books was featured in a video about the University of Melbourne archives and the work of specialist ‘keyhole surgeons’ required to unlock some of the books in the collection.

Ashleigh Green (Teaching Associate, Classics & Archaeology) spoke about the first Royal visit to Australia in 1867 in her regular monthly Victorian Afternoons spot with Trevor Chappell on ABC Radio National.

Karen Jones (Philosophy) featured in Humanities21’s Corporate Conversations Series with a lecture on Emotion and Climate-Change Activism.

Thomas Kehoe (Honorary, History) presented on ‘Treating Cancer Under Medicare’ for Deakin University’s Centre for Contemporary Histories, available on their YouTube channel.

Catherine Kovesi (History) published an article ‘Majestic Murano‘, an extract from her National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) Italia lecture, in the NGV Magazine.

Synonymous with the tiny Italian island group of Murano, Venetian glass has a long, innovative and, at times, very dark history. In this article, Catherine Kovesi explores the complex history of Venetian glass through the NGV Collection.

Peter McPhee (Honorary, History), spoke at Heritage Council Victoria’s Making Public Histories Seminar for July on History in Film.

Konstantine Panegyres (McKenzie Fellow, Classics & Archaeology) was interviewed by 2SER 107.3 on how ancient Greeks and Romans kept fit.

Iryna Skubii (Mykola Zerov Fellow in Ukrainian Studies, History) gave an interview on SBS Ukrainian Radio (in Ukrainian) on her work and progress so far in her fellowship.

Elizabeth Tunstall (PhD in History 2022, now University of Adelaide) published a piece in Smithsonian Magazine titled ‘The Brothers Who Asserted Their Right to Free Speech in Tudor England‘. The article explores the turbulent parliamentary careers of the Wentworth brothers during the reign of Elizabeth I. With the royal succession undecided, the Wentworths sought to expand on the House of Commons liberty of free speech in order to pressure their Queen to establish the succession. 

Albrect Dürer’s Material Renaissance opened at the Arts West Gallery. The exhibition is part of the ARC-funded, multi-institutional research project Albrecht Dürer’s Material World – in Melbourne, Manchester and Nuremberg. The research team includes Jenny Spinks, Charles Zika and Matthew Champion (History), together with colleagues from University of Heidelberg and University of Manchester.

The exhibition features rare works sourced from the University of Melbourne and State Library Victoria collections including Dürer and his contemporaries’ prints and books to explore how and why materiality mattered in early modern Europe. The exhibition runs through until 29 November 2024.

Graham Willett (Honorary, History) spoke on 3CR Radio about the Australian Queer Histories Conference coming up in September and what we might learn from queer history to help us now.

The Winter term subject Egypt under the Pharaohs (ANCW20003), linked to the National Gallery of Victoria’s Melbourne Winter Masterpieces 2024 Pharaoh exhibition, was featured in a Faculty of Arts video.

Academic Publications

James Bradley (History & Philosophy of Science), Redefining a Discovery: Charles Bell, The Respiratory Nervous System and the Birth of the Emotions, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science

Charles Bell was famous for the discovery of the separate motor and sensory roots of the spinal and facial nerves, although in recent years his right to priority has been challenged by historians and scientists. But Charles Bell did discover something, even if it has not been accorded the status of a scientific fact. Between 1821 and 1823 he unveiled the ‘respiratory nervous system’, a distinct system of nerves that acted as the “organ of the passions”, which he then elaborated upon in his 1824 Essays on the Anatomy and Philosophy of Expression. As Bell and his allies attempted to claim priority in the spinal and facial nerves, the respiratory nerves were pushed to the background, subordinated to the motor and sensory nerves. This essay, therefore, redefines Charles Bell’s major discovery as the ‘respiratory nerves’, providing a detailed description of their anatomy and physiology and the way in which they underwrote Bell’s theory of the emotions. It also demonstrates how his aesthetics were intertwined with his research programme. It then connects the respiratory nerves to Thomas Dixon’s assertion that Bell was one of the founders of the modern psychological category of the emotions, including the impact that Bell had upon William James’s seminal article ‘What is an Emotion?’

