Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities: Recent Episodes
The University of Queensland
The Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (IASH) in the University of Queensland is dedicated to high level research in a range of humanities disciplines with a focus on Intellectual and Literary History, Critical and Cultural Studies, the History of Emotions, and Science and Society. It has a core of permanent research-focused academics and postdoctoral researchers working on specific projects, and hosts short stay Faculty and Visiting Fellows.
Emeritus Professor Graeme Turner’s new book, Essays in Media and Cultural Studies: In Transition was published in mid-December last year. The book brings together and retrospectively reviews a selection of essays and book chapters published over the past ten years. Associate Professor Adrian Athique sat down with Graeme over Zoom in an interview that ranges over the purpose of the book, the state of the media, changes in the nature and role of universities and their relationship to the state, and the place of media studies and cultural studies within all of this.
In recent times, “conspiracy theory” has become a buzzword. Its rise to prominence reflects a political climate charged with partisanship and unsettled by changes in media technology. The phenomenon itself is, however, much older. One crucial difference between the contemporary situation and earlier times lies in the former absence of the term: the conceptual means to flag down conspiracy theories only emerged in the twentieth century. But how exactly were liberal democracies sensitized to the presence of this phenomenon that so offends their notions of authoritative knowledge and flouts their rules of evidence-based argumentation? And what kinds of problems have arisen, now that “conspiracy theory” has advanced to the main conceptual “handle” with which we try to come to grips with this phenomenon? This lecture will demonstrate that much of the answer to these questions is tied up with the emergence of social science. From its earliest days, social science was haunted by the spectre of conspiracy theory. Numerous means were devised to banish it or at least to hold it at bay, and first and foremost among them was assigning it a name.
Andrew McKenzie-McHarg is a senior research fellow at the Institute for Religion and Critical Inquiry at the Australian Catholic University (ACU). He wrote his PhD at the University of Erfurt in Germany and subsequently was involved in the Conspiracy and Democracy Project at the University of Cambridge. His research extends from anti-Jesuit polemics in the early modern period to the emergence of the social sciences in more modern times.
The address delivered by Emeritus Professor Fred D'Agostino at the University of Queensland HASS Graduation Ceremony at 2.30pm on Wednesday 11 December 2019.
Getting Steinached: Scientific Respectability and Popular Disseminations of Sex Research in Interwar German Film
In the socially progressive and politically tumultuous interwar period, researchers in the German-speaking lands were world leaders in the study of sex. Increasingly, sexologists such as Magnus Hirschfeld in Berlin and Eugen Steinach in Vienna were turning not only to photography as a seemingly more ‘scientific’ evidential medium than the narrative patient histories upon which they had once relied, but also the cutting-edge technologies of film. Followers of Freudian psychoanalysis likewise began to explore the potential of cinematic media at this period. Historians have noted the lack of research on how photographs function ‘as mediators between scientific and popular culture’ (Tucker, Nature Exposed, 2005). Extending this impetus to moving images, this paper will focus on two films, one documentary and one fictional, that deal with questions of deviant sexualities and personalities in ways that aligned with the important Weimar-era genre of the social hygiene film. The Steinach-Film (The Steinach Film, 1923), a documentary detailing Viennese physiologist Eugen Steinach’s pioneering sex organ transplant experiments into the workings of the sex hormones, explores the physiological basis for a potential ‘cure’ for homosexuality and other ‘intermediary’ sexual forms. G W Pabst’s Geheimnisse einer Seele (1926), written by Freudian followers including Karl Abraham and Hanns Sachs, presents a thriller narrative as a means of popularizing the still-new methods and theories of psychoanalysis. This paper argues that sexologists and psychoanalysts not only worked with filmmakers to disseminate their research and methods to broader publics, but also used this medium to help secure the scientific respectability of their fledgling disciplines.
Katie Sutton is a senior lecturer in German and Gender, Sexuality and Cultural Studies at the Australian National University. She is the author of The Masculine Woman in Weimar Germany (Berghahn Books, 2011), and her second monograph, Sex between Body and Mind: Encounters between Psychoanalysis and Sexology in the German-Speaking World, 1890s-1930s, forthcoming with University of Michigan Press in December 2019, examines the dialogic and competitive relationships between sexual scientists and Freudian analysts in the production of modern ideas about sexual subjectivity, pathology, and normalcy. She has published widely on early 20th-century German trans and queer histories, including articles in Journal of the History of Sexuality, German History, German Studies Review and the collection Sexology and Translation: Cultural and Scientific Encounters across the Modern World (ed. Heike Bauer, Temple UP, 2015).
Image: Measuring the male body. Screenshot from The Steinach Film (dir. Curt Thomalla, 1923), courtesy of the National Film and Sound Archives, Australia.
There has been a world of activity marking the Centennial of the outbreak of the First World War. Much of it has been in the sphere of public commemoration. I want to call attention to a particular kind of commemoration called reenactment, since its substantial growth over the last years presents an important challenge to what we historians do.
In this lecture, I want to align reenactment with other kinds of commemorative and historical representations of war, and to try to persuade you that it is a dangerous and offensive form of historical and commemorative activity. It is dangerous because it adds elements of excitement and adventure to contemporary notions of war. It is offensive because it lacks respect for the hardship, the suffering, and the anguish of men in battle. It betrays the men who fought by turning their combat service into what we now call infotainment.
Jay Winter is the Charles J. Stille Professor of History emeritus at Yale University, and a Visiting Fellow at the Humanities Research Centre at the ANU. He is the author of Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (1995) and War beyond words: Languages of remembrance from the Great War to the present (2017). He is the editor of the Cambridge History of the First World War (2014), and won an Emmy award in 1997 as producer of the television series The Great War and the shaping of the twentieth century (BBC/PBS). He holds honorary doctorates from the University of Graz, the Katholik University of Leuven, and the University of Paris, and in 2017 received the Victor Adler award from the Austrian state for a lifetime’s work in history.
Image: Photograph of Tannenberg reenactment.
The science writer Robert Ardrey began his 1961 book African Genesis with the arresting line: “Not in innocence, and not in Asia, was mankind born.” But by the end of the decade, it might have been unnecessary to include the second intervening phrase. Although the “out of Asia” hypothesis of human origins dominated models of human origins and prehistoric migration from the eighteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries, it was rapidly replaced in both scientific circles and public awareness by the theory of African origins in the 1950s and was all but forgotten by the end of the 1960s. This talk explains how the rapid pivot from Asia to Africa could take place and examines the historiographic deployment of African origins in new world history writing in the 1950s and 1960s, in order to understand how the monumental history of the Asian origins hypothesis came to be so rapidly forgotten.
Emily Kern is a historian of modern global science who specializes in the history of human evolution and paleoanthropology. She is currently at work on a book about the long history of the African origins hypothesis and the search for the cradle of humankind. Her research focuses on the relationship between the production of scientific knowledge about the human species and the production of global political power in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania (B.A. 2012) and Princeton University (Ph.D. 2018). At Princeton, she was awarded a Charlotte Elizabeth Procter Honorific Fellowship (2017-2018) and held a Graduate Prize Fellowship from the University Center for Human Values (2016-2017). She is currently a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at UNSW Sydney.
