SHAPS Digest (May 2025)
A discussion on the new book by Oleg Beyda (History), For Russia with Hitler: White Russian Emigres and the German-Soviet War, was hosted by Arizona State University.
Purushottama Bilimoria (Principal Fellow, Philosophy) took part in a session ‘Engaging Philosophies of Religion’, as part of Religion in Conversation: The Interview Series, hosted by the Humanities Religious Studies Collective at Western Sydney University.
An audio version is also available.
Martin Bush (HPS) and Tanya Hill looked back on the history of planetariums in an article for the Conversation.
Becky Clifton (Classics & Archaeology) was featured in the University’s Staff Spotlight series.
Mark Edele (Hansen Chair in History) commented for the Conversation on Putin’s intensification of the air bombardment of Ukraine, arguing that this is likely an attempt to exploit what Putin views as the weakness of Western support for Ukraine. As of the start of June, this article had been read almost 16,500 times; it was also published in Ukrainian by Novoe Vremia.
Mark Edele also wrote an article for the Australian (behind paywall) on ‘How to deal with Russia’s quest for great power status’.
Cordelia Fine (HPS) was interviewed by RRR about her new book Patriarchy Inc. and was reviewed in the Times Literary Supplement (behind paywall). She also discussed her book on the Now and Men podcast.
Samara Greenwood (PhD candidate, HPS) was interviewed for the Philosopher’s Zone on ABC Radio National about her research on the impact of second wave feminism on primatology.
Tamara Lewit (Fellow, Classics & Archaeology) and Tania Cammarano were interviewed by ABC Radio about their collaboration with CO.AS.IT. for National Archaeology Week (segment at 1hr 4 mins via the link above).
Christopher D. Parkinson (PhD candidate, Classics & Archaeology) published an article in the Conversation on ancient Roman cookbooks, culinary practices, daily diet and food culture.
Nicole Tse (Cultural Materials Conservation) was featured in a video on the Faculty of Arts social media channel on the restoration work being conducted at See Yup Temple by staff and students of the Grimwade Centre for Cultural Materials Conservation.
Awards
Iryna Skubii (Mykola Zerov Fellow in Ukrainian Studies, History) has been awarded the Best Article prize by the American Association for Ukrainian Studies.
Dr Skubii was awarded the prize for her article, ‘Food Waste and Survival in Times of the Soviet Famines in Ukraine’, Journal of Contemporary History (2024). The prize committee described the article as: “an extraordinary piece of interdisciplinary research linking famine studies, waste studies, environmental history, and survival strategies in scrutinizing the complex and rapidly changing relationship(s) to food waste during the three consecutive Soviet famines in Ukraine. The meticulous and empirically rich study of the relationship(s) between humans and food, humans and waste, humans and nature – and between the state and food waste – in times of extreme (state-instigated) famine works as a metaphorical “slap on the face” for the reader. By approaching the Soviet famines through the original prism of food waste, this article sheds new light on the scale of violence, pain and damage incurred upon the people of Ukraine at the time – and the lasting legacies of the survival strategies developed in response (as acknowledged by members of the selection committee when reflecting on the relationship to food waste cultivated in their own families decades later).”
Academic Publications
Nathan D. Gardner Molina (PhD in History, 2023, now Research Fellow, Melbourne Law School), In the Face of Diversity: A History of Chinese Australian Community Organisations, 1970s–2020s (Sydney University Press, 2025)
Has a united or singular “Chinese Australian community” ever actually existed? If so, is a united community a means to an end or an end in itself? And where might this community sit in contemporary multicultural Australia?
In the Face of Diversity offers answers to these questions with the history of more than a dozen Chinese Australian community organisations from across the country, drawing on the English- and Chinese-language materials produced by these organisations, as well as interviews with past and present leaders. Instead of a single community, the evidence demonstrates the existence of many diverse Chinese Australian communities.
Familiar and fascinating moments of recent Australian history are treated with new and evocative perspectives in relation to Chinese Australian communities, from the official turn away from the White Australia policy and embrace of multiculturalism in the 1970s to the debate about China’s influence upon Australian politics and society, beginning in the 2010s and continuing into the present.
In the Face of Diversity advances that “unity” has only ever been momentarily or partially grasped by Chinese Australian community organisations but that it has nonetheless produced real-world outcomes, the most prominent being a highly participatory style of Australian multiculturalism. Gardner Molina dismantles the myth of a single Chinese Australian community and rebuilds a solid understanding of many diverse communities instead; each with their own aims, needs and participatory capacities.