Nicole Davis (Forum, PhD in History, 2023) reviewed Anna Temby’s book, Governance and Public Space in the Australian City: Negotiating Public Order in Brisbane, 1875–1914 (Routledge, 2024), for History Australia.

Anna Temby’s book takes us into in the public and semi-public spaces of central Brisbane during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, examining the intersections between its uses and governance, as well as the lived experiences of its inhabitants. Temby weaves together a story of the city as seen through diverse sources including print media, official colonial, state and municipal documents, and visual culture. Throughout the book, Temby complicates media and government representations of Brisbane’s urban milieu, questioning whether they were tangibly observable facts or fabricated narratives driven by collective desires to organise space, morals, and behaviour.

Karen Green (Professorial Fellow, Philosophy), The Vision of Money in the Writings of Christine de Pizan, in Joseph J Tinguely (ed), The Palgrave Handbook of Philosophy and Money, Volume 1: Ancient and Medieval Thought (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024).

Medieval Christian author Christine de Pizan’s economic thought matured and developed over the fourteen years of her career, during which she turned from allegory, poetry, and the citation of authorities toward realistic description, prose, and original theorising. Her earliest representations of wealth pit the evils of greed and riches against the higher values of wisdom and virtue. In writing the biography of Charles V, she came to recognise that the circulation of money is an important means for fostering the health of the body politic. As a result, in subsequent writings, she insisted that economic management and good public administration should strive to ensure that money’s circulation does not encourage vice but instead fosters and rewards virtue.

Catherine Kovesi (History), A World of Goods, in A Cultural History of Leisure, Volume 3: A Cultural History of Leisure in the Renaissance (Bloomsbury, 2024).

The dissemination and percolation of money to, and the ability for purchase by, a much wider group below traditional elites distinguishes the Renaissance period and created a new cultural economy in which money, leisure, goods, and desire were ineluctably intertwined. A burgeoning merchant economy provided adequate income to liberate many people from the daily drudgery of working merely for the necessities of life. With this newfound leisure, they could begin to conceive of objects; to imagine, commission, fondle, gaze at, relish, share or restrict a world of goods. At the intersection of leisure, imagination, and desire, a kind of alchemical process occurred in which objective value was no longer necessarily key to an object’s subjective value, and in which an object, often quite mundane in and of itself, might be burnished into a pressing necessity. Leisure enabled the imaginative leap into which an object takes on meaning, and it is a world of goods pregnant with multiple and often complex meanings that, as this chapter argues, lies at the heart of the culture of leisure in the Renaissance.

Holly Lawford-Smith (Philosophy), Is Inclusion Good? in Extreme Philosophy (Routledge, 2024)

There’s a huge emphasis on inclusion in this cultural moment: inclusion is good, exclusion is bad, end of story. But this good/bad dichotomous thinking is usually presented by telling only the ‘good’ side of the story – namely, describing the goods of inclusion to those who would otherwise be excluded. As with any complex moral issue, it’s important to put all considerations on the table before making an assessment. Just as the benefits of restricted speech should be weighed against the harms of compelled speech, the benefits of inclusion (to those who would otherwise be excluded) should be weighed against the harms of inclusion (to those who would otherwise exclude others). I argue that sometimes the exclusion of one group is instrumental in the ultimate pursuit of another group’s inclusion; and sometimes the pursuit of important values other than inclusion supports exclusion, including freedom of thought, freedom of expression, and freedom of association.

Laura Schroeter and François Schroeter (Philosophy), Meanings as Species in Communication and Inquiry, Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy

Can mere conceptual competence explain the apriori? Many contemporary theorists believe that conceptual competence grounds apriori conceptual truths – and that this fact helps explain how thinkers can have apriori justification for accepting these truths and reasoning in accord with them. In this chapter, I’ll examine several contemporary defenses of the conceptual approach to apriority in order to clarify their core commitments about the nature of concepts. The common thread, I’ll argue, is a picture of concepts that combines a conceptual role model of conceptual competence with a rationalising approach to the determination of semantic contents. My first aim is to show how this model of concepts has the potential to ground apriori truth and justification. My second aim is to show how the model involves problematic commitments about concepts, which can be avoided on an alternative relational model of concepts.