American gun rights are premised on fidelity to the original meaning and intent of the US Constitution, in particular, the Second Amendment of the Bill of Rights, which reads: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” For decades, pro-gun and pro-gun control activists argued over the meaning of this constitutional provision, before the Supreme Court ruled in 2008 that the right to bear arms applies to individual possession of firearms, and the gun control battle appeared to be lost. This paper argues that neither pro- nor anti-gun activists have been attentive to the republican philosophy at the heart of the Second Amendment, which framed military service within an articulate concept of the social contract. Although a number of historians and legal scholars have demonstrated errors within the reigning gun rights orthodoxy, none has adequately articulated the degree to which a doctrine of firearms-for-all violates the democratic idea at the heart of the American political system. Typically, gun control activists treat the Second Amendment as a relic and a quirk that ought to be forgotten. I wish to argue to the contrary that a more historical understanding of the Second Amendment as a democratic provision can help move the debate beyond its current deadlock. Liberty has been a word monopolized by pro-gun organizations such as the National Rifle Association but it is a model of freedom foreign to the constitutional ‘proof text’ around which it bases its claims. The gun debate may be no more than a shouting match, much of the time, but history has a role to play in framing a more productive dialogue in which ‘liberty’ is not a value alienated from ‘life.’
Dominic Erdozain earned his PhD in history at Cambridge University. He taught for six years at King’s College London before moving to Atlanta, where he is a scholar in residence at Emory University. He is the author of The Soul of Doubt: the Religious Roots of Unbelief from Luther to Marx (Oxford, 2015) and the editor of The Dangerous God: Christianity and the Soviet Experiment (Northern Illinois, 2017). He is currently writing a book on the American gun culture, entitled God, Guns and Democracy in America, which will be published by Oxford University Press in 2020.
This paper addresses some current issues surrounding approaches to the study of religion in the pre-reformation period. In particular, revisionist approaches to humanism and humanists are forcing a re-evaluation of the framing of belief and the boundaries between Christianity, Judaism, and Islam are seen to be more fluid and porous, while a keen interest in devotion and materiality has lent new voice to ‘subaltern’ elements in society. I will be taking Florence in the late fifteenth century as my case study, and will examine how newly discovered texts and approaches to antique religions were challenging understandings of the nature of theology and the boundaries of orthodoxy. I will draw upon material that has hitherto escaped comment in the historiography.
Peter Howard is Director of the Institute for Religion and Critical inquiry at the Australian Catholic University, and formerly Founding Director of the Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at Monash University. He has published widely in the areas of Italian Renaissance history and medieval sermon studies. He is currently completing a monograph entitled Experiencing Religion in Renaissance Florence: Theologies of the Piazza (Routledge, 2020). His other current research interests include a project on preaching culture and the intellectual moves behind the production of the wall frescoes in the Sistine Chapel (for which he has received an ARC DP19), and another on the changing conceptual dimensions of how health and urban circumstances of life were conceived of, and reflected upon in the public sphere by way of the pulpit, in theological and moral terms. He is also a collaborator on the SCISMA project at Turku University, funded by the Finnish Academy.
The Anglican theologian, poet, novelist and science populariser Charles Kingsley readily embraced the theory of evolution by natural selection that Darwin outlined in his Origin of Species in 1859; indeed, he spent the best part of the next decade promoting it. Where many of his contemporaries found it an immoral work that undermined orthodox religious belief, Kingsley embraced Darwin’s conception of evolution as a deeply moral affair that spoke to the ethics of the individual, the nation and the empire. When Darwin published his ideas about the evolution of morality in Descent of Man, however, Kingsley was scandalised, and his ardent embrace of Darwin challenged.
Piers J. Hale is the Deisenroth Presidential Professor in the History of Science at the University of Oklahoma in the United States. His previous works include a number of essays on the politics of biology; on British socialist responses to Darwin; and on the Anglican theologian Charles Kingsley’s evolutionary orthodoxy. His book Political Descent. Malthus, Mutualism, and the Politics of Evolution was published by Chicago University Press in 2014.
Most adherents to the so-called alt-right were nurtured on the work of the Austro-libertarian Murray Rothbard, with his diatribes against the Federal Reserve and fractional reserve banking. In recent years, however, a number of key figures within the movement have begun to mark their distance from libertarianism, turning instead to the far right “anti-capitalism” of Gottfried Feder, the national socialist economist who first inspired Hitler; the social credit theories of C. H. Douglas; and Alain de Benoist, the leading intellectual of the French New Right. These new intellectual horizons have ushered in a dramatic change in political-economic strategy: while the paleolibertarians associated with Rothbard and the Mises Institute hew to a radically secessionist position, seeking ultimately to demolish the Federal Reserve and to restore a world of entirely private money creation based on a pure gold standard, the national socialist elements on the far right are intent on taking over the government and central bank as key institutions of a white, welfarist ethno-state to come.
At first glance, the sudden conversion of so many alt right figures from paleolibertarianism toward a national social or “anti-capitalist” far right, unthinkable only a few years ago, may appear difficult to fathom. Yet it is clearly foreshadowed in the work of paleoconservative scholars who were always more ambivalent about capitalism than their libertarian brethren and who always had their own distinct sense of the strategic long-game. In this paper, I look at the work of the paleoconservative theorist, Samuel T. Francis, along with key converts on the alt-right, to make sense of this turn.
Melinda Cooper is Associate Professor in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Sydney, Australia. She is the author of Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism (Zone Books, 2017) and coeditor, with Martijn Konings, of the Stanford University Press series, Currencies: New Thinking for Financial Times.
The importance of material culture in communicating memory is especially evident in the context of the Crusades. Crusaders on pilgrimage carried with them objects from home and brought back souvenirs from the Holy Land as tiny as stones or as large as reliquaries. Those on the home front, especially women, were gifted and cared for rings and reliquaries, cups and crosses. Objects like these affirmed kinship and ancestral identity and perpetuated family associations with the crusading movement. Such objects also created and communicated a sophisticated temporality that brought together past and present in highly individuated ways. They linked people, places, and earthly and eschatological time, and those who possessed or viewed objects associated with crusading became witnesses to and participants in a trajectory of sacred history. Thus objects provided tangible connection to and evidence of the distinctive spatial and temporal qualities of the Crusade. This paper elucidates these broad points by focusing on three items—a parchment miter, a portable altar, and ivory and glass relic containers. These were objects that were given to the priory of Oignies by Jacques de Vitry - a preacher and participant on the Fifth Crusade (1219-21) - and that now form a part of the famous treasury at the Musée de Namur in Belgium. My aim here is to consider how these objects connect Jacques de Vitry’s life before, during, and after the Crusade and what they might tell us about the material qualities of remembrance at the time of the Fifth Crusade and its aftermath. These three objects express personal links between Jacques de Vitry and the community of Oignies, especially his close relationship with the holy woman Marie of Oignies, who had died just before Jacques set off on Crusade. The items were not just valuable objects to add to the treasury at Oignies in order to further the priory’s prestige, but were also deliberate and meaningful conduits of connection between Jacques’s own past, present, and future remembrance. The Namur objects, their collection, and their meanings thus provide a fruitful way of linking the multiple stories of Jacques’s experiences as preacher, friend, member of the Crusade, and senior ecclesiast.
