SHAPS Digest (July 2025)

Rustam Alexander (PhD in History, 2018) published an article in Insider.ru on the history of transgender issues in the Soviet Union.

Lucyna Artymiuk (PhD candidate, History) discussed (in Polish) the role played by women volunteers in forming the Polish House ‘Syrena’ in Rowville, for SBS Polish.

Sam Baron (Philosophy) commented for Cosmos magazine on fear-mongering around AI.

Max Billington (BA Hons (History) 2022, now a PhD candidate at Deakin University) reflected on the anniversary of the Royal Commission into British Nuclear Test in Australia, for the Australian Policy and History blog.

Paige Donaghy (McKenzie Postdoctoral Fellow, History) published an article on the history of birth trauma and obstetric violencein Vida, the Australian Women’s History Network blog, to mark Birth Trauma Awareness week.

Jacinthe Flore (HPS) provided commentary on romantic relationships with AI for the Australian Computer Society’s news publication, Information Age.

Richard Gillespie (Honorary Principal Fellow, HPS, and Senior Curator, Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology) published an article in Pursuit on a multimedia installation of Mount Vesuvius erupting, produced by engineering students Yuji (Andy) Zeng and Xinyu (Jasmine) Xu, inspired by a design originally developed in 1775, and now on display as part of the University’s Grand Tour Exhibition in the Baillieu Library.

Holly Lawford-Smith (Philosophy) discussed her latest book, Feminism Left and Right (Polity Press, 2025), on the Maiden Mother Matriarch podcast.

Tamara Lewit was interviewed by ABC Radio Melbourne and featured in Il Globo for her research on Ancient Roman food and wine. 

Tamara Lewit published an article in the Conversation on the use of fermented fish sauces in ancient Rome.

Andy May (History) and Tom Kehoe (Cancer Council Victoria and Honorary Fellow, History) are co-curators of a new exhibition at ACMI, ‘From Sunburn to SunSmart‘. The SunSmart exhibition in ACMI’s permanent gallery highlights the near-50-year history of skin cancer prevention filmmaking in Victoria, from the iconic first Slip! Slop! Slap! campaign in 1981 to present-day health promotion. It explores how film has helped prevent skin cancer by shifting attitudes, behaviours, and even driving systemic change.

Andy May (History) appeared in an episode of Who Do You Think You Are? Australia to provide historical context for the family history of Tom Gleeson.

Andonis Piperoglou (Hellenic Senior Lecturer in Global Diasporas, History) appears in this SBS Examines (post podcast and video) episode on migrants and the slur ‘wog’.

A workshop led by Melbourne street artist RONE organised by the Student Conservators @ Melbourne group, was featured on the Arts Faculty’s website.

Sue Silberberg (PhD in History, 2015) was featured as an historical expert in an episode of Who Do You Think You Are? on Australian and Jewish history.

Iryna Skubii (Mykola Zerov Fellow in Ukrainian Studies, History) and Olha Shmihelska-Kozuliak gave an interview (in Ukrainian) for SBS Ukrainian about their collaborative project with Marko Pavlyshyn and Yana Ostapenko. Supported by the Ukrainian Studies Support Fund of the Association of Ukrainians in Victoria, the project examines memories of displacement and migration to Australia among the descendants of Ukrainian refugees after the Second World War.

Awards & Appointments

Sam Baron (Philosophy) has been awarded an ARC Future Fellowship. The Fellowship will support his project, ‘New Causal Foundations for Space and Time’. The project aims to solve a philosophical problem arising from physics. Recent developments suggest space and time don’t exist at certain scales. This poses a serious conceptual challenge: scientific experiments usually happen in space and time and so when these are missing we have no idea what experimentation means. Drawing on methods from philosophy, the project will explore causation as a replacement for space and time in our conceptual framework for science. The expected outcome is a seed-bank of models that philosophers and scientists can use to study nature. Anticipated benefits include generating new knowledge in philosophy, strengthening international collaboration and enhancing interdisciplinary research capacity in Australia.

Mark Edele (Hansen Chair in History) has been awarded the Australasian Association for European History (AAEH) Book Prize for 2025 for Russia’s War Against Ukraine: The Whole Story (MUP 2023).

