News Story Archives

In October 2024 two teams of students from the University of Melbourne participated in the Australian Association for Professional and Applied Ethics (AAPAE) Tertiary Ethics Olympiad. These ethics athletes, or ‘eth-letes’, as they are known in the competition, went up against universities from across Australia. They were supported by coach Dr Alex Cain (Teaching Associate, Philosophy), who reports here […]

The Hansen Trust, established to advance the study of History at University of Melbourne, includes an annual PhD scholarship for the doctoral program in History in SHAPS. In 2024 the scholarship was awarded to Patrick Gigacz, who is researching the cultural history of electricity in Melbourne. Fellow PhD candidate Jesse Seeberg-Gordon sat down with Patrick for a conversation […]

A monthly roundup of media commentary, publications, projects and other news from across the School community.

Dr June Factor AM was a distinguished social historian who pioneered the study of children’s folklore in Australia and played an active role in public life, including as president of the Victorian Council for Civil Liberties (now Liberty Victoria), Friends of the ABC and the Australian Jewish Democratic Society. June’s work was an important influence […]

A new book by Dr Helen M. Davies (Honorary Fellow, History) explores the lives of two remarkable Jewish women in nineteenth-century France. The book sheds light on gender, family, and Jewish experiences in France, from the Napoleonic period through to the Dreyfus Affair. This adapted excerpt introduces the book’s main themes. My book, Herminie and […]

A monthly roundup of media commentary, publications, projects and other news from across the School community.

In recent times, the use of modern technology to reconstruct ancient faces has become increasingly popular. But can we rely on the accuracy of such reconstructions? Dr Konstantine Panegyres, McKenzie Postdoctoral Fellow in Classics & Archaeology, investigates in this article republished from The Conversation. When we read about the lives of people from the ancient […]

Roman Krznaric looks to the past to discover the rules for radical hope in his new book, History for Tomorrow. In his review of the book from The Conversation, Emeritus Professor Peter McPhee reflects on Krznaric’s work and on whether the past can provide answers to present and future questions. Answers to the question about the […]

A monthly roundup of media commentary, publications, projects and other news from across the School community.

In June 2024 the GAIA (Georgian-Australian Investigations in Archaeology) team, comprising staff and students from Classics & Archaeology, colleagues from the Georgian National Museum, and other experts and volunteers from around the globe, returned to Rabati in Georgia for the sixth year of excavations. In this report on the 2024 dig, Associate Professor Andrew Jamieson […]

How did athletes in the Greek and Roman eras prepared in the hope of winning victory at the ancient Olympics. Some of these ways might be recognisable to modern athletes, while others could be very different. In his second article about the ancient Olympics, republished from The Conversation, Konstantine Panegyres, McKenzie Postdoctoral Fellow in Classics […]

Most Australians have heard of Norman Lindsay’s fantastical children’s book The Magic Pudding (1918). Norman was one of ten talented siblings, many of whom became internationally renowned artists and writers during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Lindsays were one of most culturally influential middle-class families in Australian history. SHAPS PhD Candidates Cat […]

In this new article, republished from The Conversation prior to the Chicago Democratic Convention on 19-22 August, Liam Byrne (Honorary in History), together with Emma Shortis, RMIT University, reflected on this event in the context of its past, particularly the “traumatic” one of 1968, held in the same city. Democratic Party delegates from across the […]

Boccaccio’s fourteenth-century masterpiece, now a Netflix series, shows the universality of human responses to a pandemic (along with some sex). SHAPS’s Catherine Kovesi (History) explores The Decameron in this article, first published on Pursuit. For anyone versed in medieval European history, the new Netflix adaptation of a 700-year-old story about a group of noble youths seems […]

As the 2024 Olympics is well underway in Paris, Konstantine Panegyres, McKenzie Fellow in Classics & Archaeology, explores the Olympics’ ancient form, the games played, and the experiences of competitors and visitors during its existence over a period of a millennium. The first recorded victor at the Olympics was Coroebus of Elis. A cook by […]