SHAPS Digest (February 2025)
The first Grimwade Visiting International Scholar Jane Henderson, Professor of Conservation in the School of History, Archaeology and Religion at Cardiff University, arrived at the Grimwade Centre for Cultural Materials Conservation in February.
Jane is a key figure in the discipline of cultural materials conservation, Professor of Conservation at Cardiff, and Secretary-General of the International Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works. She has published widely and presciently on sustainability, influence and decision-making in conservation and is determined to work towards equality of access within the heritage sector, whether in terms of users engaging with collections or managers making choices for heritage policy.
During her two month residency at the Grimwade – thanks to the generosity of the Russell and Mab Grimwade Miegunyah Fund — Professor Henderson will be conducting research on the topic of “Risk Perception and Collection Care”, an area she believes needs moving beyond risk being understood in terms of tangible threats such as physical forces, vandalism or water to consider the more intangible such as concerns about appearing unprofessional, anxiety, or not being able to conform to sector norms.
In welcoming Professor Henderson, Professor Robyn Sloggett (Director, Grimwade Centre for Cultural Materials Conservation) said,
“I am delighted that the Miegunyah Fund has enabled this opportunity for Jane Henderson, one of the key thinkers in conservation globally, to engage with students, academics and practitioners in Melbourne and Australia more broadly, and I hope she can take some valuable insights back to Cardiff.”
As part of her stay at the Grimwade Centre, Jane will contribute to some of the MA in Cultural Materials Conservation subjects running during her visit; Jane will also present some of the initial findings from her residency in a public lecture and discussion with colleagues from the Grimwade Centre, followed by a reception for all disciplinary colleagues and interested parties welcome to attend.
A video recording of talks by Nicole Davis (PhD in History, 2023) and Laura Jocic (PhD in History, 2024), delivered as part of the ‘Material Histories’ series, hosted by Old Treasury Building in partnership with Deakin University and Australian Catholic University, is now available online.
Nic Davis’ talk explores modernity, luxury and consumer desire in Australia’s nineteenth-century arcades. These arcades were marketed as dreamworlds, where the desire for exclusive or exotic commodities could be indulged. Through advertising, displays and merchandising, arcade retailers particularly emphasised goods that had connotations of luxury, modernity, and cosmopolitanism, projecting the Australian colonies as places of progress, sophistication and civility. This presentation looks at some of the ways that business owners created consumer desire for their products, from the humble to the extraordinary.
Laura Jocic‘s presentation traces the history of a wedding dress from the Henty Costume Collection at the Kew Historical Society. The dress was made for Alice Henty when she married John Hindson in Melbourne in 1875, and then radically redesigned in 1943 when it was worn by three of her granddaughters at their weddings during World War II. The presentation discusses the dress and its alterations and how such a well-provenanced item can provide evidence of life cycles of a garment that was treasured and reused across generations.
Mark Edele (Hansen Chair in History) reflected on the tectonic shifts currently underway in the global system, for the Inside Story.
Cordelia Fine (HPS) was featured in The Financial Times (behind paywall) for her book Patriarchy Inc: What we get wrong about gender equality and why men still win at work (on which more below).
Cordelina Fine published a review of Rebecca L. Davis’s book Fierce Desires: A new history of sex and sexuality in America, for The Times Literary Supplement (behind paywall), and commented in Times Higher Education on the debate around youth gender medicine.
James Hogg (PhD candidate, History) published an article in Jacobin on the “Battle for Phoenix Street”. In 1933, Sydney Road, Brunswick, then a working-class area, became the site of an infamous clash between communists and police. During the Depression, the State Government had pursued draconian anti-protest laws to clamp down on political activity. Following numerous clashes with police, who had violently shut down public meetings, one young Melbourne communist scaled a moving tram to distract police while his comrade locked himself in a reinforced steel cage below. Their campaign sparked the “Battle for Phoenix Street,” which forced the repeal of draconian anti-protest laws. To this day, their victory is commemorated with a monument on Sydney Road.
Hansen Associate Professor Jenny Spinks (History) was interviewed by Suzanne Hill on ABC Radio’s Nightlife programme about the Gutenberg Bible and transformations in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century print culture.
Sarah Walsh (Hansen Lecturer in Global History) commented for Pursuit on the rise of authoritarianism in the United States, arguing that models of dictatorship in Latin America can help to understand these developments.
Sarah Walsh also featured on the podcast the Briefing, looking back on the first month of Trump’s presidency in an episode titled ‘Has President Trump Turned into Dictator Donald?’
