History at Newcastle

The Who Do You Think You Are appearances just keep coming. Tonight at 7:30, or later on SBS On Demand, it is the turn of Assoc. Prof. Julie McIntyre to tell part of the family history of journalist Melissa Doyle. https://www.sbs.com.au/ondemand/watch/2339465283523

Yesterday we enjoyed our first social in our new office space “W2”. The occasion was a celebration of the publication of Professor Catherine Colborne’s new book Vagrant Lives in Colonial Australasia. https://www.bloomsbury.com/au/vagrant-lives-in-colonial-australasia-9781350252691/
The series editor Professor Victoria Haskins was on hand to add her congratulations and Professor Duncan McDui-Ra provided his thoughts on this valuable study of the limits of permissible mobility.
Well done, Cathy!

Vagrant Lives in Colonial Australasia Investigating the history of vagrants in colonial Australia and New Zealand, this book provides insights into the histories and identities of marginalised peopl…

Congratulations to Dr Kit Candlin on a new Q1 publication, "Fear, Dependency and Complicity in Late Eighteenth-Century Grenada, 1784–1796", _Slavery and Abolition_, available now on open access
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0144039X.2024.2337727
This article treats the aftermath of Grenada's Fedon Rebellion which is also the subject of Kit's forthcoming book, _A History of the Fedon Rebellion_ (2025).

Fear, Dependency and Complicity in Late Eighteenth-Century Grenada, 1784–1796 This article uses an unusual case of murder in the British, formally French, colony of Grenada in 1784 as a useful window to explore the themes of fear and dependency among planters, and complicity...

An upcoming talk by Associate Professor Julie McIntyre

https://www.rahs.org.au/shop/tickets-awabakal-and-nikkin/?fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAR3FlH_qRp9gHCtT3JbqoCGtzIuhXqva2saaZYI5kh1urqsPsYIHIomnJpk_aem_AYY2H6WYvIhGoqa7SQhWIdYmGsg3nZRnzFdg_HORS9K_GtM6XC2smjQSsNBxktRApz0s0Nc1yHRBTbRnMZIPFJJC

RAHS Day Lecture – Awabakal and Nikkin: Reconnecting histories of First Peoples, coal and colonists RAHS Day Lecture – Awabakal and Nikkin: Reconnecting histories of First Peoples, coal and colonists - Royal Australian Historical Society

The History and Ancient History Disciplines at the University of Newcastle (Australia) are pleased to announce the next paper in our 2024 seminar series, on Monday 3 June, from 5-6pm AEST (UTC+10). The seminar will be held online and in person. (Room details and Zoom link below.) Our presenter is:


David Pritchard (Queensland), The Children of Athena: The Armed Forces of Democratic Athens.
On the eve of the Peloponnesian War, Pericles famously advised the Athenians how they could win. This political leader re-assured assembly-goers that they already had the required funds and armed forces for victory. The first corps that Pericles mentioned was the 13,000 hoplites. The next 2 were the 1200-strong cavalry and the 1600 archers. The last military branch of which he spoke was the navy of 300 triremes. This paper’s primary aim is to go behind Pericles’s famous numbers. For each corps that he mentioned, it studies the legal status of corps-members and their social background. The paper explores how they were recruited into their corps and subsequently mobilised for campaigns. It establishes each corps’s history and specific organisation. By treating these four military branches together for the first time, this paper reveals the common practices that the dēmos (‘people’) used to manage their armed forces. It concludes by detailing the common assumptions that they brought to this management.
David M. Pritchard is Associate Professor of Greek History at the University of Queensland (Australia) where he has chaired the Department of Classics and Ancient History. He has obtained research fellowships in Australia, Denmark, France, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and the United States of America. In 2022-3, he is a research fellow in the Nantes Institute for Advanced Study (France). He is the author of Athenian Democracy at War (Cambridge University Press 2019), Sport, Democracy and War in Classical Athens (Cambridge University Press 2013) and Public Spending and Democracy in Classical Athens (University of Texas Press 2015). Associate Professor Pritchard has edited The Athenian Funeral Oration: After Nicole Loraux (Cambridge University Press 2023) and War, Democracy and Culture in Classical Athens (Cambridge University Press 2010), and co-edited Sport and Festival in the Ancient Greek World (Classical Press of Wales 2003). He has also published 65 journal articles and book chapters. Associate Professor Pritchard has an h-index of 19 and more than 1300 known citations. He speaks on the radio and regularly writes for newspapers around the world. His 41 op.-eds have appeared in, among other outlets, Die Süddeutsche Zeitung (Germany), Le Monde (France), Le Figaro (France), Ouest-France, The Conversation (France), Kathimerini (Greece), Scroll.in (India), The Age (Australia), The Australian and Politike (Brazil). Associate Professor Pritchard obtained his PhD in Ancient History from Macquarie University (Australia) in 2000.
For in-person attendance: VG07, V Building, Callaghan Campus, University of Newcastle (Australia)
Zoom meeting ID: 870 4036 3272
Password: 783069
To Join from PC, Mac, Linux, iOS or Android: https://uonewcastle.zoom.us/j/87040363272?pwd=QTJQait4ZFFMa1pKYVgzQzhPTHF5Zz09

This event will be recorded. Presentation recordings will be available from our YouTube channel, History@Newcastle: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCiju7vKLANeSX4QxBpMwJow

An upcoming event with Assoc Prof Nancy Cushing talking about energy transition and the role of memorialisation.

Our next Making Public Histories webinar will take place on Thursday, May 30! The topic will be "Energy Transitions: Historicising Australia’s Nuclear Debate".

The event will be chaired by Margaret Anderson, Director of the Old Treasury Building and in partnership with Monash University. We are excited to be welcoming Jess Urwin, postdoctoral research fellow at La Trobe University, Matthew Ryan, a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Climate & Energy Program at the Australia Institute, and Nancy Cushing, Associate Professor of History at the University of Newcastle, to speak at the event.

Register here: https://www.historycouncilvic.org.au/australia_s_nuclear_debate_mph

Australia is in the midst of an energy transition, but specific policies and decisions around the shift to more renewable forms of energy production, storage and use have become the subject of heated debate. Historians have an important role to play in this debate, shedding light on the historical factors that shape ideas and attitudes in the present. How have Australians thought about nuclear energy, and the extractive processes that underpin it, over the last seventy years? What cultural attitudes have developed around coal and coal mining in Australia, and how do they shape attitudes and policy today? And how have we transitioned between energy regimes in the past? In this seminar, three leading scholars consider how Australia’s past shapes debates about the nation’s contested energy transition today.

The History and Ancient History Disciplines at the University of Newcastle (Australia) are pleased to announce the that the next paper in our 2024 seminar series will be on Fri 24 May, 10-11am (UTC+10). Our presenter will be:

Morgan Burgess (Newcastle), From Pen to Press: Australian women’s bookcraft in the University of Newcastle’s Special Collections.
Week 11: Fri 24 May, 10-11am (UTC+10), SR202 & Online

In the West, women have been active contributors to the book trade since its inception when Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press in the mid fifteenth century. The fact of women’s sustained presence in the process of creating and distributing books has often obscured the challenges they face in entering and being competitive in what was and continues to be a male dominated industry. Similarly, the art of book collecting has traditionally been a male purview that has favoured the collection of books written and created by men. As curator of the exhibition From Pen to Press: Australian Women’s Bookcraft now showing at the University of Newcastle Library’s Special Collections I sought to surface women’s contributions to the book trade in Australia as represented by the Library’s rare book holdings. Using an intersectional feminist lens, I will consider the ways in which the patriarchy exerted influence on the careers of women featured in Pen to Press – including Louisa Lawson, Romaine Moreton, the Scott Sisters, and more – and how the lessons learned can help inform book collecting practices in future.

