Arts Faculty News

Dr Paul Watt has been awarded £500 by the Music & Letters Trust (UK) to aid his research into the musical life of Alexandra Palace in the late nineteenth century. Funds will pay for the costs of copying archival material at Bruce Castle and at the British Library. Affectionately known today as ‘Ally Pally’, Alexandra Palace was first built in 1873 (it burnt down within weeks of opening) but was quickly re-built within two years. It was home to many musical activities for all social classes. Dr Watt’s project is the first to study the palace’s musical culture in the first decade of its operation.

Celine Foenander, compere with ABC Gippsland Radio, refers to reports in the Melbourne papers that the Australian Hotels Association (AHA) have made a submission to the Federal Government inquiry into youth violence.  (The Age: Many ingredients make this gen Y cocktail of violence, 5/2/10; ‘Video generation’ under fire for hotel violence, 4/2/10) The AHA stated that rates of violence in pubs had not increased, but that attacks had become more vicious. The AHA attributed to increase in viciousness to Generation Y being raised on TV violence and video games.

Dr Andy Ruddock, Lecturer in Communication and Media, says numerous studies have displayed a link between violent videogames and short term rises in aggression. However, there is no defined link between videogame use and real world violence. He says surveys actually suggest that violent films are more likely to create fear and violence avoidance in viewers. He says increased violence is linked with an overall societal trend and drinking practices. He says videogames clearly create a culture of masculinity, but says the current issue is related to drinking practices.

View Dr Andy Ruddock’s staff profile.

Dr Therese Davis, from Film and TV Studies, has received the Ivan Hutchinson Award for Writing on Australian Film. The award is for feature-essay writing on an Australian film and given by the Australian Film Critics Association (AFCA).

The award was given for  Loving Samson & Delilah, an essay on Samson and Delilah (Warwick Thornton, 2009). An edited version of Loving Samson & Delilah is available on the AFCA website.

View Dr Therese Davis’ staff profile.

Visit the AFCA website.

Visit the Samson & Delilah website.

To Deprave and Corrupt: Forbidden, Hidden and Censored Books will be held in Melbourne, Australia on 14–16 July 2010. Keynote speakers will include:

Prof Jenny Hocking (Monash University), author of Frank Hardy: Politics Literature Life (2005) and Terror Laws: ASIO, Counter-terrorism and the Threat to Democracy (2004)

Call for Papers

• Manuscript, Print and Digital Publications
• Legal, Religious and Cultural Prohibitions
• Histories, Modes and Strategies of Textual Censorship and Subversion
• Immoral, Blasphemous and Seditious Books
• Clandestine and Self-publication, Underground Distribution and Resistant Archiving
• The Cultural Politics of Editing, Publishing, Retailing and Cataloguing

Books have long attracted an array of legal, religious and cultural prohibitions.

Most spectacularly, specific books have been decried, seized and publicly destroyed by state and religious institutions. Liberal-minded scholars have tended to focus on the trials surrounding celebrated books, from Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928) to Spycatcher (1987), as unjustifiable encroachments on authorial free speech. Likewise, there is a long history of conflict over the availability and matter of children’s and young adult literature, with schools and libraries regularly responding to public debates on moral, social and political content, including campaigns over allegedly sexist and racist content in Enid Blyton’s work and occult themes in the Harry Potter (1999-2007) and Twilight (2005–8) series. The status, content and possible influence of comics and graphic novels remain a lightning-rod for deep-seated cultural anxieties, in both children’s and adult markets. But 21st-century prohibitions also extend well beyond fiction genres, with anti-terrorism legislation and bans on euthanasia criminalising possession and sale of specific ‘how-to’ handbooks, or even their consultation in academic research libraries.

