Publications

Associate professor Clare Corbould and her University of Sydney co-author Michael McDonnell had a piece in the Washington Post perspective series, Made by History, “African American holidays, like Aug. 1, deserve national attention”.

Associate Professor Cassandra Atherton has a Covideo with US poet, Jonathan Penton on the New Orleans Poetry Festival website. You can watch them read their wonderful haibun poems here.

Events

11th August, 5-6:30pm: Dr. Gwyn McClelland will be presenting at History Council Victoria’s webinar, ‘Remembering the atomic bombs: History, memory and politics in Australia, Japan and the pacific’. You can find registration details here.

Seminar series

Zoom invites for Gwyn’s seminar on the 12th August have been emailed to members. If you didn’t receive an invite (or would like to be re-sent the invite), please contact Jacqui Baker

5th August: Andrea Witcomb.
Title: ‘Nature’s marvels’: The value of collections extracted from colonial Western Australia.

Abstract: This paper, coauthored with Alistair Paterson, seeks to make a contribution to the study of the history of collecting by arguing for the importance of understanding the ways in which the value of collections to collectors, institutions and knowledge producers was produced. We call this focus on value an Extractive Value Adding Approach (EVAA) to collection studies. Our deployment of this approach reveals not only the close relationship between collecting practices and colonialism, but the ways in which values are made not given and the processes involved in their production. By revealing the social context to these processes our hope is that new values for these collections can be produced, values that might address the colonial legacies embedded in the making of these collections and the purposes and values to which they were put to at the time of their making.

Title: Seventy-five years after the Nagasaki bomb: Listening to the Catholic survivors.
Abstract: I will introduce my new monograph, and my oral history work with Catholic survivors of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki. In 2019, I visited Nagasaki at the time of Pope Francis’s visit and observed the community’s response. I will discuss the changes since the 1981 visit of Pope John Paul II, who began a speech at Hiroshima, “War is the work of humanity” and how these comments have supported a transformation of the community’s previous interpretation of the atomic bombing as a part of God’s providence. The narratives of recently outspoken survivors demonstrate the resilience of a surviving community, for many years persecuted by the Japanese authorities.

Dr. McClelland holds a Master of Divinity from the University of Divinity, Melbourne, Australia and a Doctorate of Philosophy in Japanese history from Monash University. In 2020 he will teach in the Deakin University unit, “Conflict and its Legacies in Modern Asia”. Gwyn was a secondary teacher of Japanese and Geography for some twenty years and while doing his PhD at Monash he taught in Education (Bilingualism and Languages Methodology), History and the Japanese language. In 2019 he coordinated a modern Chinese history unit at Monash University, ‘The Fall and Rise of Modern China’. Gwyn is the winner of the 2019 John Legge prize for best thesis in Asian Studies, awarded by the Asian Studies Association of Australia (ASAA). Gwyn has taught at Monash, RMIT and Melbourne Universities and he has participated in recent workshops at Copenhagen University (Center for Contemporary Buddhist Studies) and the University of California, Berkeley. His monograph, based on his work interviewing Catholic survivors of the Nagasaki atomic bombing was published in 2019 by Routledge in Mark Selden’s series, “Asia’s Transformations” and is entitled ‘Dangerous Memory in Nagasaki: Prayers, Protests and Catholic Survivor Narratives’.