Academic Publications
Nat Cutter (History), ‘Morocco Leather in Early Modern Britain: Towards a Transcultural History of Fine Leather Bookbindings’, Parergon
Morocco leather, a variety of high-quality leather used extensively in fine British bookbindings across the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, may be the most widespread extant material result of early Maghrebi-British cultural encounter. Integrating historical sources on trade and diplomacy with bindings from the John Emmerson Collection, State Library Victoria, this article presents material towards a new economic and cultural history of morocco leather in English society. It charts imported morocco’s rise, incorporation, and decline in favour of locally produced imitations; argues that the muddy terms ‘morocco’ and ‘turkey’ used for fine goatskins may be harmonised; and explores how the materiality of books might reveal morocco’s contemporary significance.
Nat Cutter, ‘Exile in Barbary: English-speaking Expatriates, Biblical Theology, and Mercantile Ethics in the Seventeenth-Century Maghreb’, Renaissance Studies
During the seventeenth century, thousands of English-speaking Protestants went to the Maghreb as captives, diplomats, traders, and travellers. Distant from the guiding and controlling hands of monopoly trading companies and the established churches, and placed under various pressures by non-Christian neighbours, colleagues, and captors, these Protestants faced the temptation (or opportunity) to compromise or abandon their Christianity and nationality to survive and thrive in their new circumstances. Most English-speaking residents, whether free expatriates, captives, or converts, felt a tension between attraction to local norms and longing for their lives at home. Using a vast and little-known collection of merchant correspondence and financial records, this article explores the tension of exile in the professional, material, religious, moral, and ethical lives and views of long-term free English-speaking residents (‘expatriates’) in the Maghreb. I argue that the biblical-theological framework of exile, widespread in contemporary English culture and brought to mind by their circumstances, provided many expatriates with a way of understanding their lives and a set of ethical principles for conducting them appropriately. By considering the ways in which British Protestants made use of this framework, historians can better make sense of their experiences of living in the early modern Islamic world.
Cordelia Fine (HPS), Patriarchy Inc.: What we get wrong about gender equality and why men still win at work (Atlantic, forthcoming March 2025)
Work — who does what tasks in society, and what they get in return — is at the heart of social justice. Even today, the gender system brings about a gendered division of labour that is both cause and consequence of men’s greater status and power. These dynamics limit what we can do and be, unfairly tip the scales when it comes to what we get in return, create gendered distortions of competence and productivity, and irrational resistance to reforms that would make our workplaces more productive and fairer. The effects seep well beyond workplaces, contributing to poverty, undermining health, putting pressure on family life and preserving females’ second-class status, and causing real harm and injustice for both sexes.
But progress in dismantling these arrangements is being stymied by two false visions that pervade mainstream debate and discussion.
The business-case Diversity, Equality & Inclusion (DEI) approach offers us band-aid solutions, sold to powerful stakeholders with promises of enhanced profits and performance, while “Different But Equal” perspectives reassure that contemporary arrangements are fair, and reflect natural differences between the sexes.
In response, Patriarchy Inc. offers perceptive and much-needed insight into persistent inequalities in who does what and who gets what, dispels the false visions of gender equality that distract us, and charts a path towards effective, common-sense reforms that will make workplaces and society fairer and freer for everyone.
Andrew Jamieson (Classics & Archaeology), ‘Objects from a University’s Antiquities Collection Enhance Ancient World Studies in a Purpose-Built Environment: The Case of Arts West at the University of Melbourne’, in Candace Richards and Elizabeth Minchin (eds), Mediterranean Collections in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand: Perspectives from Afar (Routledge, 2025)
This volume brings together academics and museum professionals responsible for ancient Mediterranean collections across Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand to report on their collections’ legacies and their ongoing value for research, education, and community engagement in the twenty-first century.
The volume is the first published session of the Mediterranaen Archaeology Australasian Research Community (MAARC), the organisers of which include Gijs Tol (Classics & Archaeology).