This seminar turns on one idea: that history is strange. In unpacking this idea, Marnie Hughes-Warrington will outline the journey to and beyond a new history of histories told in her History as Wonder (2018). Using a variety of histories from different times and places, she will show how the discipline of history carries the imprint of its entanglement with philosophy, and more particularly our most basic attempts to make sense of things in metaphysics. This will set the stage for a brief glimpse of her new work, on the relationship between the scales of history and ethics.
Marnie Hughes-Warrington is professor of history at the Australian National University. She is the author of several historiography books, including Fifty Key Thinkers on History (three editions), History Goes to the Movies (2007), Revisionist Histories (2013) and History as Wonder (2018).
The scale of China’s population was routinely noted by Enlightenment figures. Leibniz, Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Smith added praise for Chinese civil structures, which managed to govern as one polity a remarkable mass of humans, while opening critique of China’s despotism and of an economy disinclined to foreign commerce. This is the tradition of European thought about China that Thomas Robert Malthus received and to some extent reproduced in his Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), and which made a dedicated chapter on China seem both necessary and sensible when he vastly expanded his Essay into its long editions (1803, 1806, 1817, 1826). This paper examines Malthus’s consideration of China in his own context, rather than reading him backwards through centuries of critique and correction, through the confusions of ‘Malthusianism’. How and why did Malthus write about China? What were the sources of information through which he could discern population trends and political economy in a part of the world so distant? What work did China perform in the Essay as a whole? And what was the wider context for Malthus’s comparative consideration of China in the world?
Alison Bashford, FBA, FAHA is Research Professor of History, UNSW. Previously she was Vere Harmsworth Professor of Imperial and Naval History at the University of Cambridge. She has recently traced an intellectual history of population and political economy in two books: Global Population: History, Geopolitics and Life on Earth (Columbia University Press, 2014) and The New Worlds of Thomas Robert Malthus: Re-reading the Principle of Population (with Joyce E. Chaplin, Princeton University Press, 2016). Her new work explores an intellectual history of nature/culture divides through the Huxley dynasty, 1825-1975.
In this paper I outline a theory of online anti-publics, that is, online groups whose discourse contravenes and counterposes the ethical, ‘rational-critical’ norms and practices of democratic discourse and the Enlightenment traditions that underpin such discourse, and that are neglected in the scholarly literature on such things as ‘digital democracy’, ‘online publics’ and ‘online communities’. Building on earlier theorisations of anti-publics by McKenzie Wark (1997) and Bart Cammaerts (2007), the paper examines ideological and discursive continuities across online groups such as white supremacist groups, the ‘men’s rights movement’, anti-climate science groups, the ‘alt-right’, and neoreactionary groups. Such groups, it is argued, profoundly challenge Enlightenment precepts on which modernity and democracy are based, and at the same time raise questions about the limits and viability of those projects. The paper will suggest that, rather than being seen as an ‘extremist’ opposite of democratic culture, such discourse precisely mirrors recent populist trends in public discourse consistent with developments in neoliberal capitalism and a broader transition towards post-normative ‘late democracy’.
Mark Davis teaches in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne. His current research focuses on the impact of digital media on democratic discourse and in particular the changing dynamics of expert knowledge and cultural gatekeeping. Current projects include an ARC-funded Discovery project investigating the impact of online media on literary tastemaking, and an investigation of online ‘anti-publics’ and the relationship between extreme and uncivil online discourse and the groups that foster it, and the mainstreaming of political populism in the wake of the culture wars.
How can it possibly be the case, as Hannah Arendt put it to her readers in On Revolution, that with not one but two revolutions to observe in their lifetimes—the successful American version abroad and the French one much closer to home—German philosophers were somehow more invested in producing a philosophy of history than they were in developing the philosophical framework for a successful political science? Regardless of whether we want to agree with Arendt’s assessment of the situation, her complaint still marks the general sense that politics was indeed viewed through the lens of historical determinism for such key thinkers of the German Enlightenment as Kant and Hegel. But if this type of thinking is what led to not just Marx’s analysis but his eventual failure, as Arendt saw it, it still does not explain the special attraction had by this approach to history. This talk will start out with some suggestions as to why such a developmental view of history might have been so compelling for theorists before looking in some detail at one surprising effect that it would have on the entirely different field of German anthropology. For it was only against the backdrop of philosophical arguments outlining the case for a progressive universal history that separate considerations of the ethnographic and also morphological differences between groups would be brought together in the anthropological subfield of comparative linguistics. Comparative linguistics, a science born out of investigations done by ethnographers as much as by philosophers investigating the origin of language, was carried forward into the nineteenth century by thinkers like Friedrich Schlegel in their effort to index an account of staggered historical development to a hierarchy of the races. It is the early history of comparative linguistics that needs to be reconsidered, therefore, if we are to understand the lasting impact of the Enlightenment when it comes to the politics of self-determination.
Jennifer Mensch is interested in the intersection of philosophy and the life sciences with a particular focus on debates taking place during the German Enlightenment. She moved to Australia in 2015 as a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Western Sydney University; before that, she was an Assistant Professor of Philosophy in the Program for Science, Technology & Society at the Pennsylvania State University, where she taught philosophy and the history of science and medicine. The author of numerous articles and book chapters, and editor of two forthcoming collections, her monograph, Kant’s Organicism: Epigenesis and the Development of Critical Philosophy (Univ. of Chicago Press, 2013), described the role played by life science debates on generation for Kant’s efforts to understand the mind and its production of experience. Her current research is focused on showing how Kant’s philosophical account of world history impacted the shape and direction taken by early German anthropology.
No single work has been more influential in conditioning the Enlightenment’s legacy than Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947). With its brilliant and penetrating critique of contemporary modernity, the book continues to excite readers. It is hard to overestimate the extent to which the text has been responsible for the persistent anti-Enlightenment bias in “Continental” philosophy, critical theory, and cognate disciplines. Yet, the verdict of historians of the Enlightenment on the text has been utterly scathing: for Peter Gay the work is wholly “innocent of empirical material to support its conclusions.” The Dialectic’s reputation has survived in part because historians’ complaints have missed the point. Gay is wrong. In fact the major empirical material within the Dialectic is provided by extensive reference to the Marquis de Sade. It is the figure of Sade—and of Kant with Sade—that holds the text together. Gay’s dismissal of the text is predicated on his dismissal of Sade as not worthy of serious intellectual consideration. Following his lead, serious-minded historians of the Enlightenment have generally preferred to ignore Sade’s oeuvre. This has allowed the deployment of Sade by Horkheimer and Adorno to remain unchallenged. And many others, including such figures as Lacan and Žižek, have followed their elevating strategy and placed Sade in dialectical opposition to Kant thereby attempting to instantiate the “Dialectic of Enlightenment” in concrete historical form. This paper will critically examine the meaning of Sade in the Dialectic of Enlightenment. In doing so it will move against the idea that Sade can be thought of as the dialectical other to Kant. This paper will attack at its heart the idea that the Enlightenment has a dialectical structure and that Sade reveals the true meaning of Enlightenment.
