Glen Mitchell: The Man Who Isn't There
Workshop
Glen Mitchell: The Man Who Isn’t There: The Curious Case of Francis Hugh Snow Francis Hugh Snow made a significant contribution to the development of the Australian non-ferrous metals industry. His Adelaide metal broking firm connected him to large German companies through the sale of ores and…
Gary Werskey: Falling Short: Learning from My Shortcomings as a Biographer
Workshop
During the past four decades Gary Werskey has written biographies of British left-wing scientists and a forgotten British-Australian artist, as well as family histories and memoirs of his own life as a scholar-activist. In this talk Gary reflects on his attraction to the genre of biography, his own…
Philip Clarke: Understanding long-run trends in health inequalities using biographical information
Workshop
Understanding long-run trends in health inequalities using biographical information: What insight can we gain from politicians? This paper considers data issues involved in researching long run health inequalities. A study which has been completed aimed to compare the mortality rate and life…
Cathy Perkins: Writing The Shelf Life of Zora Cross
Workshop
How do the sources determine the nature of a biography? Cathy Perkins will talk about the relationship between the extensive Zora Cross archives and her biography The Shelf Life of Zora Cross. From Cross’s 1917 poetry sensation Songs of Love and Life to her novels, letters and profiles of other…
Barbara Minchinton: The Women of Little Lon
Workshop
Barbara Minchinton, The Women of Little Lon: Biographies of the Unknown When does a family history become a biography? After establishing the usual births, deaths and marriages data, how do we reconstruct the lives of women like Madame Brussels, Melbourne’s most famous brothel keeper of the…
Kiera Lindsey: The Speculative Method
Webinar/Online
Kiera Lindsey: The Speculative Method. Using Scientific Guesswork and Narrative as Laboratory to 'Re-present' Past Lives What is speculative biography? How might writers and readers work with ‘the speculative method’? In this presentation I speak to my chapters in a new Routledge edited collection…
Who’s Afraid of Sigmund Freud? Musicological Responses to Psychobiography
Seminar
Psychobiography has often held an uneasy position in the writing of musical biography. Ernest Newman’s: The Man Liszt: A Study of a Tragi-comedy of a Soul Divided Against Itself (1934) attempted to ride the wave of the debunking biography model laced with a psychoanalytic angle, but few of the…