James Keating (History) with Joan Sangster and Ragnheiður Kristjánsdóttir, ‘Introduction,’ in Fia Cottrell-Sundevall and Ragnheiður Kristjánsdóttir (eds), Suffrage, Capital, and Welfare: Conditional Citizenship in Historical Perspective (Palgrave, 2024)
This book explores disenfranchisement and other voting barriers before and after the introduction of so-called universal suffrage. Focusing on economic voting restrictions, implemented through constitutional provisions, laws, state policies, and ad-hoc practices, we explore the many disqualifications barring people from voting in self-governing and aspiring liberal democracies, including poor relief dependency, lack of property or wealth, bankruptcy, tax debt, and low income. The notions of economic independence underpinning these exclusions built and reinforced unequal social structures, especially in terms of class, gender, race, age, civil status, and education. Examining suffrage from an economic perspective prompts new questions about democracy and political citizenship as contested concepts. This approach illuminates the histories of democratic practices, state formation, welfare states, the economic entanglements of political citizenship, gender and racial hierarchies, and the unique circumstances of colonial and settler-colonial democracies. After exploring the influence of Enlightenment ideas on liberal democratic notions of political citizenship, this introduction highlights themes that unite the chapters. These are centred around four concerns: poor relief; different experiences of suffrage at the national, provincial, and local levels; voter exclusion through policy and vernacular political practices; and colonialism.
James Keating (History), ‘Winning the Vote in a “World without Welfare”: Aotearoa New Zealand from Representative Government to a Universal Franchise, 1840–1933,’ in Fia Cottrell-Sundevall and Ragnheiður Kristjánsdóttir (eds), Suffrage, Capital, and Welfare: Conditional Citizenship in Historical Perspective (Palgrave, 2024)
Following the institution of responsible government in 1852, New Zealand rushed towards “full” democracy. Within seventeen years manhood suffrage was won and, by 1893, all adults could vote. The feat stood foremost among the “firsts” that allowed the colony to style itself as a “social laboratory.” Unlike most competitors in the “race” to universal suffrage, New Zealand’s franchise was not accompanied by citizenship disqualification for welfare recipients. Instead, Pākehā (white settlers) had long determined that welfare would not be a public provision. Rather than distribute aid, the state regulated migration to maintain wages and alienated Māori land to settlers. 1893 constituted a turning point; thereafter the colony gradually replaced its ad-hoc charitable aid system with an expansive notion of citizenship. The vote bridged the settlers’ “world without welfare” and the social experiments of the fin-de-siècle. Nevertheless, not all enjoyed the fruits of democracy. Attending to the subsequent contraction of the polity, women’s struggle for substantive equality, and the racialized limits of citizenship — extended unequally to Māori and denied to “Asiatic peoples” — this chapter troubles Pākehā claims to have built a truly democratic society and challenges linear narratives of franchise expansion with a contingent history of Aotearoa New Zealand’s path towards universal suffrage.
Iryna Skubii (Mykola Zerov Fellow in Ukrainian Studies, History), “Toward an Animal-Sensitive History of Famines: Animals, the Environment, and Soviet Famines in Ukraine,” East/West: Journal of Ukrainian Studies (Edmonton and Toronto).
Throughout history, famines have led to the deterioration of economic and environmental conditions in rural and urban areas, causing both people and domestic animals to die from malnutrition. However, histories of famine usually present them as human catastrophes alone, minimizing the fact that the impact of famine on animals is equally profound. At the same time that animals have suffered from hunger, they have been physically exploited for labour, in addition to being slaughtered and consumed en masse by humans due to food scarcity. In Ukraine, the Soviet collectivization of agriculture and dekulakization resulted in changes in human-animal relations and the forced confiscation of livestock. The lack of sufficient fodder for animals on both the collective farms and in households due to excessive requisitions brought domestic animals to the brink of death. Those taken into collective farms also lacked sufficient food, which resulted in the spread of animal epidemic diseases. Focusing on the famines of 1921–1923, 1932–1933, and 1946–1947 in Soviet Ukraine as case studies, this article examines the impact of famine on the survival, health, and living habitats of both domestic and wild animals, such as cats and dogs, cattle and horses, and gophers. In discussing an animal-sensitive history of famine, this article aims to answer three major theoretical and methodological questions: 1) Is there a place for animals in the history of famines? 2) What has historically been the impact of famine conditions on animals? 3) What does the history of animals in famines reveal about famines as historical events, animal-human and human-animal relationships, and how the dynamics of human-animal relations change in times of extreme crisis?
Appointments & Awards
Hansen Lecturer in Russian History Oleg Beyda‘s book For Russia with Hitler: White Russian Émigrés and the German-Soviet War (University of Toronto Press, 2024) has been named as a finalist in the European History category, in the 2025 Association of American Publishers (AAP) PROSE Awards.
