2023 Graduates

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 […]

Melanie Brand [submitted as Melanie Davis] (PhD in History, 2023) ‘A Question of Trust: Secrecy and Intelligence Accountability in Cold War Australia’ Intelligence oversight and transparency have traditionally been conceptualised as a zero-sum equation in which decreases in secrecy were believed to come at the cost of intelligence agency efficacy. This thesis challenges that view. While […]

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 […]

Cancy Chu (PhD in Cultural Materials Conservation, 2023) ‘Preserving Plastics in Paper-Based Collections’ Plastics, referring to semi- or fully synthetic mouldable polymeric materials, are now found in a wide range of cultural heritage materials. Ongoing research focused on plastics in museum collections show that the chemical stability of certain plastics are short-lived. These unstable plastics […]

Robyn Cooper, (MA in Classics & Archaeology, 2023) ‘Romans, Religion, and Residences: Investigating the Relationship of Domestic Spaces and Roman Homes throughout Pompeii, Herculaneum, and the Iberian Peninsula’ Using domestic cult spaces as a source material, this project explores how the nature of space within Roman residences interacted with and influenced on the expression of religious […]

Gordon Dadswell (PhD in History & Philosophy of Science, 2023), ‘Working Wood: The State, Wood Science and Industry, Australia, 1918–1949′ This study identified the role of three national forest products laboratories and their relationship with other government agencies and specifically, to the Australian timber industry. The laboratories were established with several objectives, including to reduce […]

Nicole Davis (PhD in History, 2023) ‘Nineteenth-century Arcades in Australia: History, Heritage & Representation’ This thesis explores the social and spatial histories of Australia’s nineteenth-century arcades from their beginning in Melbourne in 1853, with an emphasis on their first half century of development. It explores the retail, leisure and business activities they hosted and the lived experiences […]

Leonard D’Cruz (PhD in Philosophy, 2023) ‘Foucault and Normative Political Philosophy’ This thesis brings Michel Foucault’s work into dialogue with the tradition of normative political philosophy inaugurated by John Rawls. More specifically, it draws on Foucault’s ideas to develop an original approach to normative theorising that emphasises the importance of situated insights in reconstructing our […]

Divya Rama Gopalakrishnan (PhD in History, 2023) ‘Venereal Diseases and Bodily Excesses: A Social History of Contagions in the Madras Presidency (c1780 to 1900)’ This thesis investigates the discourses around bodily excess and venereal diseases in colonial South India, or, as it was known in the nineteenth century, the Madras presidency. It highlights the epistemological […]

Madaline Harris-Schober (PhD in Classics & Archaeology, 2023) ‘Ritual Architecture, Material Culture and Practice of the Philistines’ This thesis focuses on the recognition of cult and ritual in the Late Bronze Age [LBA] to Iron Age (1175–586 BCE) Levant. It is concerned with the identification and elucidation of ritual architecture, material culture and practices based […]

Elena Heran (PhD in Classics & Archaeology, 2023), ‘Sidelining the Feminine in Ovid’s Metamorphoses’ This thesis answers two key questions regarding the treatment of gender in Ovid’s Metamorphoses: 1) How does the poem utilise mythical narratives in order to explore peculiarly Roman masculine concerns and anxieties, such as fatherhood, the transition from boy to man, the […]

Stuart Ibrahim (PhD in Classics & Archaeology) ‘The North Sinai Transformed: Third Intermediate Period / Iron Age I–II Raphia and Egypt’s response to the changed political spectrum in the Levant’ When the decades-long process called the Bronze Age collapse ended the globalisation that characterised the Late Bronze Age eastern Mediterranean, there was a massive upheaval that […]

Alastair James (PhD in Philosophy, 2023), ‘Labour Market Justice: Old and New Problems’ This thesis sets out to analyse normatively significant and in some cases under-theorised labour market phenomena to identify forms of injustice and provide philosophically defensible responses that take seriously the feasibility constraints governing policy proposals. Some chapters engage with longer-standing questions, such […]

Caroline James-Garrod (PhD in Philosophy, 2023) ‘Pressed for Time: A Study of Digital Journalists’ Ethical and Temporal Conundrums’ This thesis argues digital print journalists experience social and time ethics pressures due to constant responsibilities to stay connected to mobile work-related online communications. It claims this identifies a social phenomenon – cyber time poverty. It examines […]

Natham McCall (MA in History), ‘Divergent Dominions: Comparing Pre-First World War Defence Policies of British Dominions and their Effects on the Introduction of Wartime Conscription’ By the third year of the First World War, the voluntary enlistment rates in Australia, Canada and New Zealand had fallen to a level that could not be relied upon […]