The AAEH book prize seeks to recognise quality and breadth of contributions to research and knowledge of modern European history in Australasia. The prize is awarded biennially and recognises the best work in modern European history (broadly conceived) for the quality and depth of research, innovation and accessibility.

“The standout of all the recent (mostly rushed) works to deal with the Russo-Ukrainian conflict of the 21st century. Edele eschews all the standard narratives of history, and indeed exposes them for the cultural manufactures that they are (on both sides).”

“In this work, Mark Edele demonstrates great expertise, clear writing and a highly theorised understanding of a contemporary issue in European politics that is presented in an accessible and enlightening mode. The author’s voice is strong and clear and his thesis that what we are seeing in this violent war is an example of failed decolonisation of Empire is revealed with telling evidence. This a great read and is truly the ‘whole story’, both the finest scholarship and a major public intervention.” 

Cat Gay (PhD in History, 2024) received an honourable mention from the Society for the History of Childhood and Youth 2024 thesis prize.

‘The committee would also like to recognize Dr Catherine Gay’s incisive and eminently readable dissertation, “Girls in nineteenth-century Victoria, Australia: A material history,” as an honourable mention. Gay creatively utilizes material culture, or “girl-produced sources,” to argue for the importance of girls and girlhood within the settler-colonial society of Australia. Gay demonstrates that the sources for nineteenth-century girlhood are plentiful if only we turn our attentive eye to the material objects girls produced. These objects illustrate not only girls’ own emotional experiences and cultural contributions but also the various ways girls might destabilize or uphold the social order of an empire. Gay’s work also addresses the intersectional elements—for example, religion, race, and class—that shaped girls’ experiences and their source-producing abilities, thus demonstrating the importance of addressing both indigenous and colonial girlhoods together for understanding the power dynamics at play in settler colonialism.’

Roderick Home (Professor Emeritus, History and Philosophy of Science) has been awarded the Alexandre Koyré Medal by the International Academy of the History of Science. The Koyré Medal is awarded biennially in recognition of a scholar’s career contribution.

Marilyn Lake (Professorial Fellow, History) has been elected as an International Fellow of the British Academy, in recognition of her outstanding contributions to the humanities and social sciences.

Beth Marsden is the winner of the 2025 Australian Historical Association (AHA) Ann Curthoys Prize, awarded for the best unpublished article-length work by an Early Career Researcher in any one or combination of the fields in which Ann Curthoys has published.

Beth Marsden was awarded the prize for her article, ‘School strikes for segregation: settler protests and First Nations access to education in Western Australia, Victoria and New South Wales’. The judges (Laura Rademaker (ANU) and Andrea Gaynor (UWA)) praised the article as: ‘[o]ffering an innovative and rigorously contextualised account of events in three Australian localities … this outstanding article examines the practice of ‘school strikes’, through which settler families pressured state education departments to exclude Aboriginal students from local schools. Mobilising a rich array of archival and media sources, it crafts a compelling narrative that unsettles contemporary associations of school strikes with progressive activism, and powerfully positions schools as key sites of settler control over Aboriginal lives. Attending closely to the particulars of local settler-Aboriginal relations, and how these intersected with departmental decision-making to legitimise and institutionalise settler racism, the article makes an important contribution to understanding the role of schooling in the machinery of settler colonialism in early twentieth-century Australia.’

Iryna Skubii (Mykola Zerov Fellow in Ukrainian Studies, History) has been selected as a finalist for the 2025 Tallinn Dissertation Prize in European Environmental History, for her PhD thesis, Survival under Extremes: Human, Environmental, and Material Relationships amidst the Soviet Famines in Ukraine (Queen’s University in Kingson, 2024).

