Historical Studies Funded Research
Current Research Grants
Australian Research Council Discovery Grants 2003-2009
A/Prof Bain Attwood
A matter of history: possession, colonialism and Batman's
treaties
Australia continues to be possessed by its dispossession of the Aboriginal owners of this country. Settler Australians declare the past is past but dispossession continues to be a matter of history in another sense. By considering the only treaty ever made between settlers and Aborigines, this research investigates why Aboriginal rights to land were denied by the governments in Australia, and what histories settlers and Aborigines have told to legitimise their rights to that land. Since the moral basis of any nation lies in true stories, this research seeks to advance a truer history than the ones we have.
Dr Marc Brodie
Transportation and transformation: How local conditions
changed traditional ideas into modern
Knowledge of how ideas make, and are changed by, their 'journey' from place to place and over time is vital for a better understanding of our region and the world. The focus in this study on the influences acting upon the development of attitudes can give us a new perspective on our similarities and differences with other postcolonial societies. This study, through its comparative work with Britain, will also provide a much clearer picture of the influences upon Australia's political and social development and allow us to understand more effectively how 'local' and 'imported' ideas have melded together to form our national characteristics.
Prof
Barbara Caine, Prof Ros Pesman and Dr Glenda Sluga
La Bella Liberta: Women, freedom and the History of Italy c1800-1940
By exploring the intersection between Italy and the lives of some prominent educated British women in the 19th and early 20th centuries this project offers innovative approaches to British history, to biography and to cultural history. By analysing the connection these women drew between their own desire for personal emancipation and Italian political developments and exploring their active interest in the history, culture, and politics of Italy this research will offer new insights into changing constructions of Italy, the intellectual life of the expatriate world there and the important role women played in representing Italy in the Anglophone world.
Dr
Emma Christopher
Australia's Black
Past: the shared history of transatlantic slave trading and convict
transportation to Africa and Australia
Every nation needs an understanding of its past‑the significance of this project is that it examines a part of Australia's history that is very little understood. European settlement of the continent was implemented at a time that ideas of race, and the relationship of skin colour to freedom, were altering significantly. These changes had a fundamental effect on the convict colony and the relationship of the early colonists with the aboriginal people. Only by gaining knowledge of how early racial interpretations were influenced by global events can Australia interpret her ever controversial racial history.
A/Prof
Ian Copland, Dr Ian Mabbett, Dr AB Roy and Mr MN Groves
Religion and governance in India, c.1000-2000 CE
This project will add significantly to the fund of Australian knowledge about the most important country in our region. It will feed into the continuing debate in this country on the proper balance between secularism and 'multiculturalism'. It will enhance our international scholarly reputation. By illuminating ways in which Indian governments have managed to mediate and contain social tensions produced by warring fundamentalisms, it will assist our policy-makers in identifying aspects of Australian communal life at risk of exploitation by zealots linked to overseas terrorist networks, thereby adding to our security.
Prof Graeme Davison,
A/Prof Renate Howe and Prof William Logan
Community and governance; Urban activism in Melbourne in the 1960s
and beyond
As the economy of Melbourne's central and inner areas has been transformed over the last three decades, conflicts over urban redevelopment have impacted significantly on governance, urban policies and inner city communities. By studying the new generation of activists attracted to Melbourne's working class suburbs in the 1960s, this project will push beyond gentrification interpretations of urban change to examine the motivations of activists and the process of forging participatory structures of governance and community partnerships. The project will assess the significance of this period of transition for managing urban development in the new millennium.
A/Prof David Garrioch
The growth of toleration in a cosmopolitan society:
Protestants in eighteenth-century Paris
In an international context in which religious conflict appears to be increasing, and an Australia where religious diversity is growing, understanding the historical and cultural roots of toleration is vital. This project will reinforce Australia's reputation for innovative and independent work in French and urban history, both areas where Australian scholars are well known internationally.
Dr
Michael Hau
High performance in elite
sports: A cultural history of medicine, psychology, and society during
the Weimar Republic and Nazism, 1918-1945
Australia has long had an excellent international reputation for innovative research on European history. This research project will expand that reputation by providing cutting-edge research into a new field that is just beginning to be developed. The project brings together research in sport with research into the history of science and medicine that will allow Australia to participate in major international debates in all of these fields. It examines the social and cultural significance of sports using Germany as a case study. A sports conscious and performance oriented society like Australia would certainly benefit from insights about the relationship between sports and performance management in a different time and place.
