Centre for 21st Century Humanities Newsletter - September

WEB VERSION

Welcome to our September newsletter

This month we feature highlights on the next generation of thinkers - our PhD students who are working with our Centre members on topics including:

Wine history
Indigenous history
Open scholarship
Colonial visual culture
Trace objects
Traditional arts
Folklore

Plus we update you on the TLCMap project and feature a journal article on displacement.

Enjoy!

University of Newcastle firmly on the map of digital humanities

The Time Layered Cultural Map of Australia (TLCMap) development team in the School of Humanities and Social Science is working on a major update following the delivery of a user testing report from Asymmetric Innovation.

TLCMap is a toolkit for mapping history and culture, from finding placenames in large stretches of text to creating virtual reality experiences. Users can utilise one or more of the tools depending on their needs and move information between them to enable new discoveries. The multi-institutional project firmly places UON as a leader in Australian Digital Humanities and is funded by an Australian Research Council Linkage Infrastructure, Equipment and Facilities (LIEF) grant. The Centre for 21st Century Humanities is a partner in the project, and UON Chief Investigators alongside Project Leader Emeritus Professor Hugh Craig include Associate Professor Mark Harvey, Professor Victoria Haskins and Professor Lyndall Ryan.

TLCMap is due to launch later this year. Subscribe to the TLCMap newsletter.

Journal article compares two case studies to examine displacement

Anthropologist with the Centre for 21st Century Humanities, Dr Hedda Askland has written a new journal article with UON alumnus Dr Georgina Ramsay.

Published in the Ethnos Journal of Anthropology, Displacement as Condition: A Refugee, a Farmer and the Teleology of Life features two radically different case studies – a farmer and a refugee – to ask whether it is possible to express displacement beyond assumptions of involuntary movement.

The article examines what it means to be displaced and uses the refugee as the conventional symbol of displacement while also highlighting a different sense of displacement through the case study of a farmer affected by a coal mine.

“Through analysis of these two saliently different ethnographic case studies of a refugee and a farmer, we argue for a new conceptualisation of displacement as an existential condition that stems from having the teleology of life ruptured,” Dr Askland said.

Introducing some of our PhD students...

Understanding how colonial Australian wine was influenced by France

Mikaël Pierre is receiving his doctorate in History achieved within a Dual Award agreement between the University of Newcastle (UON) and Bordeaux Montaigne University (UBM). Under the supervision of Dr Julie McIntyre (UON), Prof John Germov (Charles Sturt University) and Prof Corinne Marache (UBM), he focused his research on the transfer of wine models from France to Australia during the nineteenth century.

Situated at the intersection of wine history and transnational history, his thesis gives new insight on the effects of the first wave of globalisation which facilitated the circulation of knowledge, technologies, and production models from France to Australia. It highlights the importance of interpersonal and inter-institutional exchanges occurring across national boundaries in the development of agricultural production, commodity trade and scientific knowledge. It also questions Franco-Australian transfers as a reflexivity process peculiar to histoire croisée.

Mikaël conducted his research at the State Libraries of New South Wales, Victoria and South Australia as well as archive repositories in France. His contributions to the international field of wine studies include an article on transnational wine trade by the Bordelais Calvet family in Global Food History (2019) and a co-authored chapter on the socio-cultural impact of Australia’s colonial wine imaginary, with Julie McIntyre and John Germov, in Wine, Terroir and Utopia (Routledge 2020). Mikaël is presently co-editing a book, with Corinne Marache, Julie McIntyre and Stéphanie Lachaud (from UBM), entitled Wine, Networks and Scales, to be published later this year by Peter Lang. This collection incorporates a chapter on his research on grape phylloxera, the little known insect that changed wine trade in the nineteenth century. Mikaël was the recipient of a PhD scholarship awarded to him as part of the Australian Research Council Linkage Project "Vines, Wine & Identity: the Hunter Valley NSW and changing Australian taste".

