SHAPS Digest (November 2023)
Oleg Beyda (Hansen Lecturer in Russian History) was interviewed (in Russian) (with his co-author Igor Petrov) for Radio Free Europe about his work reconstructing the biography of Nikolai Tarasov, a Soviet Lieutenant Colonel who was captured in 1942 and is still considered MIA. The research demonstrates that Tarasov became a German collaborator and successfully moved to France after 1945.
Incoming Mary Lugton Postdoctoral Fellow Nat Cutter (History) explored the weird and wonderful world of early modern marginalia in a post for the Medieval and Early Modern Orients blog, seeking to uncover how people in early modern England engaged with books about North Africa. From detailed notes about Algerian ethnic groups and annual Nile flooding to doodled grubs and chickens, this investigation reveals many promising hints about intellectual culture and transcultural relations in the premodern world.
Mark Edele (Hansen Chair in History, and Deputy Dean, Faculty of Arts) discussed the Putin regime’s future on 60 Minutes.
Cordelia Fine (HPS) featured in the Australian’s Research Magazine list of ‘living legends‘ – Australian researchers and scholars who influence public discourse world-wide.
A new digital resource was launched this month as part of Jacinthe Flore‘s (HPS) Linkage Project, Borderline Personality as Social Phenomena: An Interdisciplinary Study, The interactive resource is based on fieldwork with people with lived and living experiences of Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD).
Ash Green‘s book Birds in Roman Life and Myth was reviewed in the Bryn Mawr Classical Review. The reviewer found that “Green’s richly researched and interdisciplinary Birds in Roman Life and Myth has a lot to offer—not just about the past, but also about our current situation, giving us much to ponder about how we need to behave in the future.”
The HPS Podcast published new episodes with Adrian Currie (University of Exeter) on opportunistic scientific methods; Sarah Qidwai on science and colonialism; Ian Hesketh (UQ) on the writing of science history; Gerhard Wiesenfeldt on the unknown scientist; and Carl Bergstrom (University of Washington) on science and disinformation. Since its launch earlier this year the HPS Podcast has gone from strength to strength, reaching ever-growing international audiences. The HPS Podcast was conceived by Fiona Fidler and is produced and hosted by HPS PhD candidate Samara Greenwood and Honours student Indigo Keel.
Marilyn Lake (Honorary Professorial Fellow, History) reviewed Graeme Davison’s book My Grandfather’s Clock: Four Centuries of a British-Australian Family, for the Australian Book Review (behind paywall).
Kate Lynch (HPS) produced ABC RN’s ‘The Philosophy of Biology’, questioning what philosophy can bring to biology, a scientific discipline notionally given to the pursuit of hard facts and empirical evidence.
Andy May (History) launched the website for his Shillong Digital Archives Directory (Sdad) project. The Sdad initiative is an ongoing collaboration scholars and practitioners in Meghalaya and elsewhere to share research data and build a repository of archives, stories and images exploring the history and heritage of the Khasi Hills.
Kate McGregor (History) discussed her new book, Systemic Silencing: Activism, Memory and Sexual Violence in Indonesia, on the Talking Indonesia podcast.
Kate McGregor also published an article, ‘Icons of the “Comfort Women” Movement: Considering the Plight of Indonesian Survivor Activists’, on the Australian Women’s History Network blog. The article explores how Indonesian women engaged in activism after coming forward with their experiences of sexual violence during World War Two.
Peter McPhee (Professorial Fellow) commented on the controversies around historical inaccuracies in Ridley Scott’s Napoleon, for the Conversation.
Andonis Piperoglou published an article in the Greek newspaper BHMagazino on ‘Empowering Greek Diaspora Studies via Global Academic Partnerships’; the article is available (in Greek) via Yiorgos Anagnostou’s blog Immigrations–Ethnicities–Racial Situations: Writings about Difference and Contact Zones.
Incoming inaugural Mykola Zerov Fellow in Ukrainian Studies, historian Iryna Skubii, was featured on the Faculty of Arts website. Dr Skubii will arrive in Melbourne in May 2024.