Dr Morgan Burgess is the Special Collections Librarian at the University of Newcastle Library. She was awarded her Doctorate by the University of New South Wales for her research investigating fictional representations of the campaigns for women’s voting rights in Australia and New Zealand. More recently Morgan has become interested in the works of Australian writer Eleanor Dark and has a publication about her forthcoming. She has worked in university libraries and at the National Library of Australia and enjoys connecting people with Australia’s literary history.

For in-person attendance: SR202, Social Science Building, Callaghan Campus, University of Newcastle (Australia)

Zoom meeting ID: 870 4036 3272
Password: 783069
To Join from PC, Mac, Linux, iOS or Android: https://uonewcastle.zoom.us/j/87040363272?pwd=QTJQait4ZFFMa1pKYVgzQzhPTHF5Zz09
These events will be recorded. Presentation recordings will be available from our YouTube channel, History@Newcastle: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCiju7vKLANeSX4QxBpMwJow

We are pleased to be able to pass on an invitation from the family of Lyndall Ryan to join in a celebration of her life on 15 June at Newcastle City Hall, from 2 pm.

Our next History seminar will feature Justin Pigott (Leicester/Auckland) on
Christian Slavery: Enslavement and Ownership in Early Byzantium.
Fri 17 May, 10-11am (UTC+10) Online Only

During the same period in which the abolitionist movement of the nineteenth century reached its zenith, a historiographical trend emerged amongst scholars of early Christianity who argued that the spread of Christianity brought about a gradual dissipation of ancient slave-holding practices across the late Roman world. Highlighting the Christian language of equality, such as the Pauline assertion that “there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus”, such historians believed that the church’s growing influence over Roman and post-Roman society led to the mass manumission of slaves. However, the last few decades have witnessed a sharp about-turn in the topic, with scholars demonstrating that Greco-Roman forms of slavery not only continued throughout late antiquity but did so with the participation and express endorsement of prominent figures in the church. This makes early Christian attitudes to slavery a particularly useful topic through which to trace the transition from the worlds of antiquity to that of the early medieval period. This paper investigates early Christian understandings of slavery across the Greek-speaking Roman east. How did it differ from traditional forms of ancient slavery? What part of the slave was understood to be owned? What led bishops such as Augustine to proclaim: “You must use the whip, use it! God allows it. Rather, he is angered if you do not lash the slave.”

Justin Pigott is a Research Associate at the University of Leicester. He is a historian of the later Roman Empire with a particular interest in the religious, social, and political evolution of its eastern territories. His research and publications have centred around the development and historiography of early Constantinople (Justin M. Pigott, New Rome Wasn’t Built in a Day: Rethinking Councils and Controversy at Early Constantinople 381–451, Brepols, 2020), as well as the transition of traditional forms of Greco-Roman slavery into the newly emerging religious worlds of Late Antiquity. He is currently working on the ERC funded project DoSSE: Domestic Slavery & Sexual Exploitation 300-900 AD.


Zoom meeting ID: 870 4036 3272
Password: 783069
To Join from PC, Mac, Linux, iOS or Android: https://uonewcastle.zoom.us/j/87040363272?pwd=QTJQait4ZFFMa1pKYVgzQzhPTHF5Zz09
These events will be recorded. Presentation recordings will be available from our YouTube channel, History@Newcastle: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCiju7vKLANeSX4QxBpMwJow

Image: Source is: A fourth or early fifth century mosaic displaying the domina of a villa surrounded by two maidservants. Image Credit: Fabien Dany - www.fabiendany.com

We are very pleased to see that Professor Catharine Coleborne's new book, Vagrant Lives in Colonial Australasia, has just been published by Bloomsbury Academic.
Congratulations, Cathy!