Uncovering the Aboriginal history of the Central Coast

Laurie Allen is a PhD student who is researching what happened to the Aboriginal people whose home was the Central Coast. Supervised by Professor Lyndall Ryan and Associate Professor Nancy Cushing, Laurie is looking at Central Coast Aboriginal people’s experience of colonisation. His work also explores what we know about the Central Coast before 1788, and he says it is surprising how much geology, biology and archaeology can tell us about the area’s history before British people arrived.

“In fact, this aspect of my research is threatening to overshadow my original focus on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It appears that the Central Coast had a more important place in the Aboriginal world than its present status would indicate,” Laurie said. He plans to submit his thesis in mid 2021 and then hopes to write a book to make his findings publicly accessible.

Opening up scholarship in the humanities

PhD student with Global Innovation Chair in Digital Humanities, Professor Ray Siemens, Alyssa Arbuckle has recently had a co-edited collection of essays on Feminist War Games published by Routledge. The book Feminist War Games? explores the critical intersections and collisions between feminist values and perceptions of war, by asking whether feminist values can be asserted as interventional approaches to the design, play, and analysis of games that focus on armed conflict and economies of violence.

Alyssa is studying open social scholarship and its implementation at the University of Victoria, Canada. Her thesis focuses on opening up scholarship in the humanities, and builds on a platform of digital publishing, open access, knowledge translation, and public engagement. She is a co-facilitator of the Connection cluster for the Implementing New Knowledge Environments (INKE) Partnership and recently hosted a virtual talk on the Canadian-Australian Partnership for Open Scholarship (CAPOS).

Examining the colonial visual culture of Australia and India

Srishti Guha is a PhD student who arrived from Calcutta in India within a week of COVID-19 lockdown beginning. She is co-supervised by Professor Victoria Haskins, Dr Julie McIntyre and Dr Claire Lowrie from UOW. Her PhD is on the colonial visual culture of Australia and India from 1860-1950, with a focus on colonial iconography. She says “It is a trans-imperial study where I will examine ways in which intersections between race, gender and class became entangled in and informed British colonialist assumptions and ideologies of the Empire and that was seen in the visual ephemera of the day, such as in advertisements, handbills, posters, and magazines.”

Srishti says she enjoys studying this topic because the medium is so pervasive. "We see it around us everyday and yet do not realise the meanings imbued in it or pay much attention to it. Various colonial icons and symbols that carried so much meaning in that period have been carried forward in today’s times and become a part of the norm. The importance of historicising the visual medium and studying its history is imminent."

Exhibition explores the role of trace objects

Genevieve Graham is a PhD student with Professor Marguerite Johnson, and her research explores the role that Trace Objects play in mourning and the role of artistic discourse within contemporary funerary rituals. Trace Objects are personal items left at graves that act as markers of identity for the deceased. They can be items owned by the deceased, hand-made after an individual’s death, collected and purchased with the deceased in mind, as well as the headstone. Genevieve has an exhibition titled Loves Last Token: Trace Objects and will run at UON Gallery September 28th – October 30th. Due to COVID restrictions the exhibition can only be viewed by appointment. Contact the Gallery on 4921 5255.

Genevieve says “My research utilises the visual narrative of these objects. My photographic installations and site-specific work documents and recreates the objects of memorialisation from Victorian funerary practices combined with contemporary funerary rituals. By comparing nineteenth-century western funerary practices with contemporary western practices, I explore the tension between the corporate dominance of the funeral industry and the rise of individuality in funerary rituals.” Her work was also recently featured in an article in the Newcastle Weekly.

Future roles for traditional arts

Egbert Wits, a PhD candidate supervised by Dr Hedda Askland, has worked in the arts and culture sector of Indonesia for 15 years. Over the years he has seen how modernisation processes are influencing many rural areas, both in Indonesia and the wider Asia-Pacific region. A seemingly unstoppable process that is increasingly marginalising traditional arts practices and threatens to conserve them as ‘frozen’ traditions, mere steps away from becoming history or being sold as commodified tourist rigmarole. But pockets of hope exist; where traditional arts flourish and spirited communities independently adapt and carve out futures that reweave their historic traditions with modern sounds and sights.