Academic Publications
Michael Arnold (HPS), with Fraser Allison, Bjørn Nansen, Martin Gibbs, Samuel Holleran and Tamara Kohn, ‘Reimagining Memorial Spaces through Digital Technology: A Typology of CemTech’, Death Studies
Digital technologies are creating new ways for visitors to engage with cemeteries. This article presents research into the development of digital cemetery technologies, or cemtech, to understand how they are reimagining memorial spaces. Through a systematic review of examples of cemtech in online records, academic literature, patents, and trade publications, we developed a typology of cemtech according to four characteristics: application type, technical components, target users, and development status. Analysis of the application types resulted in five higher-level themes of functionality or operation-Wayfinding, Narrativizing, Presencing, Emplacing, and Repurposing-which we discuss. This typology and thematic analysis help to identify and understand the development of cemetery technology design trajectories and how they reimagine possibilities for cemetery use and experience.
Purushottama Bilimoria (Principal Fellow, Philosophy), ‘Gandhi and the Posthumanist Agenda: An Early Expression of Global IR’, E-International Relations
The recent debates on Global IR emphasise the vital roles that non-Western knowledge-forms can play in strategic mainstreaming of the relational ethics of ‘post-humanism’. That is, the theoretical-practical approach that propositions an inclusive account of the importance of not just the human actors but also the non-human actors in global political life, such as nature, earth’s processes, plant and animal systems, technospheres, forms of viruses, and so on (Cudworth, Hobden & Kavalski 2018, Brasovan 2017, Kavalski 2020, Shih 2020). Since Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (1957), or the Mahatma (great soul) as he is popularly known, vehemently made an appeal to acknowledge an ‘identification with all that lives’, his viewpoints come across as an untapped repository that could be evoked to supplement the post-humanist agenda of Global IR. In fact, Gandhi’s way of foregrounding the post-humanist agenda borrows from a range of conceptualisations – such as ahiṃsā (non-injury or non-violence), satyāgraha (truth-force), tapasya (spiritual heat), sarvodaya (welfare for all) and swadeshi (self-sufficiency) – that arise from the Indian textual traditions of the Vedas and Bhagavad Gītā. This article aims to explain how these conceptualisations based on the Indic knowledge-forms can initiate a dialogic interaction between the seemingly divergent approaches of ‘Western modernity’ and ‘non-Western traditionalism’, thereby imaginatively informing the Global IR discourse.
Purushottama Bilimoria, Philip Hughes, Jayant B Bapat, Alison Booth, and Rajendra Prasad, ‘Hinduism in Hindu Diaspora in Oceania (Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific’, in Knut A. Jacobsen (ed.), Hindu Diasporas (Oxford University Press). This volume is the first book to bring together overviews and historical and ethnographic empirical studies of the religious traditions and practices of the most important Hindu diasporas on all the world’s continents. It documents the important role that migration has played in the geographical expansion of Hinduism and shows the great plurality of Hindu traditions and the centrality of international networks and global flows.
Nat Cutter (History), with Rachel Fensham and Tyne Daile Sumner, ‘The Slipperiness of Name: Biography and Gender in Australian Cultural Databases’, Gender and History
In this article, we examine and historicise problems related to name and gender in biographical and cultural databases. Combining theoretical and computational approaches to onomastics, we identify contradictory naming conventions, intriguing patterns and distinct institutional vestiges in the recording and representation of artistic careers. We evaluate the affordances and constraints of naming conventions in Australian cultural databases, considering evolving trends in data collection and use, in relation to the complex lives of individual artists. We argue that this local‐level analysis extends to wider transnational debates in historiography, gender studies and digital humanities research today and propose some conceptual and technical solutions for building and using cultural databases in the future.
Andonis Piperoglou (History), ‘Destination Darlinghurst’, in Anna Clark, Tamson Pietsch, and Gabrielle Kemmis (eds), My Darlinghurst (NewSouth)
Darlinghurst, a triangle of 80 hectares, sits on the edge of Sydney’s CBD. Dominated by high rocky ridges on which grand colonial houses were once built, it is bordered in the east by Rushcutters Creek (Boundary Street), which was used by Aboriginal peoples until at least the 1860s, and in the south by a Gadigal pathway (Oxford Street), which traced a route out to the ocean. The colony’s first mills were built beside valley streams, which were soon covered over by densely packed rows of terrace houses – homes to workers, artisans and labourers.