“In this path-breaking book, Gardner Molina lays out with unprecedented clarity the diversity of Chinese Australian communities, and shows how repeated efforts to foster solidarity among them in response to racism or anti-China sentiment are challenged by internal divisions, often stemming from political and social realities within China. Unity may remain a distant mirage, but Gardner Molina deftly shows how increasing political and social participation by all variety of Chinese Australians contributes to a more robust and diverse multicultural Australia.”
– John Fitzgerald, Swinburne University of Technology
“Gardner Molina uses wide analysis and examination of documents over the last several decades either from or related to Chinese community associations in Australia to show the richness and diversity of this story. This is a unique archive to draw from, and therefore presents a valid, original and fresh narrative of the important story both of the transformation of Australian identity in recent times, and the ways in which Chinese Australian identity has developed.”
– Kerry Brown, Professor of Chinese Studies and Director, Lau China Institute
“The first in-depth historical account of Australia’s diverse Chinese communities in the post-White Australia era – from the beginnings of multiculturalism, through the Blainey and Hanson debates and Tiananmen, to the challenges of a rising China in the 21st century. Drawing on previously unused sources, including community newsletters and websites, in English and Chinese, as well as interviews with key players, In the Face of Diversity highlights the views and voices of Chinese Australians and challenges us to look beyond an essentialist understanding of who makes up the ‘Chinese Australian community’, in the past and today.”
– Kate Bagnall, Senior Lecturer in Humanities (History), University of Tasmania
“This meticulously researched book does us excellent service by debunking the idea – illusory as it is pernicious – of a singular ‘Chinese Australian community’. At the same time, In the Face of Diversity gives voice to Chinese Australians and their varied organisations as complex agents in the continuing process of making multicultural Australia. This is essential reading to bring much-needed nuance in our understanding of Australia-China relations.”
– Ien Ang, Western Sydney University
“Reading In the Face of Diversity felt like being invited into a long, unfinished conversation – one shaped by care, conviction, and quiet endurance. Dr Nathan Gardner Molina doesn’t just write a history of Chinese Australian community organisations; he honours their contradictions, their forgotten moments, and their quiet strength. With remarkable sensitivity, he listens to the silences, tensions, and quiet resilience that have shaped public life in the shadow of race, migration, and national identity. What moved me most is the way this book honours complexity: it neither romanticises unity nor pathologises disunity, but treats both as part of the lived practice of representation. From the Blainey and Hanson debates to Tiananmen, the rise of China, and the COVID-19 pandemic, this book traces how Chinese Australian organisations have stood at the intersection of pride and pressure, belonging and scrutiny – sometimes fractured, sometimes unified, but always negotiating what it means to show up for community. This is an urgent and generous work—one that not only documents history, but also calls us to reflect on how we live together, speak for one another, and sustain community across difference.”
– Dr Mei-fen Kuo, Macquarie University
Frederik J. Vervaet (Classics & Archaeology), David Rafferty (University of Adelaide), and Christopher J. Dart (Classics & Archaeology), (eds), How Republics Die: Creeping Authoritarianism in Ancient Rome and Beyond (De Gruyter Brill, 2025)
Authoritarianism is everywhere on the advance; democracies seem fragile and threatened. We console ourselves that where rule by the people has long established itself, it has never collapsed from internal causes. Except it did, once: in Rome.
This book gathers together Roman historians with political scientists and scholars of other periods of authoritarian takeover to explore how open and democratic political systems have historically fallen prey to autocrats. The Late Roman Republic is the main focus, with a mix of large-scale thematic and analytical chapters paired with more detailed case studies, from some of the leading scholars in the field. Other chapters widen the scope, analysing comparable cases from ancient Athens to Napoleon to Hitler’s Germany and Franco’s Spain.
The book as a whole draws on contemporary political science scholarship on democratic decay and competitive authoritarianism. It shows that these concepts are not only applicable to modern states, but that we can properly use them to study past democratic collapses as well. This provides the tools for a more historically-informed understanding of how republics die, as part of a renewed conversation between historians and political scientists.
