More than ten years after his death, historians continue to honour the contributions of  Professor Allan Martin (1926-2002)  through the annual Allan Martin Public Lecture which is delivered each year by a distinguished scholar whose work is relevant to Allan's intellectual, institutional and social interests.

The 2013 lecture was delivered on 7 May by Professor Carolyn Steedman, Professor of History at the University of Warwick. In introducing the lecture Dr Douglas Craig, Head of the School of History at ANU, reminded the audience of Allan Martin's contributions as an intellectual, institutional, and social pioneer whose career as a historian spanned the second half of the 20th Century. When most Australians went to England for their postgraduate work, Allan Martin chose ANU, where he was the first doctoral student in History in the Research School of Social Sciences. He accepted the Foundation chair in History at LaTrobe University in 1966 and returned to RSSS as a senior fellow in 1973.

Professor Steedman's interests include: the organisation and policing of societies; the neglect of embarrassing categories of people by twentieth-century social history(policemen and soldiers); and  the variety of ways in which people have constructed self-identity in the past. Her more recent research has looked at service, society and the state in the English eighteenth century. 

Professor Steedman's Allan Martin Lecture was entitled "Living with the Dead: My time with a Stocking Maker in the Era of Luddism" and asked questions about ownership of history and who has the right to speak for the dead.

The lecture was followed by a lively Q and A  session and a reception.