Henry Martyn Lloyd is an intellectual historian and historian of philosophy with a particular interest in the French tradition, the Enlightenment, and in “Continental” Philosophy. He is currently a Research Fellow at the University of Queensland. Until recently a Junior Research Fellow in Enlightenment Studies at the University of Sydney, Martyn will soon take up a Fellowship for Enlightenment Studies at the University of Halle-Wittenberg. His book Sade’s Philosophical System in its Enlightenment Context is currently in press (Palgrave, 2018). With Geoff Boucher he has recently edited the collection Rethinking the Enlightenment: Between History, Philosophy, and Politics (Lexington, 2018). And he is the editor of The Discourse of Sensibility: The Knowing Body in the Enlightenment (Springer, 2013). In 2015 Martyn was awarded the Australasian Association of Philosophy Media Prize.
Will Christie is Head of the Humanities Research Centre at the Australian National University, Fellow and Head of the English Section at the Australian Academy of the Humanities, and Director of the Australasian Consortium of Humanities Research Centres. His publications include Samuel Taylor Coleridge: A Literary Life (2006) – awarded the NSW Premier’s Biennial Prize for Literary Scholarship in 2008 – The Edinburgh Review in the Literary Culture of Romantic Britain (2009), Dylan Thomas: A Literary Life (2014), and The Two Romanticisms, and Other Essays (2016).
The history of universities in the West from their beginnings in the late eleventh century, through the critical Romantic rethinking in Germany, and on to the modern models in America, Britain and Australia, shows several consistent binary features. Should a university be private or public? Is knowledge treated there as a means or an end? Is research or teaching its principal function? And most intriguingly, does it deliver to the student some kind of “virtue” (character, life-meaning), or some kind of “truth” (pure or applied knowledge): is it a place of value or a place of fact? To most of these questions, of course, one might answer “both”: but the binary still exposes some important fault lines. Can we still discern these fault lines in modern Australian or international universities? How do the Ramsay Centre’s plans for a new degree respond to these questions?
Simon Haines is CEO of the Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation in Sydney. He is also Professor of English at The Chinese University of Hong Kong and a founding Fellow of the Hong Kong Academy of the Humanities. He is the author or editor of five books including the prizewinning Reader in European Romanticism (Bloomsbury, 2010, 2nd paperback edition 2014) and Poetry and Philosophy from Homer to Rousseau (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), as well as articles, book chapters and papers on subjects including Shakespeare and recognition, Romantic poetry, the modern self, and time in philosophy and art. An edited volume on Shakespeare and Value is forthcoming (Routledge, 2018).
The work of humanities scholars is to tell stories about people in their dizzying diversity across times and places, at the same time that we clarify the grounds on which such stories are told. Put another way, we tell stories while also reflecting on the stakes of which stories are told and valued, and who does the telling. In this presentation, I reflect on the value of stories at a time when settler-colonial nations, including Australia and Canada, have undertaken processes of apology, truth, and reconciliation for colonial violence and dispossession of Indigenous peoples. I focus in particular on my own process of telling The Story of Radio Mind, a book focused on an early-twentieth-century Anglican missionary who embraced his role in the spiritual invention of the settler-colonial nation of Canada. At the same time, he criticized the evils of residential schools and grew to see himself as a psychic researcher exploring the borders of mind and spirit. As state-sponsored historical retellings such as the multi-volume report of Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission on residential schools are met with both Indigenous critiques and racist backlash, what difference do the stories of the past make for our possible futures?
Pamela Klassen is Professor in the Department for the Study of Religion at the University of Toronto, where she is also Vice-Dean, Undergraduate & International in the Faculty of Arts & Science. Her most recent publications are The Story of Radio Mind: A Missionary’s Journey on Indigenous Land (University of Chicago Press, 2018) and Ekklesia: Three Inquiries in Church and State (University of Chicago Press, 2018), co-authored with Paul Christopher Johnson and Winnifred Fallers Sullivan. Her book Spirits of Protestantism: Medicine, Healing, and Liberal Christianity (University of California Press, 2011) won an Award of Excellence from the American Academy of Religion in 2012. She currently holds the Anneliese Maier Research Award from the Humboldt Foundation in support of a five-year collaborative project entitled “Religion and Public Memory in Multicultural Societies,” undertaken together with Prof. Dr. Monique Scheer of the University of Tübingen. For more information, please see http://projects.chass.utoronto.ca/pklassen/
The rise of non-Western great powers, the spread of transnational religiously justified insurgencies, and the resurgence of ethno-nationalism raise fundamental questions about the effects of cultural diversity on international order. Yet current debate—among academics, popular commentators, and policy-makers alike—rests on flawed understandings of culture and inaccurate assumptions about how historically cultural diversity has shaped the evolution of international orders. Christian Reus-Smit will speak to the themes of his forthcoming book—On Cultural Diversity: International Theory in a World of Difference. The major theories of International Relations, he will argue, have consistently misunderstood the nature and effects of culture, returning time and again to a conception long abandoned in specialist fields: the idea of cultures as coherent, bounded, and constitutive. Drawing on theoretical insights from anthropology, cultural studies, and sociology, and informed by new histories of diverse historical orders, he will present a new theoretical account of the relationship between cultural diversity and international order: an account with far-reaching implications for how we understand contemporary transformations.
Professor Christian Reus-Smit is Professor of International Relations at the University of Queensland and a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia. Before joining UQ, Professor Reus-Smit held Chairs at the European University Institute and the Australian National University (where he was the Head of the Department of International Relations from 2001 to 2010 and Deputy Director of the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies from 2006 to 2008). In 2013-2014 Professor Reus-Smit served as a Vice-President of the International Studies Association.
Since its origins in the seventh century CE, Islam has been for the West often threatening, sometimes enchanting, but ever present. Since then, the self-image of the West has been constructed on a foundation in which Islam was essentially other. Islam has always been an imaginary canvas upon which the West has painted its own virtues and values. Yet in keeping with the West’s modern difficulties in defining its own values, its once unified image of Islam has also become fractured, uncertain and ambiguous. This paper argues that the origins of our contemporary intellectual malaise about the nature of Islam lie in the new images of Islam that arose in the West during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries alongside the traditional ones. The Muhammad of history began to engage with the Muhammad of Christian legend, the Western fascination with an exotic Orient co-existed with the image of a decadent and corrupt East. Such conflicting images of Islam will continue while the notion of a unitary ‘Islam’, along with the notion of the ‘West’ over against it, remains a central feature of our classification of cultures.
