SHAPS Digest (December 2025)
Kristian Camilleri (HPS) and Hugh Gundlach (Faculty of Education) reflected on the future of the university lecture in an article for Pursuit.
Matthew Champion (History) discussed the history of the calendar on Radio National‘s ‘No One Saw It Coming’.
Kate Darian-Smith (Professorial Fellow, History) commented on Opposition Leader Sussan Ley’s recent call to cut Australia’s intake of migrants.
Patrick Gigacz (Hansen PhD Scholar, History) published the online project Melbourne in 1925 (2025), as a new addition to the Melbourne History Workshop‘s Melbourne History Resources. The project delves into the Melbourne of a hundred years ago, exploring a range of themes including complaints (blasting, cattle, the ‘Flusher’), horse troughs, lamps and lighting, the traffic puzzle, the visit of the American Fleet, and the Town Hall fire. This project was also an exercise in exploring and explaining how to use the Subject Index to the City of Melbourne’s Town Clerk’s Correspondence Files held in the Public Record Office Victoria. The project was funded by a Hansen Little Public Humanities Grant, generously supported by the Hansen Trust and administered by the Faculty of Arts at the University of Melbourne. It was produced by the Melbourne History Workshop, with concept by Patrick Gigacz and technical development by Mitchell Harrop. The Melbourne History Workshop is led by Andrew J. May (History).
Themistocles Kritikakos (PhD in History, 2021) published an article on the role played by Greek migrants in the construction of Brunswick and Coburg.
To mark the Victorian Women’s Trust’s milestone 40th anniversary, the VWT asked five key Australian feminists to reflect on the impact of the VWT so far. Marilyn Lake (Professorial Fellow, History) paid tribute to former VWT Executive Director, Mary Crooks: “The VWT is a unique feminist organisation that combines advocacy, fund-raising, philanthropy, publication and policy submissions. Its programs have been animated by Mary’s defining passion for democracy as a work in progress and the necessity of community participation.”
Holly Lawford-Smith (Philosophy) published op-eds on academic freedom; on the morality of sexual intercourse and its implications for women’s equality; and on the ethical questions raised by defamation of the deceased.
Iryna Skubii (Mykola Zerov Fellow in Ukrainian Studies, History) was interviewed by BBC News Global (Singapore) on the Trump-Zelensky meeting and progress in peace talks between Ukraine and Russia.
Academic Publications
Hannah Gould (HPS), ‘Machine‘, Material Religion: The Journal of Objects, Art and Belief
This article examines the role of machines in religious practices, particularly focusing on crematorium facilities in Japan that feature baths for workers. These baths serve as a means of purification from the spiritual pollution associated with death, reflecting the intersection of material and spiritual cleansing. The discussion extends to various machines used in religious contexts, from simple tools to advanced technologies like AI and robotics, highlighting how these devices are integrated into religious life and practices. The author emphasises that while some machines are explicitly designed for religious purposes, many are repurposed from mundane origins, illustrating the complex relationship between technology and spirituality.
Thomas Kehoe (Honorary Fellow, History) et al., ‘What Can Tobacco Control Teach Us about Vested Interests in Food and Nutrition?‘, Cancer Control
Twenty years after the World Health Organization Framework Convention on Tobacco Control came into force, a clear achievement of the tobacco control movement has been to highlight the role of the tobacco industry as a vector of the tobacco epidemic and propose enforceable limits on its engagement in policy. What can we learn from tobacco control for preventing food industry interference in law and policymaking for healthy diets?
Themistocles Kritikakos (PhD in History, 2021), Armenian, Greek, and Assyrian Genocide Recognition in Twenty-First Century Australia: Memory, Identity, and Cooperation (Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming 2026)
While the Armenian Genocide has received significant international recognition, the related experiences of Greeks and Assyrians are largely unknown and overlooked. In an original contribution to genocide studies, Themistocles Kritikakos examines the enduring legacies of the Armenian, Greek, and Assyrian genocides in the late Ottoman Empire (1914–1923). This book presents the first comprehensive comparative analysis of their efforts to achieve genocide recognition in Australia, advancing our understanding of the Ottoman genocidal campaign and its long-term consequences.
Australians witnessed and reported the atrocities and suffering, and provided humanitarian support to survivors between 1915 and 1930. Yet Australian national narratives of reconciliation with Turkey around the Gallipoli Campaign (1915) are in persistent tension with the recognition efforts.
Drawing on oral interviews with descendants of survivors and research in memory and genocide studies, the book explores the intergenerational effects of silence and memories of violence and displacement within families and communities in the diaspora. It examines commemorative practices, sites of memory, and inter-communal coalition-building. Kritikakos sheds new light on how individuals, families, and communities process and negotiate traumatic experiences across time and place. The study demonstrates how communities that once remembered traumatic pasts separately have developed shared narratives through new forms of remembrance, strengthening their pursuit of recognition.