The following have been appointed Graduate Researcher Academic Associates (GRAAs):
- Jacobin Bosman (History)
- Meg Challis (Classics & Archaeology)
- Georgia Comte (History)
- Manxin Liu (Sun) (Philosophy)
- Lily Moore (Classics & Archaeology)
- Carl Sciglitano (HPS)
- Thomas Spiteri (HPS)
- Nga Wing Tsang (Eric) (Philosophy)
- Noah Wellington (Classics & Archaeology)
- George Wood (Philosophy)
Yowhans Kidane (MA candidate, History) has been appointed Teaching and Learning Archivist in the University of Melbourne Archives.
Iryna Skubii (Mykola Zerov Fellow in Ukrainian Studies, History) has been awarded a grant by the Ukrainian Studies Foundation of Australia (Sydney) for a one-year project titled “The Association of Ukrainians in Victoria (AUV) Archive as a Source of Community Memory and Knowledge on the Defence of Human Rights in Ukraine.” The project team also includes Professor Emeritus Marko Pavlyshyn (Monash University) and Dr Yana Ostapenko (AUV Archive Manager and Archivist). The team will collect archival sources at the AUV Archive and other relevant materials about the development of the human rights movement in the 1970s and 1980s among the Ukrainian community in Victoria, with a particular focus on the Committee for the Defence of National and Human Rights in Ukraine. Our long-term plan for this project is to publish a collection of documents on the human rights movement in Australia. We hope that this project will promote the cohesion of Ukrainian communities in Victoria and set a positive example for preserving community archives for other Ukrainian organisations in Victoria and across Australia.
PhD completion
Thea Gardiner, The Paradoxical Life of Portia Geach (1873-1959) (PhD in History, 2025)
Portia Geach (1873-1959) was a prominent Australian artist and political activist. She was deeply embedded in many of the local, national, and international artistic and political communities that informed the cultural, social, and political landscapes of her time. From her early twenties, Geach crossed national borders in pursuit of her interests. Following an international artistic education, she became a well-known artist during the first half of the twentieth century. During the interwar period, her public profile was increasingly defined by her social activism as a leader in domestic feminism, political consumer movements, and the “Good Health Movement”.
Geach is not a typical figure of Australian history. She is not a brave pioneer or a labour unionist, nor is she a pillar of women’s suffrage. She does not fit neatly into categories of white-settler womanhood that were defined during her lifetime or that have been identified by historians. Neither a sexually liberated modern woman nor a moral crusader, she was the leader of an organisation of over 100,000 Australian housewives; she was an indefatigable organiser, making headlines for her campaigns on topics as diverse as price control for staple consumer products to modern household management. She crisscrossed the globe, participating in international women’s organisations, and finding, bringing home, and publicising new trends in feminist activism, art, healthy eating and physical fitness.
This thesis argues that Geach should be understood as a paradoxical and multifaceted subject, by emphasising the contradictory modes of gender identity, political ideology, and artistic practice informing Geach’s life. In doing so, it expands and complicates fixed narratives around gender, art, modernity, activism and national allegiance during the late nineteenth century and throughout the first half of the twentieth century. Despite her significant impact on Australian cultural and political life, Geach is a relatively unknown figure in Australian history. This thesis is not simply an attempt to write Geach into the national historical narrative. It represents an alternative view of modern Australian history by telling the story of a woman and the world she inhabited and shaped.
Supervisors: Prof. Joy Damousi, Prof. David Goodman
Research Higher Degree Milestones
The annual SHAPS Graduate Research Symposium was held in February, featuring the following presentations:
PhD completion presentations:
Dina Hussein, An Indigenous Working Class History of the Port City of Alexandria, Egypt: 1850-1919 (History)
This thesis sets off by engaging with the conventions of digital archiving as played out in the British Library’s newly digitized nineteenth-century Bonfils-Debbas photographic collection to understand the opportunities and challenges that the current surge in digitization bestows on the writing of subaltern working-class Indigenous history. It looks at how revisionist historians can read Alexandria’s digitized nineteenth-century Orientalist historical photographs capturing ancient monuments to write the Indigenous history of the local population. It borrows the central approach of microhistory by undertaking an intensive historical investigation of a small object (the photograph) and the place it captured (the vicinity of the Greco-Roman Pompey’s Pillar). It digs deeply into a few archival files—census and police records, as well as correspondence between the government bureaus in the period roughly between 1850 and 1919—to putpeople’s history back into the photograph and understand the lives of the Indigenous working-class migrants from the hinterland (the aghrab), who studies of Alexandria have historically marginalized.
