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Welcome to our July newsletter

As we continue to respond to the challenges presented during 2020 we this month highlight Centre for 21st Century Humanities expertise which is revealing new knowledge across the themes of:

  • the history of public health, notably during the Spanish Flu pandemic;
  • youth sociology;
  • a reflection on the bushfires of 2020 and a possible link to COVID-19;
  • criminology and the fear of crime;
  • literary history.

Plus, we feature Professor Roger Markwick’s plans to digitise unique and valuable interviews with revisionist Soviet historians.

Historians reveal little known histories of the Spanish Flu

Two Centre for 21st Century Humanities historians have delved into different aspects of the Spanish Flu pandemic, revealing little known histories which have become even more pertinent during the COVID-19 crisis.

The 1918-19 pneumonic influenza pandemic, or ‘Spanish Flu’ was the most severe pandemic of the 20th Century. It arrived in Australia in 1918 and about a third of all Australians were infected and nearly 15,000 people died from it. Associate Professor Nancy Cushing and Dr Kate Ariotti were two of five academics to deliver online presentations on the Spanish Flu for the History Council NSW’s ‘The History Effect’ series of seminars.

Nancy’s presentation focused on the scheme of universal inoculation designed to reduce the deadliness of the disease and Kate’s presentation highlighted how the pandemic coincided with the end of the First World War and compounded the devastation of years of fighting. She highlights how soldiers were forced to quaratine on their return to Australia, such as the soldiers with face masks pictured above marching into the Sydney Cricket Ground in February 1919, ready for quarantine.

Read more...

Youth Sociology book helps understand youth pressures of today

Youth is a key period of transition with many challenges and issues for young people to contend with. A new book co-authored by youth sociologist Dr Julia Coffey titled Youth Sociology helps break down and understand the pressures on youth today.

Julia with her co-authors Alan France, Steven Roberts, and Catherine Waite, help to define and make sense of the tumultuous period known as ‘youth’ through the lens of sociology, examining young people’s histories, environments, culture and social location to help understand their decisions and identities.

From the pressures created by social media to the increasing precarity of employment, the book unpacks the major social, cultural and economic developments of our time that are impacting this period of life in myriad ways.

Julia said the casualised and precarious youth labour market is one of the largest points of difference for the current generation of youth, compared to previous generations.

“Their working lives, and expectations of work and life, are forged in conditions where the full-time labour market is almost non-existent compared to their parents’ generation. Increased global mobilities – before COVID-19, at least – also comprised huge cultural and social shifts in the lives of young people,” she said.

Book Review

“This is an important new book for all those interested in understanding the lives of young people and the changing social situation of youth. Written by expert scholars, and with a global perspective, the book provides an authoritative, wide-ranging, carefully-curated and accessible introduction to youth sociology. It will be of enormous value to researchers, teachers and students. – Robert MacDonald, University of Huddersfield, UK.

Read more...

Will bushfire smoke exposure make people more vulnerable to COVID-19?

Environmental historian Associate Professor Nancy Cushing has long been interested in the history of air pollution, particularly in the once heavily polluted Newcastle. So when the bushfires ravaged New South Wales in late 2019/early 2020 and many people were talking about the level of smoke and bushfire as unprecedented, she wanted to see if that was actually the case.

Through her research Nancy found that the urban air pollution from the bushfire smoke was unprecedented. She talks about this in her episode in the Our Human Experience podcast series and also penned an article published in January in The Conversation about it.

In her history seminar series paper from March this year Nancy hypothesised based on what she had read in the medical literature that long term exposure to high levels of air pollution had left people in Wuhan, China, more vulnerable to respiratory infections like COVID-19.

“It was not that air pollution caused the disease but that it could have been one of the factors that made it emerge so strongly in Wuhan rather than elsewhere.”

Nancy questioned in March whether air pollution exposure would similarly leave our population more vulnerable to coronavirus and she has been very pleased to see that so far, this seems not to be the case.

Overseas, however, various studies are finding a link between poor air quality and greater severity of COVID-19.

