SHAPS Digest (January 2026)

Helen Davies (Honorary Fellow, History) was interviewed by the UK Society for the Study of French History about her book, Herminie and Fanny Pereire: Elite Jewish Women in Nineteenth-Century France (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2024), which is newly available in paperback.

Simon Farley (History) published a blog post, ‘45,000 Dead Mynas: What Makes a Bird “Killable”?’, on the recent cull of common mynas in Qatar and the history of the common myna in Australia and beyond.

Iryna Skubii (Mykola Zerov Fellow in Ukrainian Studies, History) discussed the past, present and future of Ukrainian Studies in Australia, on SBS Ukrainian (in Ukrainian).

Iryna Skubii was interviewed by BBC News Global (Singapore) on the Ukraine-Russia peace talks in Abu Dhabi and the prospects of Ukraine’s accession to the EU.

Iryna Skubii was featured by Karazin News: Holodomor, Memory, and Sunflower as a Ukrainian Code: an interview with a historian from the University of Melbourne, Karazin graduate, Iryna Skubii (in Ukrainian).

Caroline Tully (Honorary Fellow, Classics & Archaeology) was interviewed for Angela’s Symposium on contemporary Paganism, Bronze Age Aegean archaeology, and exhibition curation.

Academic Publications

Rustam Alexander (PhD in History, 2018), AIDS in Soviet Russia: A story of deception, despair, and hope (Manchester University Press, 2026)

Throughout the 1980s, as the world was grappling with the escalating crisis of AIDS, Soviet Russia continued to deny there was a problem. Arguing that the disease was limited to foreigners and ‘immoral’ groups, the government failed to take meaningful action, long past the point other countries had begun to recognise the full scale of the threat.

In this ground-breaking book, Rustam Alexander tells the story of AIDS in Soviet Russia. Fixated on disinformation, censorship and the persecution of marginalised communities, the Soviet authorities wasted precious time, allowing the epidemic to strike at the very heart of the nation: its children. Yet, despite the government’s failure, a number of brave journalists, doctors and nascent gay groups decided to take matters into their own hands and engage in full-fledged AIDS activism.

Tracing the political and social response to AIDS in the final years of the Soviet era, Alexander sheds light on the devastating consequences of government inaction. He draws on personal stories, media reports and archival materials to provide a riveting account of the Russian people’s fight against AIDS amid the tumultuous transformations of Gorbachev’s perestroika.

Oleg Beyda‘s book, For Russia with Hitler: White Russian Emigres and the German-Soviet War (University of Toronto Press) was reviewed in Canadian Military History and Slavic Review.

Reviewers found that the book offers “a compelling new perspective on the Eastern Front as these White volunteers attempted to reconcile their Russian nationalism with aiding the German subjection of their estranged motherland. It is a fascinating history of how a defeated group, having lost power and influence within a larger ideological world struggle, finally saw an opportunity to reassert its historical purpose only to be reduced to total irrelevance by once again backing the losing side … Exceptionally researched, For Russia with Hitler is an important contribution to Eastern Front historiography that will especially appeal to readers interested in Wehrmacht foreign volunteers, collaboration studies, the Holocaust, Soviet history and the Russian diaspora.”

Paige Donaghy (McKenzie Postdoctoral Fellow, History), Mola, False Conception, and False Pregnancy in British Medicine, 1550–1850 (Durham University IMEMS Press, 2026)

When reproduction defied certainty, it unsettled medicine, law, and belief. This book reveals how ambiguous pregnancies reshaped knowledge, emotion, and the cultural meaning of conception across centuries.

Across the long durée of the early-modern period, British medical practitioners and society at large were preoccupied with the elusive phenomenon of “false generation”-a term encompassing false conceptions, molae, moles, and spurious pregnancies. These non-foetal pregnancies, often indistinguishable from true gestations, generated profound uncertainty in medical, legal, and theological thought. Drawing on sources ranging from anatomical treatises and midwifery manuals to women’s letters, diaries, and court records, Donaghy traces how false generation shaped reproductive knowledge and understandings of the embodied experience. Through case studies such as Mary I and Joanna Southcott, the book highlights how reproductive ambiguity was not merely a private ordeal but a public and intellectual crisis. Engaging with figures like Galen, Jean Fernel, François Valleriola, and Frederik Ruysch, the book situates British debates within wider contemporaneous European contexts as well as a transhistorical development of medical knowledge.