Evan Smith and Jimmy Wintermute (PhD in History, 2022). Once it was Ireland, Now it is Kenya: Anti-colonialism and Internationalism in the Pages of the Connolly Association’s Irish Democrat in the 1950s–60s. Irish Studies Review

Irish Democrat was the paper of the Connolly Association, a diaspora organisation established to build support for Irish republicanism within the British labour movement. The Connolly Association and the Irish Democrat had strong links to the Communist Party of Great Britain, which advocated for a peaceful mass movement to challenge the British presence in Northern Ireland and to remove discrimination faced by Catholics in the Six Counties. Encouraged by the wave of decolonisation across the British Empire in the 1950s–60s, both the CA and the CPGB saw the struggle against Unionist rule in Northern Ireland as analogous to events in Asia, Africa and the Middle East. This paper explores the narration of anti-colonial and national liberation movements elsewhere in the British Empire in the pages of the Irish Democrat and the overdetermination of Irish national questions by post-war discourses of radical decolonisation. It also traces the formation across difference of specific solidarities between the Connolly Association and other migrant communities within the multicultural political geography of post-war Britain, including out of campaigns against racial discrimination, the ‘colour bar’ and post-war immigration controls.

Appointments & Awards

Bronwyn Beech Jones (PhD in History, 2024) has been appointed to a one-year fixed-term position as Assistant Lecturer in Gender History. Dr Beech Jones will be teaching the subjects Gender, Rights, and Power in History (HIST10017) and Gender in History, 1800 to the Present (HIST20090), and will also be part of the teaching teams for Making History (HIST30060) and History, Memory, and Violence in Asia (HIST90026). 

Simon Farley (PhD in History, 2024) has been appointed to a three-year fixed-term position as Assistant Lecturer in History. In this role, Dr Farley will be teaching the subjects Britain’s Empire: Power and Resistance (HIST20089), The Long History of Globalisation (HIST40037) and (together with Jenny Spinks) A History of Violence (HIST30068).

Hannah Gould has been appointed to a three-year fixed-term position as Lecturer in Buddhist Studies (History & Philosophy of Science). Dr Gould is a cultural anthropologist studying death, Buddhism and material culture in Australia and North-East Asia. Alongside academic research and publishing, she creates public programs to advocate for more equitable systems of deathcare for all. Dr Gould also holds a Melbourne Postdoctoral Fellowship (2022–2025) for the project Transnational Futures of Deathcare in the Asia-Pacific.

Dan Halliday (Philosophy) is part of a team awarded a three-year grant on housing justice through Germany’s Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Foundation).

Earlier this year we were very pleased to welcome Caroline Kyi (Grimwade Centre) as Assistant Lecturer to teach in the Grimwade Centre’s Masters program. Having worked privately as a specialist on architectural finishes and wall paintings, Caroline will be sharing her conservation science background and professional skills with both students and staff at the Grimwade Centre.

Kate Lynch (Philosophy), together with Christopher Lean (Macquarie University), won the 2024 Australian Association of Philosophy Media Prize for their ABC Radio Philosopher’s Zone episodes, De-Extinction Part 1 & De-Extinction Part 2. The AAP website notes:

The winning entry focuses on the timely topic of de-extinction. This important topic is explored across a two-part podcast in which Lean and Lynch draw on their unique expertise in both philosophy and biology to explore the ethical and scientific dimensions of bringing new species back from extinction. This is particularly important in the Australian context, where the Thylacine has been targeted for de-extinction. The piece thus highlights the importance of this difficult topic to the complex ethical landscape of environmental conservation in Australia. The piece exemplifies many of the qualities of excellent public philosophy. It helps to generate public interest in philosophical contributions to science; it is clear and accessible, and it puts philosophy squarely into the public eye.