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Research highlights importance of collective efficacy in mitigating community fears

Criminologist Dr Justin Ellis has recently published a co-authored journal article on research into the level of fear of crime in inner city Sydney. The results of the study found that less than half of the participants worry about crime but that a sizable minority (13%) indicated that they have some worry about a category of crime every week of the year or more.

The importance of collective efficacy (the neighbourhood’s ability to maintain order in public spaces such as streets, footpaths and parks) was also highlighted in the research and shows how important it is for communities to pull together in times of crisis to mitigate fear.

“The key causal mechanism in collective efficacy theory is social control enacted under conditions of social trust. When a community has shared expectations for action and residents trust that their neighbours will take action when required, their level of fear is lowered,” Justin said.

“This is particularly relevant information now with the COVID-19 crisis where we are depending upon the community at large to take action on the government’s health advice in order to get through the crisis with minimal deaths.”

Read more...

A sonnet a day keeps isolation boredom away

Centre member and literary historian, Dr Erin McCarthy who has twice been a guest lecturer on the Text and Transmission MA at Kings College London, contributed a video to their 'sonnet a day' project recently. She read a sonnet from the collection of The Passionate Pilgrim (1599).

The publisher William Jaddard attributed all 20 pieces to Shakespeare but most are considered inauthentic today. In this sonnet Venus falls down and Adonis runs away and we get the excellent phrase ‘tender nibbler’!

Watch the video...

Roger Markwick, Conjoint Professor of Modern European History

Roger Markwick, Conjoint Professor of Modern European History, retired from The University of Newcastle (UON) in December 2018, after nearly 18 years teaching and researching History in the School of Humanities and Social Science, which he led for more than four years as Head of School (2011-2015).

Not content to just cycle off into the sunset (his retirement hobby), Professor Markwick has lost none of his passion for history or the humanities in general. He takes particular delight in supervising research students, which he continues to do. Among his proudest achievements he counts being Principal Supervisor of Dr Troy Saxby’s PhD thesis on the African-American activist Pauli Murray (1910–1985), the basis of Dr Saxby’s book published in March 2020 by University of North Carolina Press: Pauli Murray. A Personal and Political Life. ‘With the worldwide upsurge of #BlackLives Matter,’ Prof. Markwick notes, ‘this is a very timely book.’ 

Such an observation is in keeping with Prof. Markwick’s particular interest in the political role historical writing can play in fuelling national mythologies or in counter-acting them. In his case, this perspective has informed his own research expertise in Russian and Soviet history and historiography, notably his monograph Rewriting History in Soviet Russia: The Politics of Revisionist Historiography in the Soviet Union, 1956–1974 (Palgrave-McMillan, 2001), which won the 2003 Alexander Nove Prize in Russian, Soviet and Post-Soviet Studies.

A founding member of what is now called The Centre for the Study of Violence at UON, Prof. Markwick has turned his attention to the apocalyptic war between Stalin’s Soviet Union and Hitler’s Nazi Germany with a particular focus on the largely neglected role of Soviet women. Funded by three ARC Discovery grants (2002, 2004, 2011), he co-authored, with Dr. Euridice Charon Cardona, Soviet Women on the Frontline in the Second World War (Palgrave-McMillan 2012), which was shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s History Awards. More recently he co-edited, with Prof. Dr. Beate Fieseler (Heinrich-Heine University, Dusseldorf), a Russian-language book of essays: Everyday War: Exploring the Soviet Home Front, 1941-45 (Moscow, 2019). This has since been followed by a special issue of Europe-Asia Studies (2019), co-edited with Prof. Graeme Gill (University of Sydney),:The Russian Revolution and Stalinism’.

Prof. Markwick is now thinking about how his archive-based research can engage with the digital humanities. In this regard, he is exploring the possibilities of housing, under the auspices of the Centre for 21st Century Humanities, digital transcripts of his unique interviews with the distinguished revisionist Soviet historians who featured in his Rewriting History in Soviet Russia. On 25 May this year, he took a step in this direction when he participated in a Facebook discussion on the black comedic film ‘The Death of Stalin’, hosted by the Australian Centre for Public History (UTS).