SHAPS Digest (August 2025)

Mark Edele commented for the Lowy Institute on the Alaska summit and Russia’s strategy in its war on Ukraine, and published an article in Inside Story on ‘realism’ and its tragic consequences for Ukraine

Cristian Larroulet Philippi (RW Seddon Fellow in Philosophy of Science, HPS) discussed his research on measurement in the human sciences on the HPS Podcast, hosted by PhD candidate Thomas Spiteri.

Tamara Lewit was interviewed by ABC South Australia Breakfast about Roman food. 

The second issue of open-access journal Kylix was published this month. Kylix offers a platform for undergraduate writing on ancient history, archaeology, and classical studies, and is run on a voluntary basis by a team of postgraduates in Classics & Archaeology led by Tayla Newland as the current Editor.

Sean Scalmer (History) was interviewed on ABC Radio’s The World Today about his new book, A Fair Day’s Work. Sean Scalmer also discussed the history of the Australian working week in the Conversation.

Iryna Skubii (Mykola Zerov Fellow in Ukrainian Studies, History) wrote for The Interpreter about the talks on Ukraine’s ‘land swaps’ and their danger. 

Caroline Tully (Honorary Fellow, Classics & Archaeology) was one of the curators of the new exhibition ‘Creative Acts: Artists and Their Inspirations’ at State Library Victoria.

The new book How Republics Die: Creeping Authoritarianism in Ancient Rome and Beyond, co-edited by Frederik Vervaet (Classics & Archaeology), David Rafferty and Christopher J. Dart, was reviewed by Sarah Bond (University of Iowa) for Hyperallergic.

Academic Publications

Sadiah Boonstra, Bronwyn Anne Beech Jones, Katharine McGregor, Ken M. P. Setiawan and Abdul Wahid (eds), Rethinking Histories of Indonesia: Experiencing, Resisting and Renegotiating Coloniality (ANU Press).  

Rethinking Histories of Indonesia: Experiencing, Resisting and Renegotiating Coloniality provides a critical evaluation of histories of Indonesia from the formal period of colonisation to the present day. The volume approaches Indonesian history through the lens of coloniality, or the structures of power and control that underpin colonisation and which persist into the present. Bringing together seventeen authors from across the world, the volume offers an alternative conceptualisation of Indonesian history and lays bare the enduring legacies of and processes that reproduce coloniality.

The book can be downloaded free-of-charge from the ANU Press website.

‘This is a significant and exciting volume in terms of its scale, the range of disciplines, approaches and topics included and, ultimately, for its contribution to the field of Indonesian history and historiography, and Indonesian studies and decolonial studies more broadly … The contributors to this book do [a great service to] students of Indonesian history, its cultures, society and politics, offering new sources, voices, approaches and perspectives. Overall, they provide a fresh and vital critique of not only Indonesia’s colonial history but its continuing lived influences on present day Indonesia and beyond.’

—Jemma Purdey, Australia-Indonesia Centre, Monash University

Dhoombak Goobgoowana: A History of Indigenous Australia and the University of Melbourne, Volume 2: Voice, edited by Ross L Jones, James Waghorne and Marcia Langton (Melbourne University Publishing)

Dhoombak Goobgoowana Volume II: Voice reveals the pivotal role played by Indigenous people in the history of the University of Melbourne. An electronic version of the book can be downloaded free-of-charge via the MUP website.

It traces the University’s role in ignoring and quietening Indigenous peoples’ voices, and the reverberations created by those voices that broke through. It shows how collections of art and cultural objects have transitioned from texts for western interpretation to expressions of self-identity. It reveals the Indigenous pioneers who gained admission to the University as students more than a century after it was established, and then later as staff, and documents their triumphs and struggles.

This second volume, following the revelations of Dhoombak Goobgoowana Volume I: Truth, shows how Indigenous communities challenged and disrupted the University, how they contributed to its research endeavours and exhorted it to introduce Indigenous knowledge into the academic sphere.

Gradually, and often reluctantly, the University began to change. But there remains much work to be done.

This volume features several contributions by SHAPS staff and fellows:

• Ross L Jones and Carolyn Rasmussen, ‘Museums and Collections’
• Robyn Sloggett and Mary-Clare Adam, ‘Dr Leonhard Adam at the University of Melbourne’
• Robyn Sloggett and Vicki Couzens, ‘”Wawatoor—Grinding Stones”‘
• Richard Gillespie, ‘Photogrammetry and Rock Art’
• Hugh Taylor and Simon Farley, ‘Eye Diseases in Indigenous Australians’
• Janet McCalman, ‘Onemda’

History Fellow Jackie Dickenson and Robert Crawford (RMIT) have just published their substantial edited volume, The Routledge Companion to the History of Advertising. With 30 international contributors, this volume is global in its reach and comprehensive in its coverage.

The volume is the latest fruit of a long collaboration between Jackie and Robert on the history of advertising, including their earlier ARC Grant ‘Globalising the Magic System: A History of Advertising Industry Practices in Australia 1959-1989’ which resulted in two monographs and other scholarly outcomes including a series of interviews accessible through the Emporium website.

Sean Scalmer (History), A Fair Day’s Work: The Quest to Win Back Time (Melbourne University Publishing)

The length of the working day and the challenges of work-life balance are pressing issues for many Australians, as well as lively matters of public controversy. While the winning of the eight-hour day is celebrated as a past industrial achievement, contemporary discussions of working hours often overlook its rich history.

