School of History

Over 221 years ago, on 15 December 1803, having no charts of Mauritius and only information gleaned from the Encyclopaedia Britannica (lent by Sir Joseph Banks), Captain Matthew Flinders put in at Baie du Cap in the French colony of Mauritius, unaware that war had broken out between France and England. Arguably the greatest cartographer of his generation was to be detained subsequently for nearly seven years.

This Roundtable brings together key researchers who shaped the seven-year ARC Kathleen Fitzpatrick Laureate Program ‘Rediscovering the Deep Human Past: Global Networks, Future Opportunities’ at the Research Centre for Deep History led by Professor Ann McGrath AM. Defying our interest in critiquing boundary-enforcing periodisations, this gathering will track where we are at this very specific ‘end-time’. Where have we journeyed, intellectually and physically? What new directions might be mapped out for the future? If indeed, deep history has a future…

This Symposium marks the end of the Research Centre for Deep History and the seven-year ARC Kathleen Fitzpatrick Laureate Program ‘Rediscovering the Deep Human Past: Global Networks, Future Opportunities’, led by Professor Ann McGrath AM and a talented team based at the Australian National University. Defying our interest in critiquing periodisation and its approaches to temporality, this gathering will track where we are at this very specific ‘end-time’. Where have we journeyed, intellectually and physically? What new directions might be mapped out for the future?

The panel explores opportunities and barriers for Indigenous women to ‘take back’ their stories, and seeks to foster ongoing conversations, and spark new discussions, about Indigenous women’s family history research.

The Research Centre for Deep History’s Indigenous Family History Research Residency has been developed to create ways to overcome some of the barriers to such research. These include limited time, limited archival access exacerbated by geographic distance, and limits caused by the complexity of institutional catalogues, processes and protocols.

The event is a one-day workshop entitled “Women, Gender and Violence from Antiquity to the Middle Ages.” It will bring together scholars working at ANU and other institutions in Australasia to present research papers investigating women’s experiences of gender-based violence in different contexts, particularly in the political, domestic, legal, and ecclesiastical spheres.

In this webinar event, Dr Mike O'Sullivan (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) examines the varieties of, and challenges to, Muslim private banking in colonial and postcolonial South Asia.

Distinguished History Professor, Ann McGrath AM has been appointed as a member of the National Museum of Australia Council for a three-year term. Professor Clare Wright OAM has been announced as the new Chair of the Council, alongside new members Professor Megan Davis and Ms. Janine Freeman.

In his 1995 study of history, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History, Michel-Rolph Trouillot insisted on the need to recognise the discipline’s power to curate and control. Critical, structural analysis of history-making would expose not only the past under examination, he contended, but the form and function of the discipline over time: what ‘history is changing with time and place’, such that ‘history reveals itself only through the production of such narratives’.

EP Thompson (1924-1993) was one of the great British historians of the past century. His work reshaped our thinking about the relationship between law and society. His classic texts, such as The Making of the English Working Class and Whigs and Hunters not only transformed eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English history, but pioneered methods and approaches that continue to influence social, political, and legal historians around the world.

The ANU School of History is pleased to host the 2022 Allan Martin Lecture with keynote speaker Professor Sheila Fitzpatrick.

A century after the Soviet Union’s unexpected arrival in the world, and 30 years after its unexpected departure, it’s time to look back on this remarkable episode of twentieth-century history and ask what it all meant – for Russia, its neighbours and the world.