Shaped by this landscape, and transforming it, a mixture of posh and poor, criminal and respectable, itinerant and established, sick and well have made their lives in Darlinghurst. My Darlinghurst profiles this colourful neighbourhood, revealing the stories of its migrant and Indigenous residents, the razor gangs and brothels, the soldiers and wharfies, and the artists and LGBTQIA+ communities who have made — and continue to make — Darlinghurst their home.
Andonis Piperoglou’s chapter charts how migrants moved through the suburb, contributing to the making of its cosmopolitan character.
Promotions
Many congratulations to staff members promoted during the latest round:
- Catherine Kovesi (History) – promoted to full Professor
- Hyun Jin Kim (Classics and Archaeology) – promoted to full Professor
- Julie Fedor (History) – promoted to Associate Professor
- Nicole Tse (Cultural Materials Conservation) – promoted to Associate Professor
Appointments & Awards
We are delighted to announce the following appointments to continuing positions in the School:
- Paul Carter (Assistant Lecturer, HPS)
- Becky Clifton (Assistant Lecturer, Classics & Archaeology)
- Nat Cutter (Assistant Lecturer, History)
- Paula Dredge (Assistant Lecturer, Cultural Materials Conservation)
- Jacob Heywood (Assistant Lecturer, Classics & Archaeology)
- Kerstin Knight (Assistant Lecturer, HPS)
- Charlotte Millar (Lecturer, History)
- Fallon Mody (Assistant Lecturer, HPS)
- Kai Tanter (Assistant Lecturer, Philosophy)
- Larissa Tittl (Assistant Lecturer, Classics & Archaeology)
- Sarah Walsh (Lecturer, History)
- Natasha Wilson (Assistant Lecturer, History)
Oleg Beyda (Hansen Lecturer in Russian History) has been awarded a Scholar Research Support Grant from the Hoover Institution Archives at Stanford University. Oleg will visit Stanford in 2024 to conduct research for his project on the biography of Colonel Boris Pash.
Matthew Champion (History) is a member of the newly funded Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) Netzwerk – Die Mobilität religiöser Dinge/Mobile Matters of Religion which has been awarded funding to run from 2024–2026. The project draws together scholars and curators from Amsterdam, Berlin, Bern, Erfurt, Frankfurt, Jena, Kent and Melbourne to investigate the mobility of devotional and sacred objects in the early modern world. It is led by Anne Mariss at the University of Regensburg.
Matthew Champion has been re-elected to the board of the Council for the Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences (CHASS).
Nicole Davis (History, Forum) has been announced as a Griffith University Harry Gentle Resource Centre Visiting Fellow for 2024. Nicole’s project will explore the experiences and networks of nineteenth-century Queensland businesswomen in a specific site of commerce and leisure – the arcade. It examines establishments owned or run by women and commodities or services provided in four arcades built during this period – in Brisbane, Charters Towers and Townsville. Sometimes disguised behind male relatives acting as faces of the businesses or historiography overlooking their participation, these women played a vital role in the Australian colonial economy and represented significant networks in global exchanges of goods, ideas, and people.
Kate McGregor (History) has been appointed a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia.
2023 AICCM (Australian Institute for the Conservation of Cultural Materials) Awards
AICCM Medal – Robyn Sloggett
This award, previously known as the AICCM Hall of Fame, recognises career-long contributors to Conservation and acknowledges skills sharing across levels of seniority ensuring that skills are not lost from the profession. The AICCM citation notes that the medal is to ‘acknowledge Robyn’s international work as an expert in cultural materials conservation. Her sustained commitment to teaching, research and community-engaged research has contributed hugely to the conservation profession. Robyn pioneered the development of cultural materials conservation programs at the University of Melbourne, as a discipline through the Grimwade Centre’s academic programs, and as a commercial hub through Grimwade Conservation Services. Her work in community conservation programs includes partnerships with Indigenous communities and with remote, rural and regional organisations across Australia. Robyn’s inter-disciplinary and cross-cultural work has been transformative for the Australian conservation sector.’