Philip Almond is Emeritus Professor at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, University of Queensland. His recent books include Afterlife: A History of Life After Death (IB Tauris and Cornell University Press, 2016), Jenseits: Eine Geschichte des Lebens nach dem Tode (Darmstadt: Lambert Schneider Verlag, 2017) and The Devil: A New Biography (IB Tauris & Cornell University Press, 2014). His new book God: A New Biography (London: IB Tauris) will be published in April 2018.
Historians and anthropologists have increasingly found that Indigenous peoples’ conversion to Christianity occurred as they creatively wove the new faith into their own traditions. This interpretation of Indigenous Christianities is becoming so prominent as to be a new orthodoxy. Yet it risks overshadowing how Indigenous peoples themselves have understood the history of Christianity in their society. This paper turns to a case study of the Tiwi of North Australia. Tiwi oral histories of the ‘conversion’ of a Catholic priest inverts missionary and scholarly assumptions about inculturation and conversion by insisting they did not accommodate a new faith but that the Catholic Church converted as it learned to embrace them. Their history offers fresh insights to scholars seeking to understand conversion in cross-cultural contexts, suggesting that conversion can occur as spiritual communities change in the act of incorporating new peoples.
Laura Rademaker is Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Australian National University with interests in histories of race, gender and religion. She was awarded her doctorate from the Australian National University in 2015. Her thesis received numerous prizes: the J.G. Crawford Prize; John Molney Prize; and Australian Historical Association’s Serle Award. Her research also received the Council of Humanities Arts and Social Sciences 2017 Future Leaders Prize and the 2016 Taylor and Francis prize for best article in History Australia. Her first book, Found in Translation: Many Meanings on a North Australian Mission (University of Hawai’I Press) appears in April this year.
I aim to defend a particular type of thought that emerges from intelligent literature. I argue that this type of thought serves community: it promotes what used straightforwardly to be called philosophical reflection and it sets out both to critique and strengthen our ethical responses to change in the world. While I refer to several examples in defending this view of intelligent literature, I lean particularly heavily on Robert Musil. Musil was a qualified engineer, a doctor of philosophy and psychology, and one of the most important writers of the 20th century. Among many reasons to hold Musil in high esteem is his unfinished masterpiece The Man Without Qualities (1930; 1933), a work that anticipated the arrival of the digital or “fourth” revolution by several decades. I provide an extended reading of a chapter from this novel in order demonstrate the significance of the special class of literature I defend. I also indicate how such literature does the type of ethical work we cannot be without in a new age of “post humanism.”
Tim Mehigan is Professor of German and Deputy Director of the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities. He has published widely on German literature and thought since 1780. Of particular note is his work on Heinrich von Kleist and Robert Musil. In 2011 he published with de Gruyter (Berlin) the first translation of K.L. Reinhold’s treatise on representation (Essay on a New Theory of the Human Capacity for Representation), a difficult work of Kantian exegesis from 1789 that had long defied attempts to render it into English. Tim has also produced important work on the Nobel Prize winning author J.M. Coetzee. The edited volume The Intellectual Landscape in the Works of J.M. Coetzee is soon to appear with Camden House in the United States. His Companion to the Works of J.M. Coetzee was published, also with Camden House, in 2011. In 2013 Tim received the Research Prize of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation; in 2017 he was awarded a Fulbright Senior Scholarship. He was elected to the Australian Academy of Humanities in 2003.
"Electronics digested a mix of digital numerology and alchemy, collecting metadata as input to pattern recognition algorithms, breathing life into a machine capable of doing what men and women spent a century trying to do" Carvalko (2016: 121). Considering the emergent conditions of a digital society, this paper considers the dynamics of the big data paradigm and its potentials for scholars working in cultural studies. This paper makes the assertion that the two primary motivations of the big data paradigm stem from two longstanding preoccupations of human science, namely numerology and alchemy. Upon the basis of this critique, I will seek to consider the broad implications of the increasing centrality of big data in social research as well as the procedures through which everyday culture provides the raw material for prediction. In doing so I will begin to consider how the humanities might address the mutual decline of interpretation and truth.
In the mass media era, the role of the media was universally regarded as fundamental to the proper functioning of the democratic state: the media’s capacity to provide information to all citizens ensured they had equal access to the democratic process. There were many, though, who registered concern at the top-down, government led, and highly concentrated structures of power embedded here; it was easy to demonstrate how the flow of information could be manipulated and the power of the media abused. Consequently, the arrival of the digital era seemed to radically change that power relation for the good; we entered the era of consumer choice and ‘produsage’, as power was transferred to what journalism professor Jay Rosen described in 2006 as ‘the people formerly known as the audience’ in a process of ‘democratization’. Or, so it seemed; more than a decade later, this looks very naïve. As governments have either lost or relinquished much of their regulatory control over the mediasphere, markets have fragmented and with them, Cass Sunstein suggests, the sense of a common culture; choice is becoming unmanageable and therefore no longer meaningful; most importantly, much of the media content ‘prodused’ by the ‘people formerly known as the audience’ seems more like a threat to the democratic state than its enablement. Public concerns about ‘fake news’, hate speech, online bullying, ‘revenge porn’, phishing scams, ‘online radicalization’ and identity theft occupy our headlines daily. In this public lecture, Emeritus Professor Graeme Turner will discuss some of the implications of the digital era for the proper functioning of democracies, with particular attention to the role of journalism, news, and the recovery of the notion of the public interest.
Graeme Turner is Emeritus Professor of Cultural Studies in the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities. One of the founding figures in media and cultural studies in Australia, he has published 24 books and his work has been translated into 10 languages. He has been a strong and critical presence in debates around the state of the media over the last decade, with publications such as Television Studies after TV: Understanding television in the post-broadcast era (co-edited with Jinna Tay, 2009), and Locating Television: Zones of Consumption (co-authored with Anna Cristina Pertierra, 2013), exercising a significant influence over the field. His most recent book is ReInventing the Media (2016).
English has thousands of words drawn from other languages, especially from French, although only a limited number of those still bear the marks of foreignness. Savoir-faire and déjà vu, for example, belong to everyday talk even while being identified as foreign. The jocose phrase “déjà vu all over again” shows perfectly well how such expressions can be foreign and familiar at the same time. But there is a set of expressions drawn from a wider range of foreign languages that is found only in cultivated English. Expressions like Weltanschauung and fin-de-siècle belong to that group. They have a significant role in the practice of humanists. What is the function of such terms? What do scholars actually gain by maintaining a range of more or less foreign words in scholarly conversation? An aggressive criticism heard often in our time is that highly cultivated talk of that kind is motivated largely by snobbery, and deserves to be ignored as the chatter of an elite. Such foreign-derived expressions, according to a populist view, are exclusive in both senses of the word. They appear to have high exchange value because it takes a long time to acquire them, and their use further ensures that the majority of the population will not be able to take part in specialised conversation. Whatever the limitations of populist criticism—and they are considerable—humanities scholars today cannot simply hold to elitist practices as if by right. While some of our number may be recalcitrant, there is now a clear collective expectation that what we say will be couched in terms that can resonate outside the academy. Our work is being assessed for its engagement and for the public benefits it can bring, and there is no proper reason for us to reject that requirement.