The mountainous region of Magelang, Central Java, Indonesia is such a region. Egbert, for the whole of 2021 and supported by local students, will lead a Traditional Arts Collaborative Anthropology Working Group that will research three villages where traditional arts are very much alive, to understand, describe and imagine what a 21st century significant role for traditional arts looks.

For more information feel free to contact Egbert.Wits@uon.edu.au

Cohort of post-grads author a book on folklore

A group of post-graduate students working with Centre member Professor Marguerite Johnson and other members of the School of Humanities and Social Science including Assoc. Prof. Caroline Webb, Assoc. Prof. Alistair Rolls, Conjoint Prof. Michael Ewans, Dr. Marie-Laure Vuaille-Barcan, Dr Rebecca Beirne, Dr. Jessica Ford and Dr Michael Sala, have a forthcoming book with Cambridge Scholars Press entitled: New Ventures: Folklore in an Age of Disruption. In each chapter the book explores traditional aspects of folklore (such as body alterations, the domestic space and the supernatural) in the light of the modern world, with its technological advances and societal changes.

In addition to planning and pitching this book, many of its HDR contributors have completed other recent publications:

Tanika Koosmen, whose thesis studies man-beast transformations in Greco-Latin Literature (and beyond), also has an interest in the Anthropocene and Post-Humanism. In 2020 Tanika co-authored an upcoming book chapter “Be/Coming Nature: Ancient Folklore and Contemporary Ecological Fiction,” in Interrogating Folklore and the Literary Fairy Tale in the Anthropocene. She has also authored a journal article ‘The History of Werewolves: From Ancient Origins to Modern Horrors.’ All About History Issue 86.

Nicole Kimball’s research focusses around the changing representations of witchcraft from Greco-Roman literature through to the Middle Ages and finishes at Harry Potter. Nicole’s work includes a forthcoming book chapter, ‘Abjection and Anxiety: The Metamorphosis of the Roman Literary: Magic in the Roman World (8th c. BCE – 5th c. CE), an article on The Conversation, ‘Curious Kids: Are Witches and Wizards Real?’ and an upcoming conference which all discuss different aspects of Greco-Roman magical belief.

Ruth McKimmie is currently undertaking her second PhD (her first was in Psychology) which draws upon her former experiences in psychology. She analyses how ancient Greek culture viewed, discussed and expressed madness by juxtaposing Greek literary examples of madness with modern psychological understandings of madness in literature and media. She has discussed her re-imagining of Euripides’ Medea in a 2019 conference, and produced an outreach article discussing her research, ‘Going Mad with Classical Reception’.

Connie Skibinski works in Classical Reception Studies (how the modern world re-uses images and texts from the ancient world), with a focus on the representation and depiction of the Amazons. She looks at both the mythic origins of the Amazons and how they are treated in Renaissance literature, dramatic opera and World War poetry. She has published an interview with her mother Stella Tarakson, the author of the children’s book series ‘Hopeless Heroes’ and has an upcoming paper for the AMPHORAE XIV Conference.

Adam Turner is researching the ways in which monstrous figures in fantasy video games are sexualised and how the violence carried out is depicted as more acceptable than violence meted out to human figures. This year, Marguerite Johnson and Adam guest edited the Classical Reception Studies Network Blog with Dr. Henry Stead from St. Andrews University. The theme of this guest editing was to provide Australasian Classical Reception scholars a space in which to show their research. In addition, Adam has a few articles on the The Conversation, and a forthcoming book review: ‘Locked Out: Regional Restrictions in Digital Entertainment Culture Evan Elkins (2019)’. Journal of Digital Media & Policy. (Forthcoming).

The Conversation: The ‘channelling’ of George Floyd and spiritualism’s racist history

PhD candidate in History Timothy Worrad wrote an article for The Conversation recently about the history of political ventriloquising of deceased members of minority racial groups by white spirit mediums.

Call for submissions: power and desire seminar series

The Australasian Post-Humanities digital seminar series is now seeking submissions for presentations in October. The series, run via Zoom, challenges the barriers of western academia, creating new space for thinkers both inside and outside of the Australasian arts and humanities. Papers for October streams are invited on the theme of Power and Desire in the Australasian Imaginary.