The historian at large: Doing history outside the academy
Seminar
This masterclass explores the emerging sites of history making outside of the academy. It reflects on opportunities and limits, as well as their potentially transformative impact for the discipline. Fact: universities produce more history PhDs than they do academic history jobs. …
Life in Biography: Observations on writing about lives
Seminar
In the final Biography Workshop of 2024, historian and author Eileen Chanin will discuss the slipperiness of writing about lives: the challenges, frustrations, pleasures, and results. Eileen Chanin documents lives and writes and publishes widely. She is a senior Visiting Fellow of King’s…
Women, Gender, and Violence from Antiquity to the Middle Ages
Workshop
The event is a one-day workshop entitled “Women, Gender and Violence from Antiquity to the Middle Ages.” It will bring together scholars working at ANU and other institutions in Australasia to present research papers investigating women’s experiences of gender-based violence in different contexts,…
'All my petty schemes': The Hong Kong diaries of Chaloner Alabaster, 1855-56
Seminar
Chaloner Alabaster (later, Sir) became a Student Interpreter in the China Consular Service in 1855, aged 16. The Consular Service was established under the Treaty of Nanjing after the British victory in the First Opium War in 1843. Student Interpreters were the lowest rung on the ladder, but…
The Lost World of American Conservatism: Who is now the ‘Party of Order’?
Seminar
It is frequently argued that, for good or ill, American political culture is dominated by liberal values. In this talk I want to suggest that, contrary to conventional wisdom, there has long been an important strand of European-style conservatism in the United States. This is particularly clear in…
Writing Lives with Bernadette Brennan
Workshop
A Canberra Writers Festival event sponsored by the National Centre of Biography. For a biography to sing it needs to be written with energy and passion. The biographer, driven by curiosity and the desire to understand what makes their subject tick, or in Helen Vendler’s words, ‘the inner dynamic…
Before Islamic Finance: Muslim Banking in South Asia and the World, 1880-1975
Webinar/Online
In this webinar event, Dr Mike O'Sullivan (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) examines the varieties of, and challenges to, Muslim private banking in colonial and postcolonial South Asia. It studies this phenomenon against the backdrop of two processes: The first, are the…