It is not clear, however, just what that exigency might mean for our practice of cultivated language. In principle, the answer is clear enough. It is that scholarly knowledge should be translatable and, where appropriate, actually translated into commonsense language. But how, if at all, can scholarly talk be manhandled into everyday language without losing the fine nuances that give it value? The difficulty—some would say, the impossibility—of translation from one language to another has preoccupied humanities scholars for centuries. It informs the great scholarly tradition of philology, which will be invoked in this talk and examined for its past value as well as for its challenging unsuitability to our present ways of thinking.
Peter Cryle is an Emeritus Professor in the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Queensland. He is the author of a number of books on the history of sexuality and the history of medical thinking, including Geometry in the Boudoir (Cornell UP, 1994), The Telling of the Act (U of Delaware P, 2001), and, with Alison Moore, Frigidity: An Intellectual History (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). His most recent book, co-authored with Elizabeth Stephens, is Normality: A Critical Genealogy (Chicago UP, 2017).
The delicately etched, full-colour prints of botanical specimens that Joseph Banks brought back to England from Lieutenant James Cook’s 1768 Endeavour voyage were finally and most comprehensively published in the 1980s Alecto Historical Edition. The plates are exquisitely beautiful; they are also, of course, dense with embedded knowledge. The brief family names of collectors reads like a who’s who of European science and inquiry: the intimately connected worlds of colonial collectors and imperial science are embedded in each plate. In these images, science, technology, and art coalesce to produce objects of great aesthetic value. Yet if these prints are densely coded with some kinds of information, they are also marked by notable silences that raise important questions. For example, we might ask about the people who were encountered alongside plant life in these new spaces for European exploration, especially the Pacific. How can we better understand how these botanical specimens existed within over-lapping worlds, with multiple naming systems, and a variety of different claims as to their use and value? How did encounters with or observations of indigenous people influence the selection and preservation of species, and how do we account for indigenous knowledge and its influence on imperial science and high art production? This paper considers what an exhibition of the Florilegium might look like that sought to reconstruct the rich cross-cultural context of its original collection, that sought to expand what John Gascoigne calls “the limits of scientific cosmopolitanism” (Science in the Service of Empire).
Anna Johnston is Associate Professor of English Literature in the School of Communication and Arts, and an Australian Research Council Future Fellow in the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities. Her recent books include Travelling Home, Walkabout Magazine and Mid-Twentieth-Century Australia with Mitchell Rolls (2016) and The Paper War: Morality, Print Culture, and Power in Colonial New South Wales (2011).
In this seminar I will consider what it means to write history in the midst of escalating and alarming environmental change. ‘The Anthropocene’ is a term for a new era of Earth history in which humans have become a geophysical force, and it is an idea that has generated much stimulating debate in the humanities over the last decade. Does the climate crisis affect our views of ‘the future of history’? How is it changing the way we interrogate the past? And is it possible to write a history of humans as a species? I am stimulated by Ian Hesketh’s analysis (2014) of the moral and aesthetic character of Big History and ‘the evolutionary epic’, and I hope to reflect also on the special challenge historians face in living with deep time in Australia.
Tom Griffiths AO is the W K Hancock Professor of History in the Research School of Social Sciences at the Australian National University, Chair of the Editorial Board of the Australian Dictionary of Biography and Director of the Centre for Environmental History at ANU. In 2016 he was a Rachel Carson Fellow at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich. He is the author of Hunters and Collectors: The Antiquarian Imagination in Australia (1996), Forests of Ash: An Environmental History (2001) and Slicing the Silence: Voyaging to Antarctica (2007). His most recent book is The Art of Time Travel: Historians and their Craft (Black Inc., 2016).
Copernicanism and evolutionary theory are often seen to represent successive scientific assaults on the privileged status of human beings. Whereas the former demoted humans from pride of place at the centre of the cosmos, the latter established our lowly animal origins and the fact that our existence is a cosmic accident. At the same time, these discoveries (and others like them) can be incorporated into a historical narrative that places human beings on a progressive trajectory that reinstates their superiority, largely by stressing scientific and technological advances of the last few centuries. This paper explores this paradox, comparing the different versions of anthropocentrism that inform sacred history, evolutionary history, histories of science, and big history.
Peter Harrison is an Australian Laureate Fellow and Director of the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Queensland. Previously he was the Idreos Professor of Science and Religion at the University of Oxford where he also served as Director of the Ian Ramsey Centre. He has published extensively in the area of intellectual history with a focus on the philosophical, scientific and religious thought of the early modern period. He has been a Visiting Fellow at Yale and Princeton, is a founding member of the International Society for Science and Religion, and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. In 2011 he delivered the Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh. Author of over 80 articles and chapters, his six books include The Bible, Protestantism and the Rise of Natural Science (Cambridge, 1998), The Cambridge Companion to Science and Religion (Cambridge, 2010) and, most recently, The Territories of Science and Religion (Chicago, 2015), winner of the 2015 Aldersgate Prize.
Contemporary shifts in scholarship, digital technology and institutional agendas have created new sets of challenges for feminist history. While these do not undermine the paradigms of feminist scholarship as an intellectual endeavour, there has been an inevitable shift in how feminist history is now written, conceptualised and undertaken. A hallmark of dynamic and innovative scholarship is a capacity to evolve and respond to intellectual challenges and developments. There is much to be positive about in the future, as I argue feminist history at its best has not remained a passive or static body of knowledge, but continues to be reformulated and reconceptualised, but with this dynamism comes uncertainties which institutional change and new technologies can bring. While I do not believe these are systemic enough to pose a challenge to the enterprise, these do create cause for wider discussion, especially about the place of the humanities more generally in the corporate university of the twenty-first century.
In this talk I outline some of the major achievements by feminist historians from the 1970s onwards in re-examining the writing of history. I consider the contemporary challenges to feminist history within the tertiary sector and the future of feminist scholarship in general within the relentless pressures that exist within universities today. Finally, I consider where and how can feminist historians continue to make an intervention in contemporary politics today? In what way can feminist history continue to historicise the present given that it is not as aligned with the women’s movement as it perhaps once was several decades ago? I conclude on the vital contribution feminist history can make in our troubled contemporary times and beyond.
Joy Damousi is Professor of History at the University of Melbourne. She has published widely on aspects of political history, women’s history and feminist history, memory and war, history of emotions and psychoanalysis, sound and war, and the history of post-war migration and refugees. She is the author of numerous books which include The Labour of Loss: Mourning, Memory and Wartime Bereavement in Australia; Gender and War: Australians At War in the Twentieth Century (with Marilyn Lake), and Diversity in Leadership: Australian Women, Past and Present (with Mary Tomsic and Kim Rubenstein). Her latest publication is Memory and Migration in the Shadow of War: Australia's Greek Immigrants after World War II and the Greek Civil War. Her articles have appeared in American Historical Review, Social History, Journal of the History of Sexuality and Gender and History. She is currently working on a history of child refugees, humanitarianism and internationalism from 1920 to the present for which she was awarded an Australian Research Council Laureate Fellowship. This research examines the experiences and impact of child refugees displaced by the wars of the twentieth century.
