The Year the Stars Fell: The Great Leonid Meteor Storm of 1833 and the Problem of Meaning in Antebellum America.
Lecture/seminar
On November 12, 1833, residents of North America witnessed over 100,000 visible meteors falling over the course of four hours. They woke their families and neighbours, creating a shared, continent-wide experience of epistemological crisis—for though the science of astronomy had made…
Tribal Visuality and the Politics of Indigenous Art: 'Mary Sully: Native Modern' Revisited - Allan Martin Lecture
Lecture
In 2024, New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art launched a reclamation of the artistic career of Mary Sully, a reclusive, previously unacknowledged Dakota artist active between the late 1920s and mid-1940s. The processes of conservation, curation, and exhibition revealed new dimensions of the work,…
Prostitution and Empire: An Informal Conversation
Activity
Join Dr Eva Payne and Professor Rae Frances to talk about Eva's new book, Empire of Purity: The History of Americans' Global War on Prostitution (Princeton University Press, 2025).How the US crusade against prostitution became a tool of empireBetween the 1870s and 1930s, American social reformers,…
Relationality, Movement and Transnationality in Biographies across PNG and Australia: Stories through Nahau and Wesley Rooney
Seminar
It seems straightforward: for years now, I’ve been saying that I’m working on Papua New Guinean politician Nahau Rooney’s biography. But really, I’ve been trying to make sense of telling a story that moves across epistemic spheres and transnationally across PNG and Australia. I experience movement…
Beyond the Fatal Shore: Former Convict Departures from the Australian Colonies
Lecture/seminar
Of the 168,000 convicts transported to Australia between 1788 and 1868, approximately five per cent—some 8,000—left the colonies. Prevailing accounts suggest that most convicts remained because Australia was attractive or because leaving was prohibitively costly. Given this, the thesis asks: What…
The House of Blue Glass: A life of Penelope Lucas, by Alan Atkinson
Book launch
Join award-winning historian Alan Atkinson in conversation with Catherine Gay about his latest book The House of Blue Glass: A life of Penelope Lucas (NewSouth, 2026).Following on from his acclaimed joint biography of Elizabeth and John Macarthur, in his latest work Alan pieces together the life of…
Big Malcolm and the Mulga Mafia: The Coalition under Fraser
Lecture/seminar
One of the great oddities of Australian government which baffles foreign observers – along with preferential voting and the small matter of quite when Australia became a nation – is the endurance of the coalition between the two main conservative parties, one predominantly urban, the other rural-…