Urgent Histories.
Earlier this week, The Australian Historical Association published their forum “Doing History in Urgent Times.” A number of historians were invited to write responses to the forum, including Professor David Lowe and Professor Klaus Neumann, which have been published on Australian Policy and History.
David‘s piece, coauthored with James Walter, titled ‘Urgent histories and making decisions‘, places an emphasis on economics and communication. Klaus‘ piece, titled ‘Ever-present possibilities and the status quo,’ urges historians to reflect on their practices and to rethink history’s relationship to the past, present and future.
Black lives matter.
The past few weeks have seen unprecedented support for sustained protests against police brutality in the US. Associate Professor Clare Corbould explained some of the root causes of the protests in a widely-shared piece in The Conversation, “The fury in US cities is rooted in a long history of racist policing, violence and inequality.”
Clare also discussed this history on local radio in Melbourne, Adelaide, and northern Tasmania as well as ABC’s PM.
In light of Scott Morrison’s admonition that Australians need not “import” racism, Clare drew on her most recent research to write “Black and Blak Lives Matter: the long connected anti-racist struggle.”
Publications.
Dr. Jonathon Ritchie‘s article, ‘From the Grassroots: Bernard Narokobi and the Making of Papua New Guinea’s Constitution,’ has just appeared as part of a special issue of The Journal of Pacific History. You can read it here.
Dr. Carolyn Holbrook‘s chapter titled ‘Gendered Perspectives on War and Nationhood: The Prism of Anzac’ published in How Gender Can Transform the Social Sciences: Innovation and Impact, edited by Marian Sawer, Fiona Jenkins and Karen Downing, has been recently released through Palgrave Macmillan.
Dr. Alyson Miller and Associate Professor Cassandra Atherton have a forthcoming article in TEXT, titled ‘“The Chernobyl Hibakusha”: Dark Poetry, The Ineffable, and Abject Realities’. The paper examines poetry written by survivors of the Chernobyl disaster, or inspired by witness testimony, and explores the ways in which such literature, which we describe as ‘dark poetry’, contributes towards thanatourism, as well as performing anti-nuclear activism.
Alyson has recently published an article titled ‘Reading Gender, Power and Violence in Naomi Alderman’s The Power’, in College Literature. The article examines gendered violence in a series of speculative fictions, focussing in particular on Naomi Alderman’s The Power, and its complex negotiations of patriarchal oppression.
Alyson has also recently published an article about contemporary examples of poetry plagiarism in Axon, titled ‘Ramshackle Girls and Sleuthing Gatekeepers: Plagiarism, Poetry, and the Critical Art of Theft’. The paper analyses how literary plagiarism reveals a series of conceptual and practical fissures, not only about form, but also privilege, trauma, and truth.
Dr. Kristine Moruzi has recently coauthored an article with Natalie Coulter. Titled “Woke girls: From The Girl’s Realm to Teen Vogue” and published in Feminist Media Studies, this article places the girls magazine Teen Vogue within the broader history of girls print culture. You can read it here.
In his most recent piece for Inside Story, titled ‘Tipping points‘, Professor Klaus Neumann writes about the anti lockdown protests in Germany and explains that these protests are about more than the coronavirus.
Klaus has coauthored an article with Savitri Taylor which has recently been published in the International Journal of Refugee Law and is titled ‘Australia and the abortive Convention on Territorial Asylum: a case study of a cul de sac in international refugee and human rights law’. You can read it here.
Dr. John Doyle has coauthored an article with Scott Doidge and Rhonda Siu titled ‘A Crisis of the Humanities? Reflections on the Role of the Humanities in the Global University.’ Published in Budhi: A journal of ideas and culture, you can read it here.
Book review.
Professor Phillip Deery recently reviewed Catherine Bond’s Law in War: Freedom and restriction in Australia during the Great War. Phillip’s review was published in The Age and Sydney Morning Herald.
Working with web archives
Most historians of the 1990s or beyond are going to have to come to grips with web archives. But the amount of data available, and the technical and legal barriers to use, make it difficult to know where to start. Over the last couple of months Associate Professor Tim Sherratt has been working with the British Library, the National Library of Australia, and the National Library of New Zealand to overcome some of these barriers by developing a set of tools and resources aimed at humanities researchers. These are now available through the GLAM Workbench.
For example, one of the features of the GLAM Workbench is the tools to help you find when a word or phrase appears (or disappears) from a web page, to compare the text content of a page over time, to create full page screenshots & more. If you want to go deeper, there’s detailed documentation and examples of the sorts of data that’s available from web archives and how you can get it. All of the resources are published as Jupyter notebooks which let you run live code in your browser. Just click on one of the links to get started.
The development of these notebooks was supported by the International Internet Preservation Consortium’s Discretionary Funding Programme 2019-2020.
In the media.
Associate Professor Tony Joel was recently interviewed on the ABC. Tony discussed the tension between amateur and professional VFL, in reference to his book, On the take: The 1910 scandal that changed Australian football forever.
Grant for Vietnam War Learning and Teaching Resources
Earlier this year Deakin was successful in its tender for funding from the Victorian Department of Premier and Cabinet for the creation of learning and teaching resources on the Vietnam War. The resources are designed for Year 9 and 10 students and will complement the Vietnam Veteran speaking program, Learning Firsthand. The team comprises Deakin historians and history education academics from the School of Education, including three Contemporary Histories members: Professor Peter Edwards, Dr. Bart Ziino and Dr. Rebecca Cairns, and will be led by Julianne Moss and Kerri Garrard.
Since then Rebecca, Bart and Peter have continued working towards the development of the teaching and learning resources on the Vietnam War, published by the Department of Premier and Cabinet. It’s a great example of the potential for developing material co-designed by historians and history educators. The draft is about to go out for consultation with teachers and stakeholders. The resource will be launched on Vietnam Veterans’ Day on 18 August and we will make the link available to CHRG when it is available.