Vagrant Lives in Colonial Australasia Investigating the history of vagrants in colonial Australia and New Zealand, this book provides insights into the histories and identities of marginalised peopl…

An event coming up at the State Library with our Professor Cathy Coleborne and the University of Sydney's Jamie Dunk, chaired by Effie Karageorgos.

Book to attend here : https://www.eventbrite.com.au/e/history-now-histories-of-mental-health-tickets-901992984297?aff=oddtdtcreator

See more about the Future of Madness Network here: https://www.newcastle.edu.au/research/centre/the-future-of-madness

For this week's seminar, we are pleased to welcome
Nilay Özok-Gündoğan (Florida State)
who will speak on
The Beginning of the Endgame? The Road to the 1895 Armenian Massacres in Ottoman Palu.
Friday 10 May, 10-11am AEST (UTC+10), Online only.

In the mid-nineteenth century, the Ottoman imperial state initiated an ambitious project to abolish the hereditary military, fiscal, and administrative privileges of the Kurdish begs — members of elite Kurdish families who ruled the emirates in a hereditary manner. This policy contradicted three-century-old decrees granted by Ottoman sultans and aimed to establish a small, tax-paying peasantry. The goal was to undermine the economic and political basis of the landed Kurdish rulers’ authority.

The state confiscated the begs’ extensive landholdings and offered them for sale, sparking intense negotiations over their hereditary privileges. This negotiation involved not only the imperial state and the begs but also the emerging Armenian financial bourgeoisie, as well as Muslim and Armenian sharecroppers and small peasantry, alongside local Ottoman administrators.

Over six decades of ongoing negotiations and disputes among these parties, tensions culminated in 1895 with a series of massacres against the Armenian population of Palu. This discussion examines how socio-economic and political changes resulting from the government’s policy toward the Kurdish begs’ hereditary privileges set the stage for violent attacks on Armenians in the fall of 1895. It explores the escalation of intercommunal conflict in Palu within the context of the changing fortunes -including diminishing wealth and authority- of the Palu begs, alongside the growing hostility between them and the district’s Armenian population.

This seminar is co-hosted by the Centre for the Study of Violence at the University of Newcastle

Nilay Özok-Gündoğan is an Associate Professor of Ottoman and Middle East history at Florida State University. Her research centers on the questions of modern state-making, property regimes, and intercommunal conflict and coexistence in the borderlands of modern empires. She also writes about the question of methodology in Kurdish Studies. Her publications appeared in Journal of Social History, International Journal of Middle East Studies, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, New Perspectives on Turkey, and in edited volumes. She also contributes to Jadaliyya with op-eds on the Kurdish Studies. Her first manuscript, The Kurdish Nobility in the Ottoman Empire: Loyalty, Autonomy, and Privilege (Edinburgh University Press, 2022) received the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association’s 2023 Book Prize. Her current manuscript Forging Empire: Mineral Extraction, State-Making, and the Colonization of Ottoman Kurdistan, 1720-1870 examines Ottoman colonization of Kurdistan through the study of mineral extraction at the Keban and Ergani mining region in the eighteenth century.

Zoom meeting ID: 870 4036 3272
Password: 783069
To Join from PC, Mac, Linux, iOS or Android: https://uonewcastle.zoom.us/j/87040363272?pwd=QTJQait4ZFFMa1pKYVgzQzhPTHF5Zz09
Presentation recordings will be available from our YouTube channel, History@Newcastle: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCiju7vKLANeSX4QxBpMwJow

Another contribution to the "Stories of our Town" series is out. A lot of history in and on a very small island makes it "our Opera House or Harbour Bridge", and an early example of protest to save a natural feature. See also the chapter on this topic in _Radical Newcastle_.
https://l.facebook.com/l.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DqBMWW9g5zu8%26t%3D73s&h=AT1QmxkWZs8l9_8MRCCCAJtbddOAjKEx1r0nVpXg5SgXohYy3QSGvIpO13HEIXOjsOmLL9cC7BGVfi90KplbLaxBkwpVeq2u3cu_puKB5rHknCRhD77EevuuAILLBN1MEMlVK-MZMg58bgCUTg&s=1

WHIBAYGANBA, The Story of Nobbys Headland For our 19th film, we’ve turned the lens on Newcastle’s most recognisable icon, Nobbys/Whibayganba Headland, and it’s been a wild and fascinating ride. ...