Darwin’s concept of natural selection has been endlessly written about; his “secondary” principle of sexual selection has received far less historical attention. Its sources and the conceptual pathways to its formulation remain largely unknown or misunderstood. The extraordinarily wide range of Darwin’s investigations and the depth of his readings in this connection have never been explored.
Yet sexual selection (the struggle for mates) was of considerable strategic importance to Darwin’s theory of evolution. He first outlined it in the Origin of Species (1859) and fully elaborated it in the Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871). There, Darwin’s exhaustive investigation of sexual selection throughout the animal kingdom (fully two thirds of the work) was directed to substantiating his view that human racial and sexual differences, including certain mental and moral differences, had evolved primarily through the action of sexual selection. It was the culmination of a lifetime of intellectual effort and commitment, a “tremendous job”, as Darwin described it, long and hard in the making. Yet sexual selection never quite made it. Darwin constantly was forced to contest its validity with a great array of critics and on his death sexual selection went into abeyance, not to be revived until late in the twentieth century. Today it remains a controversial theory, subject to ongoing dispute and reinterpretation. But, however it may be read, sexual selection still means Darwin. And what Darwin meant still matters. He lives on in many contradictory (and some quite startling) guises in current narratives, justifications or critiques of sexual selection. My talk sketches the complexity of theory, analogy and practice, the cultural beliefs, the professional power plays and larger social issues that shaped the history of sexual selection. It highlights some of the more surprising findings that have emerged in the course of my study and critiques aspects of Darwin historiography.
Evelleen Richards is Honorary Professor in the Unit for History and Philosophy of Science, University of Sydney and Affiliated Scholar, Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge. She has served on numerous journal editorial boards and as Collaborating Editor of Social Studies of Science. Her main fields of interest and publications encompass the sociology of clinical trials, the history of evolutionary biology and gender and science. She is the author of Vitamin C and Cancer: Medicine or Politics? (Macmillan 1991). Her latest book is Darwin and the Making of Sexual Selection (Chicago 2017).
One form that the naturalization of the human took in the late eighteenth century is what was called ‘the natural history of man.’ It comprised comparative anatomy; ‘physical geography,’ which attempts to identify the environmental factors that shape human behaviour; human variation, such as racial variation, and its significance; and the external marks of character, notably physiognomy, craniology, and phrenology. Crucial to these comparative exercises are the questions of whether there is any continuity between apes and humans, what the standing of seemingly half animal/half human feral children is, whether there is a continuity between human races or whether they have separate origins, whether physical differences between men and women extend beyond their reproductive organs, and more generally whether significant differences are due to environmental or intrinsic factors. The ‘natural history of man’ was essentially comparative, and this distinguished it from all earlier forms of natural history. So too was the fact that it did not consider human beings in terms of their essential qualities, but rather as the product of a series of differentiae.
Stephen Gaukroger is Emeritus Professor of History of Philosophy and History of Science at the University of Sydney. Professor Gaukroger’s recent research has focused on the emergence and consolidation of a scientific culture in the West in the modern era. This research has resulted in three volumes: The Emergence of a Scientific Culture: Science and the Shaping of Modernity, 1210–1685 (Oxford, 2006), The Collapse of Mechanism and the Rise of Sensibility: Science and the Shaping of Modernity, 1680–1760 (Oxford, 2010), and the recently published The Natural and the Human: Science and the Shaping of Modernity, 1739–1841 (Oxford, 2016). A forth volume is currently in progress. His work has been translated into Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, and Serbian.
That there was great resistance to Darwinism in France during the 1860s and 1870s is unsurprising. Opposition to Darwinism at that time was widespread, not to say strident. Ian Hesketh has written about debates around Darwin’s work in Britain, showing that opposition to his theory was based on a range of scientific and theological positions. The British controversy tended to be seen more simply by scientists on the other side of the Channel as concerned with matters of theology, and improperly so. French scientists usually supposed that Christian views of any kind were incompatible with a general commitment to positive science. The intellectual leader of French physical anthropology and Perpetual Secretary of the Société d’Anthropologie de Paris, Paul Broca, did in fact resist Darwinism, but he did so in resolutely scientific terms. Broca argued that the theory of transformation of species was as yet entirely unproven. He could not fail to acknowledge the theoretical tension between Darwinist “transformism” and his own anthropological-zoological theory of race as a normal set of hereditary characters.
Peter Cryle is an Emeritus Professor in the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Queensland. He is the author of a number of books on the history of sexuality, including (with Alison Moore) Frigidity: An Intellectual History, published by Palgrave Macmillan. He is currently completing (with Elizabeth Stephens) a critical genealogy of normality. That work contains a number of chapters on the history of anthropology.
Many things upset vice campaigners from the consumption of alcohol to the existence of prostitution. One of the consistent threads of outrage running through the movement was over the exposure of flesh whether in pornography, on the stage, or indeed in any public arena whatsoever. Discomfort with nudity was not unique to the anti-vice movement, perhaps more especially as the naked body increasingly became a site through which political dissatisfaction could be articulated. Diverse forms of the new nudist movement early in the twentieth century offered a critique of modern life at much the same time as modernist artists used the nude as a canvas protesting the limits of older artistic traditions. Yet despite the obvious radical differences between anti-vice campaigners, nudists and the avant-garde art scene, their understanding of the nude was shaped by surprisingly similar readings. The female form and the notion of the ‘primitive’ dominate the discussions in all these movements, and do so under the sign of modernity. This talk explores the ways in which nakedness figured as a problem of and in modernity.
Philippa Levine is the Helen Mary Thompson Centennial Professor in the Humanities and Co-Director of the Program in British Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Her forthcoming book with Oxford University Press is Eugenics: A Very Short Introduction and she is currently at work on a study of nakedness.
When D’Alembert suggested that Geneva should establish a theatre, Rousseau reacted with fury. “Theatres and Drama,” Rousseau writes in his letter to D’Alembert, “in any little Republic, and especially in Geneva, weaken the State” (Letter to D’Alembert, 336). For Rousseau the theatre is dangerous because it manipulates our emotions by appealing to our capacity to sympathise with the joys and sorrows of others. It thereby dissolves the “natural” fit between the citizens’ moral sentiments and the institutionalized social practices established and protected by the laws of the state. Yet at the same time Rousseau maintains that in order to integrate citizens into the wider sphere of the state we have to make use of our sympathetic capacity. In this paper I explore how Rousseau’s account of a sympathy-driven civic education undermines his conception of human nature as the ground on which society should be erected. I argue that ultimately it is society and its institutionalized practices that jointly determine which kinds of sentiments are to be cultivated, and thereby essentially shape our understanding of what it is that counts as natural.