Andonis Piperoglou (History) and Francesco Ricatti (eds), Researching Migration on Indigenous Lands: Challenges, Reflections, Pathways (Springer Nature, 2026)
This open access edited collection provides an interdisciplinary assessment of research about migration on Indigenous lands. Via an assortment of critical reflections from settler colonial Australia, it identifies tensions between colonialism and Indigenous sovereignty as an increasingly salient topic of analysis within migration research. It poses challenges to migration research that takes place on Indigenous lands, reflects on the methodological and theoretical issues at play when studying migration in settler colonial Australia, and outlines potential pathways for ethical migration research agendas that genuinely engage with Indigenous knowledges and scholarship. The book also compares and synthesises where studies of settler colonialism and migration have intersected and contributing authors profile how migration, colonialism and Indigenous sovereignties intersect in multicultural Australia’s pasts and presents. At its core, the volume challenges migration studies, from Australian shores, to reimagine itself. In doing so, questions related to migration are altered and the basis of discussion around colonial legacies, multiculturalism, integration and diversity is recast. By providing nuanced theoretical, historical, and reflective case studies from a rage of disciplinary approaches, the volume will be a great resource to students, academics in migration and refugee studies, Indigenous scholars, activists, as well as policymakers in settler colonial societies.
The volume features an introductory essay by the editors, ‘Recognising Indigenous Sovereignty in Migration Research: Australian Reflections’, and a chapter by Andonis Piperoglou, ‘Naming “Little Greece” on Gadigal Country: Rethinking Australian Multiculturalism via Indigenous Sovereignty’.
In 2021, a precinct in Marrickville, a suburb in Sydney’s inner west, was named ‘Little Greece’. Situated on Gadigal Country, Marrickville is celebrated as a “birthplace” of Australian multiculturalism. Indeed, after the Second World War, many Greeks came to call the suburb home, as did a plethora of other migrant groups, especially members of the Vietnamese and Portuguese diasporas. Using this migrant place naming episode as an entry point for the critical study of multicultural heritage in Australia, this chapter explores how Indigenous sovereignty was directly exercised via a Welcome to Country that took place during the launch of Little Greece. Charting the Indigenous and colonial-cum-multicultural histories of Marrickville alongside the cultural commentary and public art, the chapter argues that the naming of Little Greece on Gadigal Country reveals the potential for alternative modes of multicultural heritage making that recognises and centres Indigenous sovereign expression.
Historian Sean Scalmer‘s book A Fair Day’s Work: the Quest to Win Back Time was reviewed in Australian Historical Studies by Eugene Schofield-Georgeson.
Frederik Vervaet et al., How Republics Die: Creeping Authoritarianism in Ancient Rome and Beyond (De Gruyter, 2025), was reviewed in the Classical Review and Bryn Mawr Classical Review.
Awards
Matthew Champion (History) has been awarded a grant from the Melbourne Biodiversity Institute in December for the project ‘Waking Up in Australia – Biodiversity, Sound, Temporality’.
Hannah Gould (HPS) is winner of the Wang Gungwu Prize for the best article in Asian Studies Review for 2025. The judges praised Dr Gould’s article, ‘Becoming a Bone Buddha: Fragmenting and Remaking Death Rites in Contemporary Japan’ as “beautifully written, elegantly weaving theory with ethnography,” and offering “a unique account of a new posthumous rite that speaks to deep changes in contemporary Japanese society.”
Kate McGregor (History) has been awarded one of three 2025 Australia-Indonesia Institute Awards for Studies and Cultural Leadership. This award recognises excellence in study or research at any level and across any discipline, or in cultural education and outreach, which has contributed to an increased understanding of Indonesia among Australians. The 2025 Australia-Indonesia Institute Indonesian Studies Awards were presented at the First Australian Congress for Indonesian Language, hosted by the Embassy of the Republic of Indonesia in Canberra at the Australian National University.
Pete Millwood (History) is winner of the 2025 Richard T. Arndt Prize for Outstanding Work on Cultural Diplomacy, for his book, Improbable Diplomats: How Ping-Pong Players, Musicians and Scientists Remade US–China Relations (Cambridge University Press, 2023).
Nicole Tse and team at the Cripps Institute for Cultural Conservation have been awarded the 2025 Global Award for World Heritage Education Innovative Case by UNESCO. This recognition highlights their project From Ashes to Stories, which explores innovative heritage education and post-fire conservation at the See Yup Temple.
A Grimwade Conservation Services team led by Vanessa Kowalski has won the 2025 AICCM Outstanding Conservation Treatment of the Year Award for their mural conservation treatment at the historic Commandant’s Cottage in Port Arthur.
Other happenings
From 3–5 October, SHAPS hosted the biennial conference of the Australian and New Zealand Association of Medieval and Early Modern Studies on the theme ‘Possibilities’. With over 260 participants from 12 countries, the conference showcased cutting-edge research across the fields of History, Literary Studies, Art History, Philosophy and Musicology. Keynotes were delivered by Prof. Emma Dillon (King’s College London), Prof. Kate Franklin (Tufts) and Prof. Leah DeVun (Rutgers), as well as early career researchers Dr Samuel Cardwell (Nottingham), Dr Ruby Lowe (Melbourne) and Dr Jennifer McFarland (Cambridge). The conference was preceded by a a vibrant postgraduate and early career training seminar on palaeography led by Dr Sarah Corrigan. The conference committee of Assoc. Prof. Matthew Champion, Dr Sarah Corrigan, Dr Mairi Hill and Dr Charlotte Millar would like to extend their thanks to the whole SHAPS community for their support of this major event.
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