We are deeply saddened by the loss of Emerita Professor Lyndall Ryan, AM FAHA (1943 – 2024).
Condolences have been streaming in, from former postgrads and colleagues, people who only knew her in passing and close friends. They recall a woman who was both brave and kind, an innovative thinker and an excellent companion, and who left a legacy of scholarship that has made a difference in the world.

https://www.smh.com.au/national/historian-who-put-colonial-frontier-violence-on-the-map-dies-at-81-20240509-p5inkp.html

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/may/01/lyndall-ryans-impact-on-australian-history-research-will-be-felt-for-many-years-to-come

https://www.newcastleherald.com.au/story/8612614/tributes-flow-for-emerita-professor-lyndall-ryan-of-newcastle/

https://www.womenaustralia.info/leaders/biogs/WLE0732b.htm

One more event for the week. On Wednesday 1 May from 1 - 2 AEST, Associate Professor Nancy Cushing will present an online RAHS Day Lecture on "What Is So Good About Crime, Historians’ Edition"

While crime statistics trend downward, the appetite for stories about crime just keeps growing. This abiding interest makes historical crime a tempting area for historians following their own interests or with a view to writing histories that people want to read. In 2018, I became part of this trend when I developed a course on the history of crime in Australia. In this talk, I will discuss why crime can be so fruitful for historians, illustrating my points with examples from Australia’s criminal past.

About the speaker:

Nancy Cushing is Associate Professor in History at the University of Newcastle on unceded Awabakal land. Her teaching includes the history of crime while her research area is Australian environmental history. Her current book project is A New History of Australia in 15 Animals (Bloomsbury). Nancy is the 2024–2025 Coral Thomas Fellow at the State Library of New South Wales, Director of the Centre for the Study of Violence and a member of the executive of the Australian Historical Association.

Register for this free event here:

RAHS Day Lecture – What Is So Good About Crime, Historians' Edition RAHS Day Lecture – What Is So Good About Crime, Historians' Edition - Royal Australian Historical Society

Our Seminar series continues this Friday, 3 May with a talk from Dr Elizabeth Roberts-Pedersen at 10 am AEST.

Psychopolitics: capitalism and the history of mental health. Co-hosted by Centre for Study of Violence and Future of Madness Network. W202 & Online

What is the relationship between psychiatry, mental health, and capitalism, and how can these connections be understood historically? In this paper I attempt to extend the conventional association between the rise of industrial capitalism and the expansion of the asylum by sketching a related history in which capitalism is conceptualised as a form of totalising ‘psychopolitics’ – a (mostly) inescapable entanglement of the market and the psyche. As well as outlining the consolidation of this critique in the first decades of the twentieth century, I examine two, more contemporary examples that sustain it into the present: the ‘psychiatrisation’ of work and in particular the notion of ‘burnout’, and the marketisation of emerging digital technologies for the provision of mental health care.

Elizabeth Roberts-Pedersen is a Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Newcastle, Australia. Her research examines the history of psychiatry and medicine as well as the history of warfare. She is the author of Freedom, Faction, Fame and Blood (2010), a study of British foreign fighters in three European wars, and Making Mental Health: A Critical History (2024), an inquiry into the political stakes of psychiatry from the nineteenth century to the present. Her next book, on the concept of mental ‘salvage’ in the Second World War and its aftermath, will appear with Cambridge University Press.