ADFAS/ArtsNational Student Conservator of the Year – Jo Lupgens
Jo will complete their Masters by Coursework in Cultural Materials Conservation this year and is a committed advocate for queer and women’s heritage in fine art, and the issues involved in securing and strengthening queer identity through the conservation of queer cultural heritage. They are currently the Secretary of Student Conservators at Melbourne (SC@M) and were instrumental in the SC@M proposal for the recent changes to the AICCM Codes of Ethics and Practice to ensure they are more trans-friendly and trans-inclusive. Jo has been a key part of SC@M workshops and events, and took part in the student team working on the restoration of Virginia Cuppaidge’s Cytheria.
AICCM Outstanding Conservation Project of the Year – 2022 Australian Flood Recovery Project (Grimwade Conservation Services)
Libby Melzer, Katy Glen, Noni Zachri, Penny Tripp, Peter Mitchelson, Cushla Hill, Vanessa Kowalski, Ellie Urrutia Bernard, Christine Mizzi, Beatrice Dahllof, Bridget Fejes, Hannah Lamond-Hallett, Hayley Nolle, Hilary Kwan, Jess Argall, Emma Dacey, Julia Sylvester
This award recognises conservation projects that aren’t strictly treatments that nonetheless demonstrate a level of complexity, skill, innovation, collaboration and benefit to cultural heritage.
The 2022 Australian Flood Recovery Project, led by the University of Melbourne’s Grimwade Conservation Services, was a direct response to a number of calls for assistance during the 2022 Australian flood emergency. A high-profile project was developed to test future recovery responses during extreme emergency events, and featured online and face-to-face activities to support regional, remote, and isolated communities in the recovery of personal items and small collections impacted by floodwater. The project created a variety of new resources and included community engagement opportunities for conservators to provide specialist services and train affected individuals. There was a strong communications plan which ensured the project reached a broad audience and raised the profile of the conservation profession. The team collaborated with stakeholders and allied professionals such as local councils, the media and affected communities. The resources developed will continue to be used by these groups.
Research Higher Degree Completions
Pascale Bastien (PhD in Philosophy, 2023), ‘Economic Growth, Liberalism, and the Good: A Contemporary Eudaimonistic Evaluation’
The majority of states worldwide pursue economic growth as a policy objective, and this tends to be justified in liberal and welfarist terms. However, the legitimacy of this pursuit is rarely debated and appears to be largely taken for granted. This thesis thus seeks to evaluate the legitimacy of the pursuit of economic growth as a policy objective in affluent countries, with a particular focus on well-being.
Part 1 establishes the grounds for a normative evaluation of the pursuit of economic growth in affluent countries. Chapter 1 focuses on methodology. It argues that the economy is a proper target for a normative evaluation, and that the methodologies of social critique and political economy are appropriate to this evaluation. Chapter 2 explores the historical roots and the ideological features of the commitment to economic growth. This understanding of the commitment to economic growth in ideological terms contributes an explanation for the fact that it is rarely questioned. Chapter 3 investigates the relationship between economic growth and consumerism, and shows that individuals in consumerist societies are structurally constrained to engage in the consumerist lifestyle of working and spending, which challenges the association between economic growth and freedom, and raises questions regarding welfare.
Part 2 elaborates and defends a contemporary theory of welfare eudaimonism which will form the basis for an evaluation of the pursuit of economic growth. Chapter 4 draws on a psychological theory called self-determination theory, and sketches a theory of welfare eudaimonism called self-determination eudaimonism. Central to this theory is the idea that human beings flourish when they engage in activities which fulfil their basic psychological needs. Chapter 5 defends the plausibility of a deflationary teleological explanation of prudential well-being in terms of self-fulfilment. Chapter 6 elaborates on self-determination eudaimonism and shows how it can be understood in terms of normative motivation. Chapter 7 discusses the development of normative motivation and its relationship with practical rationality.