Academic Publications

Purushottama Bilimoria (Professorial Fellow, Philosophy), ‘Gandhi on Nonviolence in Action, Education and Satyagraha’, in Ananta Kumar Giri (ed.), Rethinking Satyagraha: Truth, Travel and Translations (Routledge 2025)

Mohandas Karamchand (Mahatma) Gandhi developed a distinctive educational philosophy which gave particular emphasis to truth and nonviolence, or the teaching of peace. In his social thinking he gave immense importance to a balanced form of education. By this he meant, balanced as to needs, i.e. the necessities of life, against wants, i.e. whatever one yearns to possess, acquire or enjoy out of desire; and, more significantly, balanced as to values against a disproportionate concern with the externals. By ‘externals’ is meant the goods people generate and the sorts of activities, planning and manoeuvres people carry out in the normal course of living in order to meet the demands of commerce, material accessories, personal welfare and reproduction, and which are at the same time instrumental in sustaining the community. There is no denying the fact that Gandhi’s philosophy of education embraced the teaching of virtue ethics (adapted from Jaina ethics, in which ʼahiṃsā or non-injury is but one desirable character trait, moral uprightness, courage of conviction, and steadfastness in intelligent willing, plus conscience. Gandhi proposes a decisive method for the dissemination and learning of the same. The present chapter demonstrates how this is made effective against the grain of tradition but also against the rushing ride of modernity, and argues for the importance of this strategy for the challenged present.

Thomas James Keep (PhD candidate, Classics & Archaeology), Madeline G. P. Robinson, Jackson Shoobert and Jessie Birkett-Rees, An Australian Overview: The Creation and Use of 3D Models in Australian Universities, Journal of Computer Applications in Archaeology

This paper examines the current status of 3D modelling of cultural heritage objects in Australian universities, focusing on how these models are being integrated into object-based learning practices. It discusses the different approaches taken by major universities, explores the motivations behind digitisation projects, and considers the benefits and challenges they present. The paper provides an overview of various digitisation techniques and the separate metadata recording practices that have been developed. It argues for the use of digital surrogates in object-based learning and research while also identifying key challenges that are limiting the potential of cultural heritage 3D modelling. These include the ad hoc nature of digitisation projects, inconsistent funding, and a lack of standardisation in data management and metadata practices. The paper emphasises the importance of long-term planning and collaboration both within and between universities to develop skills, standards, and shared resources.

Charlotte Millar (History) (ed.), A Cultural History of Magic in the Renaissance, vol. 3 in the Bloomsbury Cultural History of Magic series (2025)

What role has magic played in society through the ages? How has it been practiced and, at times, controlled? How has magic been understood and represented? And how has this understanding differed according to time and place?

In a work that spans 2,500 years these ambitious questions are addressed by 57 experts, each contributing their overview of a theme applied to a period in history. With the help of a broad range of case material they illustrate broad trends and nuances of the culture of magic across the world from antiquity to the present, albeit with an emphasis on western traditions. Individual volume editors ensure the cohesion of the whole, and to make it as easy as possible to use, chapter titles are identical across each of the volumes. This gives the choice of reading about a specific period in one of the volumes, or following a theme across history by reading the relevant chapter in each of the six.

The six volumes cover: 1. Antiquity (500 BCE to 800 CE); 2. Medieval Age (800 to 1450); 3. The Renaissance (1450 to 1650); 4. Age of Enlightenment (1650 to 1800); 5. Age of Empire (1800 to 1920); 6. Modern Age (1920 to the present).

Themes (and chapter titles) are: defining magic; magic, religion, and belief; practices and practitioners; authorities and control; geographies of magic; magic and material culture; magic and gender; imagining magic.

Andonis Piperoglou, Sakis Gekas, Stratos Dordanas, and Alexander Kitroeff, The Greek Diaspora and Greek Emigration: Australia, Canada, Germany, and the United States, in Stefanos Katsikas (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Modern Greek History (Oxford Academic, 2025)

At the turn of the twenty-first century, the four biggest and wealthiest Greek diaspora communities were those in Australia, Canada, Germany, and the United States. The oldest and largest is the one in the United States that began forming in increasing numbers from the late nineteenth century and continued to grow through the 1970s. Greek mass emigration to Australia, Canada, and Germany is a post-World War II phenomenon, triggered by the devastation wrought by the war especially in northern Greece and the Aegean islands, which experienced the greatest outmigration, with the numbers falling, as was the case with the United States in the mid-1970s. Within those four diaspora communities there was and still is considerable diversity along gender roles, place of origin, social class, and political orientation; and there were differences in the way they were received, with the United States adopting a more pronounced assimilationist policy, Australia and Canada recognizing ethnic difference to a greater extent, and Germany inviting the Greeks initially only as guest workers. Yet these communities shared common characteristics; they formed a range of secular and religious organizations and maintained close ties to the Greek homeland, while at the same time their members adapted to their host societies and worked hard to achieve upward social mobility with many success stories.