For in-person attendance:
W202, Behavioural Science Building, Callaghan Campus, University of Newcastle (Australia)

Zoom meeting ID: 870 4036 3272
Password: 783069
To Join from PC, Mac, Linux, iOS or Android: https://uonewcastle.zoom.us/j/87040363272?pwd=QTJQait4ZFFMa1pKYVgzQzhPTHF5Zz09
These events will be recorded. Presentation recordings will be available from our YouTube channel, History@Newcastle: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCiju7vKLANeSX4QxBpMwJow

On Thursday 2 May from 12 - 1 AEST, Associate Professor Nancy Cushing will give a talk in the University of Newcastle's Geography seminar series in room SR193 and on Zoom.
Nancy will discuss her current book project:
A New History of Australia in 15 Animals
In 2022, a colleague told me that Bloomsbury Academic had launched a new series called Histories in 15. They were looking for proposals that would use 15 items, instances or examples to provide a novel way into established historical topics for a primary audience of undergraduate students. I immediately began thinking about how I could provide a new history of Australia in 15 animals. Starting with the Rainbow Serpent, finishing with the singed koalas of the Black Summer bushfires and including camels, Murray cod and mosquitoes along the way, this project has been my major focus since then. In this talk, I will discuss the theoretical and methodological issues I have grappled with in first choosing my 15 animals, and then using their stories to trace a more animal-centred pathway through Australian history.

Zoom link:
Phone one-tap: Australia: +61871501149,,87397714286 #,,,,*645675 # or +61280156011,,87397714286 #,,,,*645675 #
Meeting URL: https://uonewcastle.zoom.us/j/87397714286?pwd=QWZOY0hIa1ZtN2hPMjZES09GQkl5UT09&from=addon
Meeting ID: 873 9771 4286
Passcode: 645675

Good to see this placed in historical context. Highest percent of overseas born since the 1890s.

Australia's Population by Country of Birth, 2022 Statistics on Australia's estimated resident population by country of birth.

Dr Effie Karageorgos will appear in the new documentary ‘Tears of Hope’ which shares the stories of Australian veterans, and their families, and follows the making of a new sculpture for the Australian War Memorial that recognises the ongoing trauma suffered by many as a result of their service.

Watch this Sunday night at 10.10pm AEST on Channel 7
or later on 7plus

Sufferings of War and Service | Australian War Memorial Sufferings of War and Service For Every Drop Shed in Anguish, a new sculpture recognising and commemorating the suffering caused by war and military service, was dedicated at a public ceremony on 22 February 2024. The Australian War Memorial has worked with veterans and their families and advocates....

History about the Newcastle area rather than by us, but this sounds terrific:
Eleanor Foster, "Assembling Collections: Isabella Parry and the Distribution of Aboriginal Material Culture at the Port Stephens Australian Agricultural Company Settlement, 1830–1834" in Australian Historical Studies

Assembling Collections: Isabella Parry and the Distribution of Aboriginal Material Culture at the Port Stephens Australian Agricultural Company Settlement, 1830–1834 This article revisits a suite of Worimi objects in the British Museum whose collection is attributed to Sir Edward Parry, Australian Agricultural Company commissioner from 1830–1834, and brings int...

We have a seminar today (10 am AEDT) - Michael Robinson (Birmingham), on War, Trauma and the Great Depression, previously advertised.
Next week, not in our usual timeslot, we bring you Cristian Cercel (IDGL, Tübingen), Of Lives and Letters: The Incomplete Story of the Incomplete Correspondence between Sigmund Freud and Eduard Silberstein.
This one will be online only, Tuesday 9 April, 4-5pm AEST (UTC+10)

The link for both talks is Zoom meeting ID: 870 4036 3272
Password: 783069
To Join from PC, Mac, Linux, iOS or Android: https://uonewcastle.zoom.us/j/87040363272?pwd=QTJQait4ZFFMa1pKYVgzQzhPTHF5Zz09