More pervasively, books have been subject to textual interventions that effect censorship by comparatively subtle means, through omissions, excisions and selective glossing, the creation of ‘school’ and ‘family’ editions, and by the addition of tendentious paratextual apparatus. There is also a wide variety of mechanisms by which certain books become hidden—by denying state cultural subsidies to the authors of ‘unfashionable’ subjects, allowing texts to drop out of print, remain un-reviewed or academically neglected. Publishers, librarians and readers may themselves actively collude in such obscuring practices: through misleading cover-designs and blurbs, skewed marketing and publicity campaigns, inaccurate cataloguing, creating restrictive ‘closed collections’, or through the deliberate mis-shelving of books by library patrons.

But in a world of textual abundance, and with the growing penetration of algorithmic search-engines, can any book remain hidden for long? As the legal jurisdiction of the nation-state struggles to combat piracy and grass-roots file-sharing, as individual activist and corporate mass-scanning projects deliver prohibited texts virtually, and online book retailers offer an ever-growing ‘long tail’ of globally-sourced book titles, strategies for both prohibiting and evading prohibition are clearly in a critical state of flux.

The Bibliographical Society of Australia and New Zealand, The Centre for the Book at Monash University, and The Wheeler Centre for Books, Writing and Ideas at The State Library of Victoria invite proposals considering examples of forbidden, hidden and censored books (conceived broadly) and the issues that stem from them.

Submission Deadline

Abstracts are sought for both individual papers (20 minutes) and themed panel sessions (3 x 20 minute papers). Please email prospective paper titles, 300-word proposals and 50-word presenter bio-notes by Friday 26 February 2010 to BSANZ2010@arts.monash.edu.au.

Postgraduate Travel Bursaries

A limited number of postgraduate travel bursaries will be available to students submitting the best abstracts, as judged by the BSANZ2010 organising committee. Please indicate when submitting your abstract that you wish to be considered for a travel bursary. If you have already submitted an abstract and wish to be considered for a student bursary, please advise the BSANZ 2010 organising committee by sending an email to BSANZ2010@arts.monash.edu.au.

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This conference is produced by Bibliographical Society of Australia and New Zealand, the Centre for the Book at Monash University, and the Wheeler Centre for Books, Writing and Ideas at The State Library of Victoria.

The Vietnam Inheritance: Cultural, social and political legacies of the Vietnam War in Australia

An Interdisciplinary Symposium marking the 35th anniversary of the end of the war

29 & 30 April 2010

Call for Papers

This symposium provides an opportunity for scholars from a range of disciplines to reflect on the impact of the war and its aftermath in Australia on the occasion of the 35th anniversary of its conclusion. In particular, we are interested in explorations of the cultural, social and political legacies of the war in Australia.

Topics which may be covered include:

• the legacy of the war on Australian media, journalism and reportage of war and other emergencies
• post-war Vietnamese migration to Australia and the Vietnamese diaspora
• the legacy of ‘boat people’ on the contemporary politics of asylum seeking in Australia
• the war and Australian culture (including Vietnamese-Australian cultural production)
• the legacy of the Saigon babylift on intercountry adoption to Australia
• the war and tourism
• the war and Australian geopolitics

Selected papers from this symposium will be published in an A-ranked journal.

Advice to Prospective Contributors

Abstracts of 200 words and brief author’s biographies to be submitted to Denise Cuthbert at denise.cuthbert@arts.monash.edu.au by Friday 26 February 2010.

Notice of inclusion in program by Monday 8 March 2010.

Authors wishing to have their work considered for publication should be in a position to submit full versions of papers promptly following the symposium. Details of submission dates and publication schedule to follow as soon as possible.

Further Information

The Vietnam Inheritance

Jointly convened by the School of Political and Social Inquiry and the School of English, Communications and Performance Studies, Faculty of Arts, Monash University.

Generously supported by the Office of the Campus Director, Caulfield Campus, Monash University

Performing Arts Building
Clayton Campus
Wellington Road
Monash University, Victoria

The School of Music – Conservatorium will host the first ever Australian conference devoted to British Music.

The conference welcomes papers exploring any aspect of British music and musical life in any period. Papers are particularly encouraged which discuss forgotten or less-explored repertoire and composers. Without limiting the remit of the conference, areas of investigation may include British writings about music, reception of British music abroad, ‘foreign’ composers resident in Britain, music broadcasting and concert life in Britain, and intersections between music and literature, politics, modernism, postmodernism, nationalism, and colonialism.

