The Inaugural Ken Inglis Memorial Lecture

The Inaugural Ken Inglis Memorial Lecture

All the Things We Cannot See:The Dunera story and the challenge of visual history

Presented by Jay Winter - Professor of History, Yale University

(Music: Driven To Success by Scott Holmes CC-BY-NC)

Dunera Lives posited that visual material is the archival text out of which the narrative emerges. Following W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz, this approach to historical writing entails traps as well as opportunities. What is there in the Dunera story that is either left out or expressed in ambiguous ways by adopting a visual approach? This lecture offers a modest assessment of what historians can know and what they cannot know through an exclusively visual approach to narrating the past.

About the speaker

Jay Winter is the Charles J. Stille Professor of History Emeritus at Yale University. He is a specialist on World War I and its impact on the 20th century. Previously, Winter taught at Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the University of Warwick, the University of Cambridge, and Columbia University. In 2001, he joined the faculty of Yale.

Winter is the author or co-author of 25 books, including most recently, War Beyond Words: Languages of Remembrance from the Great War to the Present. In addition he has edited or co-edited 30 books and contributed 130 book chapters to edited volumes. Winter was also co-producer, co-writer, and chief historian for the PBS/BBC series The Great War and the Shaping of the 20th Century, which won an Emmy Award, a Peabody Award and a Producers Guild of America Award for best television documentary in 1997. He has received honorary doctorates from the University of Graz, the University of Leuven, and the University of Paris.

About the lecture series

This inaugural lecture honours the life and work of Kenneth Stanley Inglis, AO, distinguished Australian historian, who passed away on 1st December 2017. After completing an MA at the University of Melbourne and a PhD at Oxford, Ken spent the major part of his career at the ANU. Future lectures in the series will alternate annually between the ANU and the University of Melbourne.