Finally, Part 3 evaluates the pursuit of economic growth as a policy objective in affluent countries in light of the framework developed in Part 2. Chapter 8 argues that the consumerist lifestyle entailed by the pursuit of economic growth undermines well-being, such that the pursuit of economic growth is illegitimate as a welfarist policy. In addition, since individuals in consumerist societies are structurally constrained to engage in this lifestyle, the underlying structure can be deemed unjust. Lastly, the pursuit of economic growth as a policy objective seriously limits the freedom to live as one sees fit and amounts to the imposition of a particular conception of the good, which is inconsistent with liberal principles. Part 3 ends with a brief discussion of what the good life may look like in the post-growth society.
Supervisors: Associate Professor Daniel Halliday, Andrew Alexandra
Martin Carnovale (PhD in Classics & Archaeology, 2023), ‘The Language of Archaeological Investigations‘
The thesis explores whether methods based upon analogical reasoning can be used to interpret culture if there are difficulties of translating other culture’s beliefs. The kind of cultural interpretation that I will discuss is that which pertains to social, artistic and religious activities. The thesis also explores the differences between quantitative and qualitative forms of reasoning, as well as inductive an deductive approaches, and how these are used in certain forms of archaeological interpretation. It is shown that scientific analyses of culture can make errors of translation, and it is also shown that humanistic and qualitative analyses of culture make many errors of reasoning that may be usually put forth against scientistic analyses of culture. How much biology and culture influence statistical trends is also discussed, and it is argued that trends may give support to certain forms of analogical reasoning that an archaeologist might use for the interpretation of culture.
I also critique the idea of biological universals as being meaningful for cultural analysis. It is also argued that cognitive and biological factors exist below the level of cultural and religious activities; hence, a biological basis for statistical trends might not give much content to certain forms of comparative cross-cultural analysis. Thus, one might defend a qualitative approach to interpretation, but I argue that qualitative approaches make errors that can be paradoxically regarded as scientistic. The relevance of philosophical and linguistic theories by Kant, Kripke and Carnap is defended for archaeological research to explore interpretative errors in both quantitative and qualitative reasoning. The thesis argues against the dualism between the qualitative and quantitative, and attempts to argue for a pluralist methodology where positivism and relativism may be unified.
Supervisor: Dr Brent Davis
Belinda Gourley (MA in Cultural Materials Conservation, 2023), ‘The Paper Negatives of Reverend George Wilson Bridges: A Preliminary Investigation into their History, Materials and Techniques’
The Reverend George Wilson Bridges (1788–1863) was an English clergyman, writer and early photographer who lived in and travelled extensively through Jamaica, Canada, the Mediterranean and the Middle East. He played a significant part within a group of nineteenth-century British photographers, learning the paper negative and salted paper print processes from their inventor, William Henry Fox Talbot (1800–1877) and other associates during the mid-1840s. Bridges created his photographs during his travels around the Mediterranean and the Middle East between 1846 and 1852, and published some of these upon his return to England. His production of images was reasonably prolific, however, for numerous reasons his photographic work appeared to not gain much attention during his lifetime and these days are considered relatively obscure and an adjunct to the work of his mentors.
This research explores the life and work of this fascinating character through the lens of fourteen paper negatives attributed to Bridges that are held in the collections of Museums Victoria (MV). The focus is to begin understanding and identifying of the scope of photographic works created by this relatively unexamined photographer, and then more specifically, the photographic materials and techniques he used to create his paper negatives. The results of this research are intended to inform future methods of care for the works in the MV Collection, and more broadly, to advance the collective understanding of Bridges’s overall photographic oeuvre and begin filling a significant gap in scholarly knowledge of this area.
This investigation begins with a review of the historic literature written about Bridges’s life and photographic career, comparing secondary accounts against the historic primary sources they are derived from, and exploring what photographic works are generally believed to have been created by him. In particular, numerous letters written by Bridges in which he explains his working methods, materials, and various issues he had with resulting images are interrogated. This discussion draws upon the significant number of secondary and primary resources that describe Talbot’s methods of producing paper negatives and salted paper prints, in which Bridges’s practice was based.