Tracing 150 years of campaigns for rights and for the fair distribution of productivity gains, historian Sean Scalmer shows how these movements successfully reduced the length of the standard working week from 60 to 38 hours per week, and how economic, social and political shifts since the early 1980s have stalled this long-term progress. Today, industrial laws provide inadequate protection for excessive hours, and Australian women increasingly shoulder long hours of paid work with the bulk of unpaid domestic labour. This has produced a social crisis for all Australians, but is yet to inspire adequate political action.

As debate over our working lives intensifies amid ongoing political, economic and technological challenges, Scalmer’s labour of love on the history of work and play affords us a way to understand the past so we can win back our time-collectively.

‘The campaign to limit labour time and win leisure for the workers is the most significant of the Australian union movement’s past achievements and continuing struggles. Every Australian who has ever enjoyed a lazy Saturday afternoon barbecue, a day at the footy or a week down the coast should read this splendid book.’ — Frank Bongiorno, Professor of History at the Australian National University

Rosemary Morgan, Spectacle Benefaction and the Politics of Appreciation: Case Studies from Italy, Gallia Narbonensis and Africa Proconsularis (Ancient World Studies monograph series, Brepols)

In the remotest corners of the Roman Empire, large crowds were as beguiled by spectacles as their Roman counterparts. Provincial spectacles however, did not share the technical wonders of flying machines, elephant dressage and synchronised swimming seen at imperial extravaganzas. Is it this lack of the sensational that accounts for the relative paucity of scholarly attention paid to regional spectacles and in particular, their sponsors?

When spectacles are viewed purely as entertainment, the messy realities of institutionalized social, economic and political power that regulated them are obscured. A clearer understanding of the spectacle can therefore be achieved by contextualizing it in the big picture of regional and provincial life against the backdrop of Roman power and control. The spectacle itself was highly political in its aims and intent. Access to sponsorship of a spectacle similarly relied on hierarchies of political power and privilege, and consequently required strategic negotiation of candidacy, promises, expenditure and recognition. Rivalry, competition and emulation was endemic.

This epigraphic analysis, focusing on the western Roman Empire (Italy, Gaul and North Africa) during the Imperial period, identifies the milieux of provincial sponsors, their strategies and quest for public honours.

Rosemary Morgan completed her Postgraduate Diploma of Arts (Advanced) thesis under the supervision of Frederik Vervaet. Rosemary is currently writing a (second) doctoral dissertation on frontier zone rural markets in Roman North Africa.

The latest issue of Journal of Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and Society (General Editor Julie Fedor (History)), guest-edited by Yuliya Yurchuk, is the second part of a special issue examining Symbols and Narratives of Ukrainian Resistance.

Oleg Beyda (History) reviewed Sheila Fitzpatrick’s book The Death of Stalin in Australian Book Review (behind paywall).

Simon Farley (History) published a review of Russell McGregor’s Enchantment by Birds: A History of Birdwatching in 22 Species (Scribe: 2024) in Australian Historical Studies.

MA Confirmation Seminar

Liam Brennan, ‘Unveiling Poverty in the Later Roman Republic and Early Principate’ (MA Confirmation Seminar, Classics & Archaeology)

The lexical repertoire employed by Republican and Early Imperial Latin authors to describe the ‘poor’ is notably imprecise. Terms such as pauper, paupertas, egens, egestas, indigens, indigentia, inops, inopia, mendicus, mendicitas, miser, exiguus, and tenuis have frequently been treated in this context as virtually interchangeable by modern scholars. Specificity tends to emerge only when describing more acute levels of deprivation, particularly in distinguishing between the ‘poor’ and the ‘destitute’, with scholars often contrasting paupertas with egestas and inopia. In this paper, the author adopts the modern theory of multidimensional poverty, rooted in the work of Amartya Sen and further developed by scholars such as Sabina Alkire and James Foster, whose Alkire-Foster Counting (AF) method underpins many contemporary national Multidimensional Poverty Indices (MPIs). This framework is used to reformulate the Latin poverty lexicon as it is employed by modern scholars analysing the Roman literary and epigraphic evidence in search of an ancient ‘poverty scale’. The paper examines the contextual nuances of the most frequently used terms, paupertas and egestas, to argue that they are not interchangeable, but that their precise meaning and connotation are in fact highly dependent on literary and socio-cultural context. It then proposes a revised lexicon, structured around poverty dimensions expressible in Latin and informed by contemporary theory, and demonstrates its application through a case study on depictions of cold-related suffering in the Roman literary and epigraphic corpora.

Liam Brennan is an MA (Research) student focused on the social history of the Roman Republic and early Principate. He completed his BA in Ancient History at University College London, followed by an MSt in Greek and Roman History at Oxford. At Oxford, he worked on the Roman Provincial Coinage project and wrote his thesis on coinage and cultural change in Crete following the Roman conquest.

Other happenings

Finally, some reflections from Frederik Vervaet (Classics & Archaeology):

“What is the single most rewarding aspect of being an educator in the at times alienating modern day university ‘business’?

Very simple: the students we teach and learn from!

Yesterday, Xiyao Chloe Liang, one of my talented and curious Chinese undergradute students, soon departing for King’s College, London, to pursue an MA in comparative ancient Roman-Chinese studies, gifted me a truly amazing home-made 3D print of the Colosseum, complete with an inscription and the most lovely little card.

And she also handed me an equally lovely card plus high grade replica of the famous coin minted by Caesar’s lead assassins in the aftermath of the notorious Ides of March gifted by Shilong Chen, a talented former BA Honours student of mine who just completed his MA in ancient history at University College London, where he is now set to embark upon doctoral study in Roman history.

Incredibly gratifying, encouraging, and humbling, and also most exciting and promising to see how interest in the ancient Roman world is clearly gaining traction in the equally formidable Middle Kingdom!”

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