Dr
Carolyn James
Dynastic marriage, courtly
politics and the state in Renaissance Italy
The search for an understanding of the processes by which political ideas and cultural assumptions about masculinity and femininity change, and new genres of written expression emerge, is directly relevant to contemporary Australia. To study these themes in a period at once remote from one's own and yet, as the Italian Renaissance is, perennially fascinating to the public imagination, is to make an important contribution to our understanding of the historical roots of significant on-going debates.
Prof
Bill Kent
Lorenzo de Medici and Renaissance
Italy
By providing a scholarly study of Lorenzo de' Medici, and bringing to conclusion the critical edition of his correspondence (a collaborative enterprise by several eminent research institutions in the UK , USA and Italy), this project makes a major Australian contribution to a classic research field of high international prestige, and helps ensure the continued strength of teaching and research in Italian Renaissance and early modern European history in Australia. This period, and Lorenzo, continue to intrigue the general reading public throughout the world, and broadly to disseminate specialist research on these themes, as this project also proposes, is to contribute to the maintenance of a lively and critical contemporary culture.
Dr Constant Mews and Dr Karen Green
Peace, politics and love: Christine de Pizan and the political
thought of medieval women
The project aims to translate into English Christine de Pizan's 1412-14 work Le Livre de la Paix and to provide it with a scholarly introduction discussing the context of its production, its relationship to the political thought of other medieval political thinkers (both women and men) and its relevance for contemporary feminist political thought. It also aims to produce an edited volume of essays on de Pizan as a political thinker. The project will both illuminate an unjustly neglected political theorist and make available to English audiences a better appreciation of women's distinctive contribution to political theory.
Dr Constant Mews, Prof John
Crossley and Dr Carol Williams
Experience
versus authority: science, musical theory and observation in Grocheo's
De Musica and intellectual upheaval in the 13th century
The project will help break down disciplinary divisions between those interested in medieval musicology, the history of science and the history of ideas by bringing together specialists from all three domains. The production of an interdisciplinary monograph devoted to an upheaval in thinking in 13th century Europe, in which experience challenged arguments from authority, will deepen awareness of the interconnectedness of the musical, scientific and intellectual traditions inherited by Western culture. It will also encourage international recognition of the innovative capacity of Australian scholars to engage in interdisciplinary research, and provide an opportunity to nurture early career and postgraduate researchers within this country.
A/Prof Constant Mews, Dr
Karen Green and Dr Jan Pinder
Medieval
virtue ethics and the formation of the feminine moral subject: Jeanne
of Navarre to Marguerite of Navarre (1285-1550)
This research will generate fresh community awareness of the importance of teaching ethics in everyday rather than academic language, with a particular relevance to women, thus contributing to the national debate about what constitutes values education. By showing how famous women writers were not isolated individuals, but adapted an established tradition of communicating ethics to women, the research will contribute to contemporary debates about the relevance of the teaching of ethics. The project will develop further existing close connections between Australian scholars and researchers in both Europe and the USA.
Dr Maria Nugent
Blackfella historians: A Historical study of Aboriginal history making
in south-eastern Australia
Aboriginal people had not only to endure colonisation, but to make sense of it. This innovative study examines their deployment of history, focusing on south-eastern Australia in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It will explore the importance of history in the efforts made by Aborigines to explain their plight to non-Aborigines and to make sense of it for themselves. The project will offer major new insights into the role of history in shaping relations between Aborigines and non-Aborigines and will also enrich our understanding of history's political and cultural uses and its significance as a medium for cross-cultural communication.
Dr Seamus O'Hanlon and Prof Tony Dingle
De-industrialising and reinventing the inner city: A
tale of two cities, Melbourne and Geelong, c1970-2000
As a major study of the recent past, this project illuminates many aspects of Australia's contemporary urban experience. It investigates a number of current urban issues, previously the preserve of geographers, planners and economists and opens them to historical inquiry and insight. Utilising a number of previously untapped sources, the project expands our knowledge of the history of our cities, and of the history of urban youth cultures. The project enhances the international reputation of Australian scholars for producing innovative studies of the urban past. By training a PhD student in urban history, the project transmits this reputation to a new generation of scholars.