The second part of the thesis documents and collates results gained from visually examining a range of paper negatives attributed to Bridges. It begins by reviewing how other conservation professionals have conducted similar studies of nineteenth-century paper negatives and salted paper prints in the past and details the visual examination and documentation methods that were developed and utilised in this study. Two sets of results are then presented and discussed. The first set of results is derived from the visual examination of 44 paper negatives attributed to Bridges in three other collecting institutions, and the second is from visual examination of 14 such works in the MV collection. Following this, a final third section details the overall results obtained from all four collections. Results are discussed in the light of the earlier review of historic literature about Bridges and observable trends are drawn out to create a sketch of the characteristic elements of his paper negatives. Discussion of the results from the MV collection in particular, focusses on where those works fit into the broader context of his oeuvre, and how the results of these investigations may influence the future care of this collection. The study finishes by listing numerous recommendations for further study on the topic.
Supervisors: Associate Professor Petronella Nel and Associate Professor Alison Inglis (SCC)
Ajay Raina (PhD in Philosophy), ‘A Critique of Differentiated Citizenship‘
This thesis is a critique of ‘liberal’ theories of culturally differentiated citizenship, with primary focus on Will Kymlicka’s philosophy. The main proposition of differentiated citizenship is that, for reasons of (distributive) justice, liberal states ought to give special rights to cultural minorities in addition to the universal, culture-blind, rights that all citizens have. The special cultural rights are essential for the members of ethnonational minority cultures to be able to exercise autonomy, for those communities to viably flourish, and for polyethnic, immigrant minorities to smoothly integrate into the liberal-democratic social contract. The classic liberal system of culture-blind universal rights and citizenship denies them these possibilities because the basic institutional structure of such a liberal society is, in reality, culturally majoritarian and minority exclusive; it cannot address substantive interests and needs of cultural minorities.
In this thesis, these claims of autonomy, wellbeing and integration are each posited as hypothesis and empirically tested—for the first time against large-N, longitudinal data – in the real liberal world where such special rights have been granted. The evidence suggests that none of these claims can be undisputedly upheld. Deeper analysis points to faulty assumptions in the theories being the likely cause of the empirical failures. For example, while the argument for the autonomy rests on the assumption that ‘societal culture’ is the source of all the meaningful ‘options’ of the good life, it overlooks the role that ‘preferences,’ the agent’s dispositions to options, play in the actual making of choice and the culture’s role, if any, in the shaping of those dispositions. Similarly, the wellbeing of the Native ethnocultural minorities is assumed to automatically follow from the ‘external protections’ – from ‘outbid’ (on resources) and ‘outvote’ (on policies) disadvantages which the classically liberal economic and political institutions supposedly cause them – that the special cultural right to self-government provide them, with little thought given to the structure and diversity of institutions which, economic theory tells us, are factors more critical to the achievement of robust wellbeing than bare ownership of resources and policy. Similarly, the assumption that multicultural rights, simplicter, enable shared civic identity of ‘mutual concern, accommodation, or sacrifice’ is problematic because it conflates independent dimensions of political life. Rights establish/adjudicate the moral status of members in a moral community, while ‘mutual concern, accommodation, or sacrifice’ represent actions subject to moral responsibility adjudication by, or within, the moral community; neither dimension, straightforwardly, entails the other.
On the positive side, this thesis proposes and defends a principle, the baseline principle (BP), of effective distributive justice: a liberal state ought to ensure equal probability of securing the acceptable baseline of wellbeing for all citizens. The baseline principle can be (prescriptively) fleshed out as the equal capabilities principle (ECC): all citizens should have equal sum of basic capabilities needed to satisfy the BP in a market economy. (The ECC should also, hopefully, reduce the autonomy deficit in the culture group). The ECC does require some state paternalism, but, arguably, only of a degree that would be acceptable to all rational and reasonable persons. And, shared civic identity in the multicultural context, this thesis argues, has better chance of emerging, inductively, from ‘identity of political experience’ rather than deductively from dissimilarity of political rights.