Paper conservator Lucilla Ronai has been appointed Assistant Lecturer in the Grimwade Centre (commencing September 2024). Luci joins us from the National Library of Australia where she was a Senior Conservator and manager of their new acquisitions programme.

Chips Sowerwine (Emeritus Professor, History) received a Federation of Australian Historical Societies Fellowship, presented at the Royal Historical Society of Victoria AGM in June.

In July we also welcomed to our team as Assistant Lecturer, objects conservator and Grimwade alumna Victoria Thomas, who will mainly concentrate on teaching into treatment-based subjects, sharing with students her expertise on textiles and organic materials.

Caroline Tully (Honorary Fellow, Classics & Archaeology) has been selected to participate in the artist residency at DOMUS in the town of Galatina, southern Italy. Caroline’s artistic project is titled The Theatre of Spirits: Trance Performances and Séance Phenomena in the Australian Spiritualist Movement, 1870–1950. She will also be researching folkloric and environmental aspects of the Puglia region such as the Tarantism phenomenon, where (mainly) women were allegedly bitten by the tarantula and became possessed; and the ecological problem of the death of olive trees affected by rapid desiccation, CoDiRo, due to the proliferation of the Xylella Fastidiosa bacterium (appeared around 2013).

PhD Completion

Amy Hodgson (PhD in History, 2024) The Cost of Truth-Telling: An Oral History of Staff and Testifiers’ Experiences of Chile’s Truth Commissions

The Chilean government created two truth commissions to investigate human rights abuses committed during the 1973–90 Pinochet dictatorship. Using primarily oral history, this thesis examines how victim communities and commission staff experienced the truth commissions’ operations. It argues that in their efforts to uncover abuses, at times, the 1990–91 Rettig Commission and the 2003–04 Valech Commission effectively perpetuated, reinforced, or repeated dictatorial legacies. Other times, participating in and/or cooperating with the commissions proved redemptive or reparative for both staff and testifiers.

Supervisors: Associate Professor Julie Fedor, Dr Roland Burke (La Trobe); formerly Professor Ara Keys (now Durham).

Research Higher Degree Milestones

Alice Margrison (PhD Completion Seminar, History) Non-Violent Revolution and the Russian Liberals, 1900-1917

This thesis explores the tactics of the liberal opposition in Late Imperial Russia using theories of non-violent revolution. This focus aims to shift discussion from the existing historiography’s focus on how ‘modern’ or ‘developed’ Russia was as the measure for the potential for the development of a liberal democracy, amounting to a kind of Russian Sonderweg. Using a mix of journals and memoirs this thesis argues that after the failure of the Vyborg manifesto, the liberals turned away from vital grassroots organisation building which left them disconnected from the desires of the broader population and lacking the mass support vital to staging a successful non-violent revolution.

Steven Kambouris (PhD Completion Seminar, HPS) Assessing Computational Reproducibility: Fidelity, Tensions, and Implications

Computational reproducibility is a frequently extolled ideal in science, but how is it achieved in practice? How often do scientists fulfil the requirements for computational reproducibility checks (i.e., data and code sharing), and when they do, how accurate are the reproductions? Have incentives (e.g., badges) been effective at improving reproducibility? The first two parts of my thesis address these questions empirically, using examples in ecology and psychology. In the third part (the focus of this seminar), I examine how the concept of computational reproducibility is used by scholars in HPS and meta-research communities and describe tensions between the different accounts.

Student Clubs & Societies

The Unimelb History Society has elected a new committee for 2024:

• President: Guo Zheng Choe (Tom)
• Secretary: Caitlyn Sproston
• Treasurer: Ravin Tillekeratne
• Education Officer: Paris Cabouret
• General Committee Members: Charlotte Ni Choncheanainn, Viktor Borgstroem, Liam Luke

Other Happenings

^{Feature image: Unimelb History Society Committee at the 2024 SHAPS Ball. Left to Right: Liam Luke, Viktor Borgstroem, Charlotte Ni Choncheanainn, Paris Cabouret, Caitlyn Sproston, Ravin Tillekeratne, Guo Zheng Choe (Tom).}