PhD Completion Seminars

Felicity Hodgson (PhD candidate, History), ‘Foxholes to Front Pages: Three American Women War Correspondents in the Second World War’

Despite their poignant prose, the wartime writings of Catherine Coyne, Virginia Irwin, and Shelley Mydans have been overlooked in the historical record. Using a thematic analysis, this thesis shows how the human-interest reporting of Coyne and Irwin brought empathetic understandings to the daily life of American soldiers. Similarly, Mydans explored the emotional struggles of internees in Manila. By emphasising literary features, this approach shows the great similarity between these women’s work and some of their most famous male colleagues.

Ines Jahudka (Hansen PhD candidate, History), ‘Everyday Experts: Laypeople, Forensics, and Eighteenth-century English Legal Medicine’

This thesis explores the surprising role of laypeople in eighteenth-century English forensics. Why were women and men without formal medical training authorised to determine causes of death? The thesis investigates what constituted authority and expertise in legal medicine, and why lay knowledge was sufficient for the early modern postmortem system. It examines how this lay forensic authority ‘worked’, and how it was legitimised through interactions with legal and parochial institutions. By tracing how forensic authority was socially constructed, it then explores why and when this system was replaced by the modern system which values different forms of knowledge and expertise.

Noah Wellington (PhD candidate, Classics & Archaeology), ‘The Voice from Elsewhere: Women’s Anti-Epic in the Ancient Greek Literary Tradition’

This thesis examines a tradition of women’s subversive speech acts in Greek literature which criticises and undermines traditional epic narratives of male valour and martial prowess. Closely entwined with male concerns about women’s discourse, this “anti-epic” tradition from the Archaic through Hellenistic periods is unique to women, whose speech is characterised as hysterical, riddling, false, and obscure. Through close readings of poetic and dramatic texts from Sappho to Lycophron involving four epic women, the focus on women’s speech in this thesis offers a reading of Greek literature opposed to mainstream discourses of the ancient Greek world.

Other Happenings

Andy May (History) ran a two-day workshop at Cancer Council Victoria on “Cancer Culture: Changing Behaviour to Improve Public Health” supported by funding from the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia and in partnership with Cancer Council Victoria. The workshop brought together interdisciplinary experts from across the social sciences and humanities to explore the nexus between science, advocacy, policy and behavioural change in the context of the social, cultural and political experience of cancer in Australia.

Andonis Piperoglou (Hellenic Senior Lecturer in Global Diasporas, History) attended a symposium hosted by the Centre for Greek and Chinese Culture at Southwest University in Chongqing, China. Under the guiding principles of ‘openness, corporation, and mutual benefit,’ the Centre, an initiative established in 2019 between the Greek and Chinese governments, integrates resources from leading universities in China, Greece, and Central and Eastern Europe to foster a shared scholarly community from the Global South. The conference brought together a range of leading scholarly chairs of Modern Greek Studies from around the world to discuss a new ‘Studying Modern Greece Globally’ initiative and Andonis presented a well-received comparative research paper on Chinese and Greek diasporas in Australia. 

In the Winter Intensive subject ‘Imperial Rome: Mediterranean Superpower’ (ANCW30021) just over 40 enthusiastic students were introduced to the social, political, cultural and religious history of imperial Rome, from the Julio-Claudian period to the transformative final century of the united empire. Maxx Schmitz was subject coordinator; the subject featured guest presentations by Tamara Lewit and Julia Kuehns, as well as the participation of John Blake from Ancient Roman Re-enactors Victoria (ARRV), in the role of Roman Legionary.

Feature image: John Blake from Ancient Roman Re-enactors Victoria (ARRV), as Roman Legionary wearing Lorica Hamata.

SHAPS staff, fellows, students, alumni: if you have news items for the monthly SHAPS digest, email us the details.