Anik Waldow is Senior Lecturer in the Philosophy Department at the University of Sydney. She mainly works in early modern philosophy and has published widely on the moral and cognitive function of sympathy, early modern theories of personal identity, scepticism and associationist theories of thought and language, and the influence of artifice and nature in the enlightenment debate. Her articles appeared in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, The British Journal for the History of Philosophy, Hume Studies, History of Philosophy Quarterly and Philosophy. She is the author of the book David Hume and the Problem of Other Minds (Continuum, 2009), and edited a special edition of Intellectual History Review on “Sensibility in Early Modern Philosophy: From Living Machines to Affective Morality.” She also co-edited Contemporary Perspectives on Early Modern Philosophy: Nature and Norms in Thought (Springer, 2013).
When and under what circumstances was historical writing first structured by a set of exemplary philosophical oppositions—between the spiritual and material, the rational and temporal, ideas and social existence—such that history could be presented as world-historical progress towards human self-consciousness? In discussing this question the paper will pay due attention to those accounts that have answered it in terms of the reception of Hegelian philosophy by such historians as Leo, Rothe, Gans, and Droysen. But it will also depart from these accounts by arguing that this reception cannot itself be understood in terms of Hegelian philosophical history—as a dialectical mediation of rationalist philosophy and empiricist history. It should instead be seen as the work of a particular academic-intellectual faction engaged in cultural and political combat with rival factions, especially the empirical and ‘philological’ historians, and most notably Leopold von Ranke and his school. It will thus be suggested that when dialectical philosophical history emerged in 1820s-30s Protestant Germany, it was in the context of a particular cultural-political battle with empirical-philological historians. The roots of this conflict lay deep in German religious, philosophical, and political history, but its specific configuration was provided by post-Napoleonic struggles to reshape German politics and culture. It is understandable that academic intellectual work should be characterised in terms of disinterested research and free discussion within an open academic public sphere. On this occasion, however, it would appear that important intellectual developments were driven by combat between internally closed and mutually hostile intellectual factions bent on cultural and political domination in and through the university.
Ian Hunter is an emeritus professor in the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities. He is the author of a number of studies on the history of early modern political, philosophical, and religious thought, most notably, Rival Enlightenments: Civil and Metaphysical Philosophy in Early Modern Germany (Cambridge 2001). He has also published a number of papers on the history of post-Kantian philosophy in the modern humanities and social sciences. His current work, on intellectual movements as cultural-political factions in the politics of early 19th century Germany, has resulted in a recent paper—‘About the Dialectical History of International Law’ (Global Intellectual History 2016)—and forms the basis of the present seminar.
A view common to intellectual historians and historical theorists of various stripes is that understanding the meaning of past speech has little or nothing to do with knowing if such past speech is true. The primary concern of the historian should be the pragmatics rather than the semantics of past language use. Meaning is a means for understanding what language does, what effects it produces, what ends it pursues or intentions it embodies. Insofar as truth does come into play, the idea is that the truth of an utterance is relative to a scheme, a certain language game or mode of comportment or understanding. Truth in other words is regime-specific, and the task of the historian is to ascertain the emergence and eclipse of such regimes and what kinds of moves they sanction. Many practical conventions for the historian follow from this, such as the tendency to periodize the past and to maintain a distinction between historical knowledge and political judgment. This paper will pursue an opposing line of argument drawing on Donald Davidson’s project for a truth-conditional semantics in analytic philosophy. Intellectual historians have considered Davidson’s pertinence to their craft and have concluded resoundingly in the negative. But their brisk rejection of his view is indicative and suggests that the challenges to intellectual history implicit in his work are worth drawing out and taking seriously.
Dr Knox Peden is an ARC DECRA Research Fellow in the School of Philosophy at the Australian National University. He is the author of Spinoza Contra Phenomenology: French Rationalism from Cavaillès to Deleuze (Stanford, 2014) and a two-volume edited work devoted to the Cahiers pour l’Analyse (Verso, 2012).
This lecture will draw on a recently completed study of higher education in Australia. The Unified National System established in the 1990s brought substantial changes to university funding, management, teaching and research that had particular implications for core disciplines in the humanities and social sciences such as history. The lecture examines patterns of activity over the past quarter-century and their implications.
Stuart Macintyre is Professor Emeritus of the University of Melbourne and has written extensively on Australia’s political and social history, as well as its intellectual traditions. His most recent book is Australia’s Boldest Experiment: War and Reconstruction in the 1940s. His study of how Australian universities were reconstructed from the 1980s, No End of a Lesson, appears later this year.
This paper will offer a close examination of the chapter on Dante that concludes Ernst’s Kantorowicz’s 1957 masterpiece, The King’s Two Bodies. For some, Kantorowicz’s Dante interpretation, with its celebration of the notion of “Man-centred kingship” which emerges from Dante’s political theory, represents a secularisation of the theological fiction to whose historical reconstruction his book had been dedicated; yet this paper will explore to what extent it can equally be described as an instance of what Kantorowicz himself elsewhere termed the “sacralisation” of an originally secular concept. An examination of the prehistory of the invented Latin formula – homo instrumentum humanitatis – through which Kantorowicz pursues his reading will provide the perspective not only from which to clarify the sense of his intervention, but also to explore the implications that follow from it.
Nicholas Heron is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Intellectual and Literary History program in the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Queensland. He is the author of a forthcoming monograph entitled Liturgical Power: Between Economic and Political Theology (Fordham UP, 2017), and the translator of Giorgio Agamben’s Stasis: Civil War as a Political Paradigm (Stanford UP, 2015).
Informal empire and gunboat diplomacy are two key terms scholars use to describe the British Empire’s intermeddling with states in its margins after the Napoleonic Wars. The first captures something of the condescension, and the second, some measure of the violence, which Britain imposed on its interlocutors. This paper focuses instead on exploring the way that internal ideas of order shaped Britain’s relations with a cluster of states in the Asia-Pacific region in the early nineteenth century. It suggests that, in this period, when the very term ‘international law’ was a new term of Jeremy Bentham’s invention, understanding how routines of internal legal reform and practices of adjudication were exported is crucial to understanding how the world worked and how interpolity legal order was imagined.
Lisa Ford is Associate Professor of History in the School of Humanities at UNSW. Her research centres on ideas and practices of order in the post-1763 British Empire and the early national United States. Ford’s prize-winning first book, Settler Sovereignty (Harvard, 2010), explains how and why North American and Australasian settler polities defined their sovereignty against indigenous customary law after 1800. This paper draws from her second book (co-authored with Professor Lauren Benton) entitled: Rage for Order: The British Empire and the Origins of International law, 1800-1850 (Harvard, 2016). Ford’s research has been supported by Australian Research Council grants. In 2012, she received the Max Crawford Award, recognising 'outstanding achievement in the humanities by young Australian scholars... whose publications contribute towards an understanding of their discipline by the general public.'