Although it is expected to draw mainly on scholars from the fields of musicology, history and cultural studies, the conference hopes to bring together delegates from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds.

Enquiries: Dr Paul Watt, paul.watt@arts.monash.edu.au.

More information is available on the School of Music site.

To coincide with Malthouse Theatre’s staging of the play Sappho…in 9 fragments, Monash University, the Victorian College of Arts and Music and the Australasian Classical Reception Studies Network are hosting a 3 day interdisciplinary conference on the relationship between performance and the Classics. The conference will bring together Classical scholarship, theatre studies, translation studies and cultural studies to investigate how performance manipulates and embodies our understanding of the classical world.

Using the figure of Sappho as a metaphor for the many gaps we have to fill as we grapple with the otherness of the ancient world, the conference will explore how readers, translators, performers and spectators endlessly recreate the Classics in our imaginations and our embodiments.

Call for Papers

Abstracts are invited for papers/presentations/performances exploring all aspects of the interrelationship between Ancient Greece and Rome and performance. Please note that, while papers on Sappho will be welcomed, the conference is in no way limited to Sappho scholarship, and papers on all aspects of performance and classical reception are invited.

Proposed panel topics currently include:

• Embodying the gaps in the mind’s eye: reading as performance
• Audience, affect, tragedy
• Rhythms of reception
• Acting reception: performance as a route to reception, or as reception in its own right?
• Who’s/Whose author? The multiple ‘authorship’ of adaptations of the Classics
• Weeping stones and bleeding shells: from Niobe to Hypatia
• Nationalism, translation, reception: Classics and cultural sensitivities
• Performance as Research/Research as Performance

The convenors welcome suggestions for other panels.

Please send your abstract to jane.griffiths@arts.monash.edu.au.

The deadline for submission of abstracts is Friday 26 March 2010.

Contributors will be advised of the outcome of their submission in late April.

Publication

Selected conference proceedings will be published.

Further Information

Further details about the conference can be found at Arts Events: ‘From Sappho to … X’: Classics, Performance, Reception.

Dr Keir Reeves from the National Centre for Australian Studies, together with Dr Jennifer Laing from the Tourism Research Unit, was also awarded best paper for “Exploring Issues of Authenticity With Respect to the Development of the Bendigo Chinese Heritage Precinct”. The award was presented at the 2nd UNESCO-ICCROM Asian Academy for Heritage Management Conference held in Macau in December 2009.

More about the Tourism program at the National Centre for Australian Studies.

Monash University PhD student Charlotte Baines has been elected the youngest female Mayor of the City of Monash, a local government area in south east Melbourne.

The 27-year-old Bachelor of Arts and Bachelor of Laws graduate is juggling her council commitments with completing a PhD in sociology in the School of Political and Social Inquiry.

Charlotte’s passion for youth affairs and finding solutions to community problems encouraged her to run for Council.  She has been elected to the role consecutively since first running in 2005.

She believes more young people need to be involved in civic life and in local decision-making processes.

“I think that life is really short and you don’t really know what’s around the corner so I’d rather do the things that I love to do as opposed to doing things that I’m only half hearted about,” she said.

“I really like being a leader but also believe in being a team player. I like to be in positions where I challenge myself, where I can use it as a vehicle to influence and make change but at the same time I want to grow with other people.

“I think the University has played a significant role in my thinking, challenging me to look at things from a variety of angles.

“My study has really opened my mind to debate, to be open to various sides, to know how to create reasoned argument, and to also to believe in the notion of collecting strong evidence to support your case.”

During her time on Council, Cr Baines has led the establishment of a Youth Advisory Committee, Monash History Week and was instrumental in Monash becoming a Fair Trade Community.

Eras is a fully-refereed, online  journal, produced by postgraduate students of the School of Historical Studies, Monash University.

View Eras Edition 11 online.