Nasim Koohkesh, Degradation of Ultramarine Paint in Persian Illuminated Manuscripts (Cultural Materials Conservation)
The natural ultramarine, derived from lapis lazuli, was an essential colour widely used in the decoration of Persian illuminated manuscripts, often serving as the dominant background colour. This study investigates the mechanisms behind the degradation of ultramarine paint in historical Persian manuscripts and makes a significant and novel contribution to the field of material conservation science. By examining primary Persian sources from the 12th to 18th centuries, deep insights are gained into the types of blue pigments used in this art form and techniques for pigment preparation. It then analyses case study manuscripts from the University of Melbourne Manuscript Collection that exhibit signs of paint degradation. Through a comprehensive study of ultramarine paint under simulated conditions of historical manuscripts, this research identifies the factors contributing to its susceptibility to degradation. Finally, by comparing experimental results with observations from the studied manuscripts, the study proposes a theory explaining the degradation of the ultramarine paint in historical manuscripts.
MA completion presentation:
Fenella Pelanca, Modelling Textile Consumption and Production in Republican Italy (Ancient World Studies)
Although the manufacturing of textiles must have comprised a substantial industry during the Roman Republic, scholars have frequently characterised this economy as low-intensity and unproductive, owing to an apparent paucity of literary and archaeological evidence that suggests otherwise. Through quantitatively modelling hypothetical demand for textiles, and corroborating these figures with the archaeological and literary material, the current thesis argues against this view. Rather, it is proposed that the textile economy involved more intensive and varied modes of production than has previously been assumed, driven by high-intensity consumers like the army and sustained by the largely invisible labour of enslaved women.
PhD confirmation presentations:
Jacobin Bosman, Abominable Crimes, Queer Cases: The Settler Capitalist Body Politic at Its Outer Limits, 1835-1901 (History)
This thesis studies the relationship between settler sexual and gender transgression, and the formation of the body politic in colonial Victoria and South Australia. Connected geographically, economically and
socially, the colonies of Victoria and South Australia consistently leveraged the body politic as a site of both hope and anxiety in the period 1835-1901. Within this body, sexuality and gender exemplified a range of socio-political and economic concerns. While this observation has been well-researched in relation to ‘normative’ gender and sexuality, my research inverts this focus. By considering responses to, and outcomes for, settler sodomites, sapphics and men-women, I develop a nuanced understanding of the role of sexual and gender transgression in forming the colonial body politic. the formation of the body politic through analysing responses to, and outcomes for, settler sodomites, sapphics and men-women, a nuanced picture of transgression emerges. Consequently, I argue that perceptions of utility, conformity and civilisational meaning- rather than acts, identities, or modes of expression- defined the parameters of legal-political inclusion and exclusion.
Meg Challis, Translation as Reception: How Socio-Political Factors have Influenced the Anglophonic Translation Tradition of Classics Texts (Ancient World studies)
This paper explored how socio-political factors such as gender, sexuality and ethnicity have influneced the translation of Classical texts into English, with a specific focus on Sappho’s poetry. It then discussed how biased translations can impede monolingual students from fully understanding and engaging with the texts. Finally, it discussed different strategies for how educators can approach teaching Classical texts in translation to promote translation literacy.
Patrick Gigacz, The Electric Man: Cultures of Electrification in Melbourne, 1918-1950 (History)
As Melbourne emerged from the Great War, public electricity supply had reached most parts of the city, yet it remained an enigmatic emblem of the future metropolis; by the middle of the century, electricity was an ubiquitous feature of the urban landscape. How did Melburnians encounter this transition, and how did it reflect and refract their visions, ambitions, fears and anxieties for the future of their city? This thesis interrogates the electrification of Melbourne between 1918 and 1950 as a history of urban change, in which the urban landscape was inscribed with an enduring material record of negotiations between sweeping social and cultural transformations, and economic and technological pragmatism. By reading against the grain of official archives to make visible the traces of ordinary Melburnians and the complexities of their everyday lives, it responds to the dominance of progress narratives in histories of Australian engineering, and contributes to the growing field of urban history research that examines the encounters between city-dwellers and the physical fabric of their city.
