Following in the footsteps of Princess Mary, Australians are infiltrating all levels of Danish society.  Actually, Australian literature was taught at the University of Copenhagen for several decades before Mary met Fred but there’s no doubt that the Princess indirectly helped the formation of a Centre for Australian Studies at the University in 2005. 

Heading that lively outfit has been another Australian who has infiltrated the higher echelons of Danish society, Professor Stuart Ward, now Provost of Regensen College and the first non-Dane to occupy that august position in almost 400 years.  Ward is a renowned scholar and teacher of European imperial history and the histories of the settler colonies of the British empire.  The ANU and the University of Copenhagen are both members of the International Alliance of Research Universities (IARU).

This February and March, a small team from the Centre for Environmental History at ANU are strengthening the IARU partnership through participation in teaching and scholarship at the University of Copenhagen. 

In 2008, Professor Tom Griffiths of the School of History was the Distinguished Visiting Professor of Australian Studies in Copenhagen, and now he is an Adjunct Professor of Climate Research there.  This position, created by the university during the preparations for the UN Climate Summit in Copenhagen in December 2009, brings Professor Griffiths back to the Faculty of Humanities for several weeks of teaching each year. 

In 2011, he is accompanied by Dr Christine Hansen, a PhD graduate of the School of History who is funded as an ANU-IARU Visiting Fellow, and Dr Mike Smith, an archaeologist and Senior Research Fellow at the National Museum of Australia and a Board member of the Centre for Environmental History at ANU. Tom, Christine and Mike are contributing to the teaching of a Masters course on Indigenous Australia (coordinated by Dr Claire McLisky) and they are also speaking at a conference on Aboriginal relationships to land, and giving lectures in other courses. 

Mike and Tom have also initiated a meeting of scholars at the university who are working on climate history and policy.  Denmark, a nation that established many of the key concepts of archaeology in the nineteenth century, is now taking a great interest in the remarkable twentieth-century revelations of the deep human history of the Australian continent.