The book is available open access and was launched online here:
The book features chapters by several SHAPS staff, postgraduates and fellows:
- Christopher J. Dart, David Rafferty and Frederik Juliaan Vervaet, ‘New Perspectives on Old Problems/Old Perspectives on New Problems’
- Frederik Juliaan Vervaet, Christopher J. Dart and David Rafferty, ‘Reform Unwillingness and the Death of the Roman Republic’
- Christian Hjorth Bagger (PhD candidate, Classics & Archaeology), ‘In the Wake of Autocrats: The Plight of Matronae in the Late Republic’
- David Rafferty, Frederik Juliaan Vervaet and Christopher J. Dart, ‘Competitive Authoritarianism on the Eve of Empire: Pompeius’s New Republic of 52 BCE’
- Ronald Ridley (Emeritus Professor, Classics & Archaeology), ‘Augustus’ Res Gestae as a Revolutionary’s Manual’
- Catherine Kovesi (History), ‘With a Bang or a Whimper? Reflections on the Fall of the Venetian Republic’
- Peter McPhee (Emeritus Professor, History), ‘A New Catilina or a New Cromwell? Napoleon Bonaparte and the Death of the First French Republic, 1794–1804’
- Angel Alcalde (History), ‘The Death of Democratic Republics in the 1930s: Germany, Austria, Spain’
The latest issue of Journal of Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and Society, edited by Julie Fedor (History), is the first of two special issues on ‘Symbols and Narratives of Ukrainian Resistance’. It features contributions by Daria Antsybor (State Scientific Center for Cultural Heritage Protection, Kyiv) and Michel Bouchard (University of Northern British Columbia), Yana Prymachenko (Ukrainian History Global Initiative), and Colby Fleming (University of Illinois-Chicago), and is guest edited by Yuliya Yurchuk (Södertorn University).
Thea Gardiner (PhD in History, 2025) and Catherine Gay (PhD in History, 2024), The Leafy Tree: The Lindsay Family and Siblinghood in Australia, Cultural and Social History
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, social, cultural and political change were mediated through sibling networks. During this period in Australia, no middle-class family was more culturally influential than the Lindsay family, many of whom became internationally renowned artists and writers. This paper examines the Lindsays’ sibling bonds from childhood into adulthood and explores how the social relationships and networks created between the siblings acted as cultural incubators. The Australian settler-colonial context provides a unique lens through which to understand the importance of sibling relationships throughout the life cycle, and speaks to broader patterns around the intense character of sibling relations during this period.
Marilyn Lake (Professorial Fellow, History), The Ideals and Imagined Citizens of the New Commonwealth of Australia at Federation, Victorian Historical Journal
The new Commonwealth of Australia, created in the first years of the twentieth century, was the work of proud idealists, many of them Victorian reformers such as Charles Pearson, Alfred Deakin, H.B. Higgins, and suffragist Vida Goldstein, who proclaimed the values of equality, collective welfare, and social justice that they aimed to realise through key institutions such as the Court of Conciliation and Arbitration, a compulsory minimum wage defined as a living wage, old age and invalid pensions, the maternity allowance, and the White Australia policy. Espousing what US historian Mae Ngai has called ‘the ideology of coolieism’, these idealists saw Asian workers as inherently cheap labour, subject to degradation and exploitation by the bourgeois class. Deakin proposed equal pay for equal work. Social and economic equality were these founding fathers’ and mothers’ key values.
Petronella Nel (Cultural Materials Conservation) and Yvonne Hearn (NGV), Conserving Artline Permanent Marker and Fineliner Pens on Paper: Assessing Vulnerability of Drawings by Walmajarri Artist Jimmy Pike, Journal of the American Institute for Conservation
Works by Walmajarri artist Jimmy Pike are distinct amongst contemporary First Nations Australian art, due to his palette of bright colors and use of modern materials such as Artline fiber-tip pen on paper. From 1980 to 2002, Pike created hundreds of drawings on various papers. With little literature available on the display and preservation of fiber-tip pen on paper, the aim of this investigation is to better understand the condition of the works of Jimmy Pike, issues experienced by conservators and custodians and the vulnerability of displayed fiber-tip pen drawings. This study of fiber-tip pen drawings by Jimmy Pike involved: research of materials, techniques, practice, history, and a survey of his collected works; consultation of key stakeholders, and experts in the field of materials conservation; and a light aging experiment of similar materials used in Pike’s drawings such as selected contemporary Artline permanent marker and fineliner pens. Results analyzed using visual documentation and color spectrophotometry revealed a broad range of light sensitivity from fugitive to moderately light sensitive. Samples were found to also be slightly affected by temperature and relative humidity in the absence of light, which may contribute to subtle color change observed in media over time during storage.
