Welcome to the University of Newcastle's Centre for 21st Century Humanities monthly newsletter.

​We hope you and your families are keeping well during this time of isolation and social distancing. 

The official University of Newcastle web page for the institution-wide response to coronavirus is https://www.newcastle.edu.au/covid-19.

Read on to learn about our research and activities.

Welcome to our new members

We wish to extend a warm welcome to the following new members of the centre who have recently joined the team:

• Associate Professor Nancy Cushing is an Australian environmental historian with particular interests in animal human histories and in Newcastle’s history as a centre of coal mining.  She is on the executives of the Australian and NZ Environmental History Network, the History Council of NSW and the Global Newcastle Research Network.
• Professor Duncan McDuie-Ra is an urban sociologist who examines the relationship between rural-urban space migration.
• Dr Justin Ellis is a criminologist studying the impact of digital media technology on crime and criminalisation.
• Dr Erin McCarthy is a digital humanist and literary historian specialising in the histories of reading and the book.
• Dr Kiwako Ito applies psycholinguistic methodologies (e.g., eye-tracking) to study how people respond to speech signals in a wide range of groups of language users.

View all the centre's members...

New book looks at how music helped shape migrants lives in nineteenth century Newcastle

How did nineteenth century migrants to Australia use music to make sense of their new surroundings? That is the question focused on in a newly published book authored by School of Creative Industries researcher and member of the Centre for 21st Century Humanities, Dr Helen English.

Music and World-Building in the Colonial City Newcastle, NSW, and its Townships, 1860-1880 investigates how migrants to Australia used music as a resource for world-building, focusing on coal-mining regions of New South Wales, particularly Newcastle. Helen says the book explores how music-making helped British migrants to create communities in unfamiliar country, often with little to no infrastructure.

Helen says music was a useful, accessible and valued resource that settlers could draw on to create their world.

“Music was powerful for this purpose because of its many attributes, its effects on the body and emotions, its potential for meaning-making and, notably in the nineteenth century, its value as symbolic capital.”

Read more...

Book Launch: Doubtful Readers by Dr Erin McCarthy

Digital humanist with the School of Humanities and Social Science and the Centre for 21st Century Humanities, Dr Erin McCarthy has found a unique way to launch her newly published book, Doubtful Readers: Print, Poetry, and the Reading Public in Early Modern England.

Dr McCarthy had planned to launch her book in Philadelphia at the Renaissance Society of America meeting. However, the conference was cancelled due to the COVID-19 crisis. Instead McCarthy hosted a ‘virtual launch’ online, sponsored by the Society for Renaissance Studies (UK) and held on Crowdcast. Watch a replay of the launch.

Dr McCarthy said despite the time and physical distance, the launch was a success with at least 92 people tuning in from US, the UK, Canada, Ireland, Switzerland, Italy, Australia, and New Zealand.

Read more...

Our Human Experience Podcast features Victoria Haskins

What can the historical experiences and cultural memories of the earliest global domestic workers tell us about the history of home, domesticity and cross-cultural relationships?

In the latest episode from the School of Humanities and Social Science podcast, Our Human Experience, Centre for 21st Century Humanities historian Professor Victoria Haskins is revealing the little known stories of the Ayahs and Amahs from India and China – female domestic care workers who travelled to Australian and Britain during the period of British colonialism.

The stories of these incredibly mobile women helped shaped our world today. Victoria also reveals the intriguing family history find that sparked her academic journey. Listen to the episode on Anchor FM or find it on Spotify.

Dr Askland part of research project to study advocacy coalitions

Member of the Centre for 21st Century Humanities, anthropologist Dr Hedda Askland, is part of a new $418,828 multi-institutional research project led by Dr Alfonso M. Arranz at the University of Melbourne, which aims to better understand and utilise the mechanics of “advocacy coalitions” for low-carbon technologies.

The study will explore who forms the advocacy coalitions that operate in the NSW low-carbon technologies space and what their belief systems are. This process will facilitate identifying ‘key opinion leaders’ (KOLs). Dr Askland said the study seeks to learn from interactions between KOLs in order to identify and better understand the social dynamics of new, broader coalition building.

“It is important to identify these KOLs, also known as influencers or thought leaders, and understand their personal belief structures and those of the coalitions they belong to,” Dr Arranz added.

“Policy proponents can leverage this knowledge for better targeting of funding and resources for low-emissions technologies.”

Read more...

PhD student featured in Newcastle Herald

The research of PhD student Genevieve Graham (pictured - photo credit Marina Neil) has featured in the Newcastle Herald. Genevieve is supervised by the Centre's Professor Marguerite Johnson, and studies what we leave at graves and why. She's coined the term 'trace objects' for the items left on graves.

"It's something we've been doing since we've been burying people, but trace objects are not heavily researched," Genevieve told the Newcastle Herald.

She documents the trace objects and has observed a change in what people choose to leave on graves.

"The thing I am most interested in at the moment is the change from leaving natural flowers to plastic flowers and longer lasting plants like cacti. I think that's a really interesting shift, and indicative that we're not wanting to spend as much time at cemeteries."

Read Genevieve's articles here and here. 

Read more C21CH media items...