By foregrounding uncertainty as both an emotional and conceptual force, this monograph contributes to the history of emotions, knowledge, and the body. It offers a field-defining account of how false generation unsettled assumptions about life, conception, and pregnancy, and how these ideas evolved into modern categories such as molar pregnancy. The book speaks directly to current debates in reproductive justice and healthcare, while presenting a compelling case for the historical contingency of reproductive knowledge and the diverse ways it has been shaped by cultural, scientific, and experiential factors.

Levy Perrett (BA Hons (History) 2024; supervisor: Oleg Beyda), ‘See USSR‘: The Soviet Union’s Experimental Tourism Industry of the 1930s’, ANU Historical Journal

This article explores the phenomenon of foreign tourism to the Soviet Union during the 1930s, focusing on the operations of the State Joint Stock Company for Foreign Tourism, commonly known as Intourist. Established in 1929, Intourist promoted the Soviet Union as a desirable tourist destination on the international stage and facilitated travel to the USSR for foreign nationals. While profit served as a primary incentive for the industry’s development, Intourist also sought to create a “Soviet-style” tourism experience, designed to provide visitors with an education on the USSR’s progress towards utopia. To achieve this, tourists first had to be taught about the USSR’s domestic policies through promotional material such as advertisements, brochures and posters.

Delving into the complex interplay between the state’s development and the communication of these processes with the outside world, this article argues that Intourist’s promotional material, as well as the tours that the company organised, mirrored contemporary Soviet economic, social and cultural policies, By revealing the high levels of interaction between Soviets and foreigners in the tourism industry, the article thus adds to the growing scholarship demonstrating the porosity of the barriers between the Soviet and non-Soviet worlds during the 1930s, undermining the common perception that the USSR was a “closed society”.

The latest issue of Sophia: International Journal of Philosophy and Traditions, edited by Purushottama Bilimoria (Professorial Fellow, Philosophy) has now been published.

Iryna Skubii (Mykola Zerov Fellow in Ukrainian Studies, History), “Things of Life in Times of Extremes: Survival Materialities During the Soviet Famines in Ukraine”, in M. Arbuthnot et al. (eds), Soviet Materialities: Socialist Things, Environments and Affects (Manchester University Press)

During famines, the value of material goods grew exponentially. Even small, tiny, mundane objects obtained more economic and emotional importance than previously. As the ‘silent witnesses’ to these catastrophes and crimes against humanity, such material objects were instrumental in the survival of the hungry and in remembering their experiences. Material objects allowed them to ‘uncover’ traumatic stories about the life and aftermath of a catastrophe. In this chapter, the author shows how the things of life were transformed by extremes, how the histories of objects are interwoven with human fates, and why human-material relations obtained new dimensions and value during the famines. Acknowledging the difficulties of tracing the history of things during times of extremes, this research explores the social spaces and networks in which they circulated during the famines. It initiates a material turn in famine studies and aims to bring about a paradigm shift in the understanding of human and material dimensions in famines and times of extremes more broadly. One of the main aims of this chapter is to illuminate how people’s relations with nature and things changed during the Soviet famines of 1921–23, 1932–33, and 1946–47 in Ukraine and why materiality mattered.

Appointments

We are pleased to announce the following appointments of Graduate Researcher Academic Associates for the 2026 academic year:

Ronak Alburz (Classics & Archaeology)
Christian Bagger (Classics & Archaeology)
Finn Butler (Philosophy)
James Fretwell (History)
Patrick Gigacz (History)
Kelly Herbison (Philosophy)
Isabelle Moss (History)
Carl Sciglitano (HPS)
Jesse Seeberg-Gordon (History)
Aseera Shamin (HPS)
Thomas Spiteri (HPS)
Rhiann Thomas (Classics & Archaeology)
George Wood (Philosophy)

Research Higher Degree Milestones

Yowhans Kidane (MA completion seminar, History), “‘The ELF will wither away’: Rethinking the Demise of the Eritrean Liberation Front, 1975-1981“

This thesis reconsiders the history of the Eritrean Liberation Front (ELF). Challenging dominant historical narratives which depict ELF as a reactionary and ineffectual, this study, presents a counter history that situates the ELF within the context of Eritrea’s diverse social and political landscape. In doing so, it argues that its rise and collapse were shaped by tensions stemming from the pluralism that wished to foster for imagined Eritrean nation. Drawing on interviews, memoirs and, hitherto, unexamined archival sources, the thesis demonstrates that the ELF’s defeat resulted not from organisational decay but from a specific historical conjuncture, where unresolved internal contradictions intersected with mounting external pressures.

Advisory Committee: Assoc. Prof. Darrin Durant (Chair), Dr Andonis Piperoglou (Principal Supervisor), Assoc. Prof. Julie Fedor (Co-Supervisor)

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