Supervisors: Associate Professor François Schroeter, Associate Professor Dan Halliday
Behzad Zerehdaran (PhD in History), ‘Genesis and Development of the Concept of Rights in Iran before the Constitutional Revolution (1815–1906)‘
In this dissertation, I have studied the history of subjective rights in Iran during the Qajar era. I have shown that the concept of subjective right (right as to have a right) emerged during this period as opposed to objective right (right as to be right). The genesis and development of subjective rights can be observed in the political and legal literature of Iran since the reign of Fath Ali Shah. I have presented a meta-theory for analyzing the concept of rights by providing a concise history of its semantic development and explaining the transition from objective to subjective rights. I have also examined theories on the foundations and justifications of rights and used the Hohfeldian framework to analyze various conceptions of rights in travel literature, enlightenment literature, and dream literature of the Qajar era.
To explore the manifestations of the concept of rights in travel literature, I have examined the travelogues of Abu al-Hasan Khan Ilchi, Mirza Salih Shirazi, Rizza Quli Mirza, Mirza Fattah Garmarudi, Haj Sayyah Mahallati, and Mirza Muhammad Husayn Farahani. These travelogues were written by Iranian statesmen, students, and tourists who visited the Ottoman Empire, the Russian Empire, and Europe during the early and mid-Qajar era. I have used the meta-theoretical framework of rights to analyze the representations of the concept of rights in their travel accounts.
To study the contributions of the Qajar intellectuals in the development of the concept of rights, I have consulted the complete oeuvre of Mirza Malkum Khan, Mirza Yusuf Khan Mustashar al-Duwlih, Mirza Fath Ali Akhundzadih, Mirza Aqa Khan Kirmani, Abbas Afandi, Abdulrahim Talibuf, and Ziyn al-Abidin Maraghih-i.
Lastly, I have considered the question of rights in dream narratives of the Qajar era by examining The Book from Invisible (1860), One Word (1874), Sleep and Awakening (1884), The Travel Diary of Ebrahim Beg Vol. 1 (1897), The Paths of Virtuous (1905), The Celestial Consultative Assembly (1906), and The Travel Diary of Ebrahim Beg Vol. 3 (1909).
Supervisors: Associate Professor Richard Pennell, Associate Professor Dan Halliday
PhD Confirmation Seminars
Christian Bagger (PhD Candidate, Classics & Archaeology), ‘From Cornelia to Livia: Senatorial Women, their Influence, Power and Auctoritas ca. 133–27 BCE’
My research endeavours to examine the elite Roman women, known as matronae, and their power, influence and auctoritas from, roughly, the 160s BCE to 27 BCE. The topic positions itself as a conjunction of social and political history. The study concerns itself with elite women and the family, and the impact women had on the political climate of the late Republic. The scope is more than a century, spanning from the much neglected ‘early’ late Republic and the fame of Cornelia, and ending in the culmination of the civil wars of the triumvirate with the ascension of Caesar Augustus and Livia Drusilla. The investigation centres on diachronic case studies of well attested women, examining their (perceived or real) power, influence and/or auctoritas within the public and domestic spheres of Roman society. I argue that social convention allowed women a high degree of influence and positioned elite matronae as central and vital members of the socio-political milieu in late Republican Rome. This position, I argue, became increasingly visible to observers of the late Republic with the emergence of continued internecine strife, political rivalry and outright civil war, and through the roles women publicly played in these crises.
Fenella Palanca (PhD Candidate, Classics & Archaeology), ‘Modelling Textile Consumption and Production in Republican Italy’
Although there must have been tremendous demand for textiles in the Roman period, scholarship on the Republican textile industry has been surprisingly limited, due to an apparent paucity of literary and archaeological evidence. But can we really omit such a major industry when discussing the burgeoning economy of the sprawling Roman Republic? This thesis aims to model textile production and consumption in the Republic, drawing from quantitative, archaeological, and literary sources. It argues that the textile economy involved more intensive, varied modes of production than historians have assumed, relying on the – often invisible – labour of women and slaves to function.
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