Of Lives and Letters: The Incomplete Story of the Incomplete Correspondence between Sigmund Freud and Eduard Silberstein.
Cristian Cercel (IDGL, Tübingen)
The originals of eighty letters addressed by Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) to Eduard Silberstein (1856-1925) between 1871 and 1881, published in volume more than a century later (1989/1990), are deposited at the Library of Congress. They have been digitized and are freely available online for everyone to peruse. Bar seven of them and a postcard, the letters were bought by the Sigmund Freud Archives (SFA) in 1978 for 100,000 USD. SFA subsequently offered them to LOC. The rest was acquired in 2009 by LOC from an antiquities dealer in New York, who had in his turn acquired them from an antiquities dealer from Berlin, who had bought them from an undisclosed seller from Germany.
The person from whom the first set of letters was acquired was one Heinz Stănescu (1921-1994). Born in Vienna, Stănescu was living in Germany in 1978, after ‘defecting’ from Romania, where he had lived almost his entire life, a few years before. Stănescu was Jewish; a Holocaust survivor; homosexual; literary historian and university professor whose specialism was German-language literature from Romania; Securitate officer; Securitate informer; victim of the Securitate. He was also distantly related to Silberstein, although he was not Silberstein’s next of kin.
When the letters were published in volume in 1989/1990 (in both original and in English translation), the edition included almost no information about their provenience. The preface noted that SFA acquired the originals, but did not specify from whom. Moreover, the publication of a short appendix on Silberstein authored by his granddaughter in 1988 could make one falsely assume that the letters had actually been in the possession of Silberstein’s heirs.
The talk presents the attempt – and the difficulties one comes across in such an attempt – to reconstruct the history of the correspondence as both thing (material object) and text. The biography of the letters is placed in relationship with the biographies of those – individuals and institutions – who owned them at different moments, or who claimed to own them. In doing this, it critically engages with questions of ownership, with changing concepts and understandings of provenience, and with archival and collecting practices throughout various political systems and over a period of more than a century. Furthermore, in trying to delineate the biography and the trajectory of the letters, from Vienna and the Habsburg Empire to Brăila in eastern Romania, to Bucharest, and then to Washington, DC, via Frankfurt, Berlin, and New York, the talk invites towards a reconsideration of spatializations of German and Central European history often taken for granted.
Cristian Cercel is researcher at the Institute for Danube Swabian History and Regional Studies in Tübingen. He holds a BA in European Studies (Bucharest), an MA in Nationalism Studies (Central European University, Budapest), and a PhD in Politics (Durham). Between 2016 and 2022, Cercel was postdoctoral researcher with the Institute for Social Movements at Ruhr University Bochum. He is the author of Romania and the Quest for European Identity: Philo-Germanism without Germans (Routledge, 2019). He has published articles in Nationalities Papers (2011), East European Politics and Societies and Cultures (2015), Nationalism and Ethnic Politics (2017), History and Memory (2018), Journal of War and Culture Studies (2019), Immigrants and Minorities (2023). His research focuses on German minorities, migration studies, settler colonial studies, memory studies, nationalism and ethnic politics.

On Friday, April 12, Emeritus Professor John Maynard will host a forum marking 100 years of organised Aboriginal activism:
Centenary Forum for the Australian Aboriginal Progressive Association 1924–2024.
Location: NSW State Library. Book at the link below.

100 years of organised Aboriginal activism Centenary Forum for the Australian Aboriginal Progressive Association 1924–2024. Hear about the origins of Aboriginal activism.

Love the woodchopping competitions at the Royal, or your local Show? Assoc. Prof. Julie McIntyre writes about one of the past champions.

Heading to the Sydney Royal Easter Show? 🐰🐣

The show's first woodchopping competition was held in 1899. Read about one of its early competitors, Manny McCarthy (1902–1994), in the ADB: http://tinyurl.com/mannymccarthy

📷 1. Daily Telegraph, 27 March 1937 Trove
📷 2. Manny McCarthy, NSW Hall of Champions Sydney Olympic Park
📷 3. Sydney Mail, 26 April 1933 Trove