Past events
Teaching and Learning Day - 2019
Activity
The College of Arts & Social Sciences (CASS) Teaching and Learning Day is an event to celebrate good teaching practices within the College. This year, the theme is student engagement which will focus on interactive learning strategies and technologies. ORGANISERS Frederick Chew, College of…
Books that Changed Humanity: Encyclopédie
Lecture
Books that Changed Humanity is an initiative of the Humanities Research Centre, based at the Australian National University. The HRC invites experts to introduce and lead discussion of major texts from a variety of cultural traditions, all of which have informed the way we understand ourselves both…
Ape social systems and the extended evolutionary synthesis
Seminar
The superfamily Hominoidea is characterised by several distinctions including varied patterns of complex social arrangements that extend beyond relatives, beyond sociosexual relationships, and beyond the immediate social group. In addition, our understanding of intraspecific variation suggests an…
‘Only Happiness Here’: The Life and Work of Elizabeth von Arnim
Seminar
Born in Australia in 1866 as Mary Beauchamp, Elizabeth von Arnim was the author of 21 best-selling novels, a lover of H.G. Wells, a Prussian Countess and the wife—for a short time—of Francis Russell, brother of Bertrand. She was also Katherine Mansfield’s cousin and the two writers had an intense,…
“O, they are firing squibs”: Responses to Assassination Attempts on British Royalty, 1800 – 1900
Seminar
Assassinations or attempted assassinations are archetypal moments of crisis, but they have only rarely been given sustained and systematic attention by historians. This paper focuses on a series of attempts to assassinate members of the British royal family: James Hadfield’s attempt on George III…
China, Russia, and global order
Lecture
The world is undergoing an extraordinary transformation. The liberal order is in crisis, and the very idea of a rules-based international system has become discredited. China and Russia, and their strategic partnership, are widely blamed for this state of anarchy. But is their partnership as close…
Crisis Diverted: A Sociological Study of the Handling of Public Crises
Seminar
This paper explores how contemporary UK public crises are framed and managed, paying particular attention to their tendency to calcify. The dominant sociological view is that we have too many public crises. I want to suggest an altogether different problem, namely that too few public crises are…