Jesse Seeberg-Gordon, On the Diplomatic Sidelines: A Study of Australian-Soviet Relations (History)
The Soviet Union was the chief Cold War adversary of the West, Australia included. But despite the abundance of literature addressing the history of Cold War-era Australia, shockingly little attention has been given to the diplomatic relationship between Canberra and Moscow at this time. The goal of this study is to provide the first real glimpse into the diplomatic backroom between Australia and the Soviet Union, casting light on the previously classified nature of this relationship between an Asia Pacific middle power and a communist superpower. This project comes at a time when, with Russia projecting its military might in the Pacific region and having a secured a ‘no limits’ partnership with China, expertise on diplomacy with Russia and the post-Soviet space is sorely needed. So far, the main focus of the project has been to collate what little pre-existing literature there is on this subject into a coherent narrative of Australian-Soviet relations, from their beginnings in 1942 until 1959, the year in which relations were restored following their severance in the wake of the 1954 Petrov Affair. The archival work, focusing on 1959 onwards, has also begun, mainly using the archives of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. The presentation will offer a summary of the findings so far and give some predictive indications as to where the research might lead next.
Joshua Strong, Nation-building with Stalin: Socialist Realist Architecture in the Non-Russian Republics (History)
Stalinist architectural practice, rather than being a monolithic expression of the dictator’s will, nurtured a wide array of stylistic diversity. By the time of his death, each of the fifteen union republics within the USSR had its own distinct sub-variant of the official state style. That this occurred was a result of Stalin’s nationalities policy and the cultural doctrine of Socialist Realism. Unlike western-led Modernism, which de-emphasised cultural differences, Socialist Realism recognised the importance of speaking to the distinct national groups of the USSR in their own vernacular to deliver political messages and instil affiliation with the Soviet state. To this end, from 1934 Stalin mandated that all cultural production, including architecture, should be ‘national in form, socialist in content’, leading to a profusion of national styles. The process by which these styles emerged, and the diverse factors that shaped them, is the subject of my research. Along the way, the architecture of Stalinism reveals itself as multiple ‘architectures’—a self-contained world of national styles stretching across the Eurasian landmass.
Shouyue Zhang, Citizenship, Interracial Marriages, and Reverse Migration: Chinese Migrants in Texas from the Chinese Exclusion Era to World War II (History)
This project will trace some representative Texans with Chinese ancestry and their global migration across China, Mexico and the United States. I reveal several families’ Americanization and denaturalization in three or more generations. When the Chinese exclusion and xenophobia laws threatened their U.S. citizenship, Chinese American elites returned to China for social and economic factors. According to their family papers and oral history records, Chinese American entrepreneurs and professionals had the agency and mobility to move to the land where they had the most promising opportunities. This global micro-history presents insightful individuals’ strategies for exclusion, discrimination and even warfare.
PhD work-in-progress presentations:
Paul Fearon, Victoria’s Colonial Railways 1853-1883: Responsible Government and the Paradox of Political Control and Managerial Autonomy (History)
This thesis narrates the first thirty years of colonial railway management and administration, from when private railway companies were first incorporated in 1853 to the creation of the pioneering, independently managed Government Business Enterprise (GBE) in 1883. The thesis argues that the early politicians remained deeply ambivalent towards state ownership and control of its railways and that this was partly a recognition that political control was a double-edged sword. When popularly elected governments promote policies, they seek political control, but this also involves delegating responsibility for management and service delivery without losing public accountability for implementation and results. The paradox of control and delegation helps understand public administration’s more generalised problems, including state ownership, which economists and political scientists have long theorised. The paradox was and remains particularly acute when complex technological choices, public infrastructure, and private enterprise are involved. The thesis extends historical knowledge by correcting conventional interpretations of the early colonial period of railway building and management. It provides a deeper and more nuanced assessment of how railway management and governance evolved when private enterprise and the state built and operated railways.
William Hoff, “Many misdoers beynge of his clothinge”: Robin Hood and Affective Allegiance in Medieval and Early Modern Communities (History)
The wearing of livery in the Robin Hood tradition reached beyond literary storyworlds to the streets of medieval and early modern England, with both performers and fundraisers donning the green coat of Robin Hood and signifying their allegiance to his cause. The illegality of these actions, such as the wearing of livery badges in exchange for cash, was ignored by authorities who co-opted the tradition, folding it into existingcelebrations, in order to exploit the positive affect the outlaw had over his audiences. This paper seeks to explore this relationship to illustrate how the real-world adoption of Robin Hood’s aesthetic characteristics can reveal a crisis of allegiance amongst communities as they sought to openly align themselves with the tradition’s political ideals in times of instability and upheaval.
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Feature image: L–R: Dr Jonathan Kemp, Prof. Jane Henderson, Prof. Robyn Sloggett.