PhD Completion
Sun (Manxin) Liu (PhD in Philosophy, 2025), How Political Liberal Feminism in Possible: Revisiting the Personal and the Political
The slogan “the personal is political” from the second-wave feminist movement became one of the feminist fundamentals. As a guiding principle of feminism, it drew attention to many issues faced by women that were deemed too personal to be considered political. However, new developments in feminist theory and practice undermine its meaningfulness. Some new approaches in feminism overemphasize the personal, resulting in depoliticizing feminist issues, while others strictly detach the personal and the political, limiting the political only to those formal political processes.
This thesis, therefore, aims to make sense of this slogan again by seeking a better understanding of the political and its criteria. It begins with political realism, which views the political as normatively autonomous and defined by adversaries and conflicts. However, political realism fails to adequately capture the political, especially for feminism, which requires substantive normative constraints. The thesis then examines two political cases: the duty to vote and identity politics. It defends citizens’ duty to vote based on its role in democracy and its nature as a joint power-right, grounded in the idea of equal citizenship and its normative implications. In identity politics, it distinguishes two conceptions of identity and criticizes the current form based on internal self-identity. It argues that identity politics must appeal to the external sense of identity that tracks how equal citizenship of an identity group is undermined externally. In both cases, equal citizenship marks off the normative sphere of how citizens should act and be treated. Finally, the thesis traces the idea of equal citizenship in political liberalism, where it forms the core of its political turn. Based on equal citizenship, the thesis defends political liberal feminism against both comprehensive liberal feminism and radical feminism. In answering how political liberal feminism is possible, equal citizenship underpins the demarcation of the political, and therefore, makes sense of the feminist slogan, “the personal is political.”
Supervisors: Assoc. Prof. Holly Lawford-Smith, Assoc. Prof. Dan Halliday
Research Higher Degree Milestones
Emily Simons (PhD completion seminar, Classics & Archaeology), Great Galloping Griffins: context and meaning in the Late Bronze Age Eastern Mediterranean
Griffins became an increasingly popular motif during the Late Bronze Age (LBA), c. 1600–1150 BCE, in the eastern Mediterranean. Although the main iconographic features of griffins (i.e., a leonine body with the wings and head of a raptor) remained remarkably stable during this period, considerable contextual, spatial, and temporal variation is present, suggesting that griffins performed a wider range of functions than has previously been identified.
This thesis presents an analysis of the archaeological find contexts of Late Bronze Age griffins excavated from the Greek mainland to the Levantine coast to resolve whether the evidence corresponds with the current perception that griffins functioned as symbols of power in the LBA. It characterises the relationships between archaeological contexts and the objects on which griffins are displayed, to elucidate the relative visibility and experience of griffin imagery in antiquity, and the resultant role context and object types played in the production of the motif’s meaning. As a result, this thesis demonstrates characteristics of the multi-factorial relationships between griffins, the objects on which they are displayed and their archaeological find contexts, presenting evidence of the varied social, political, and religious use of this composite creature in the Late Bronze Age eastern Mediterranean.
Other Happenings
On 22 May, Kate McGregor (History/Associate Dean International, Faculty of Arts) delivered the annual Kathleen Fitzpatrick Lecture, an occasion that doubled as her inaugural professorial lecture. Before a packed Forum Theatre, Kate shared some of her ongoing research on ‘submerged histories’ of Dutch colonialism, using the past and present resonances of the satirical anti-colonial novel Max Havelaar to trace the complications that beset anti-colonial memory work in Indonesia.
‘Untitled’, by Matthew Thompson (LING), was painted as an educational initiative for students enrolled in the Conservation Intensive – Street Art (CUMC90003), coordinated by Caroline Kyi (Grimwade Centre), as part of the Masters Program in Cultural Materials Conservation. Painted on the north wall of the Thomas Cherry Building at Elgin Place South, this work functions as an important teaching and research tool for students studying contemporary street art and its conservation.
Colleagues and former students of Heather Jackson gathered in May to celebrate the preparation of a Festschrift, Culture, Context, and Connection: Studies on Classics, Archaeology and the Ancient World in Honour of Heather Jackson (FAHA FSA), produced as a gift to commemorate Heather Jackson’s 88th birthday and to celebrate an extraordinary career that spans decades of untiring work as an archaeologist and as an authority on ancient Greek vases.
Feature image: Students enrolled in ‘Conservation Intensive — Street Art’ (CUMSC90003), Masters program in Cultural Materials Conservation, with ‘Untitled‘, by Matthew Thompson (LING).
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