Keynote Speaker and Plenary Speakers

• Keynote Speaker : Professor Sir Christopher Bayly

• ’Distant Connections: Empire, Race and Nationality in India and Australia’

Professor Bayly is Vere Harmsworth Professor of Imperial and Naval History, University of Cambridge, author of a number of books including The Birth of the Modern World: Global Connections and Comparisons 1780-1914 (2004) and most recently Recovering Liberties: Indian Thought in the Age of Liberalism and Empire (2011).

• Opening Plenary Panel: ‘Australian History in its Asian Contexts’
  

• This panel will offer different perspectives on the ways in which research on Australian historical connections with Asia – in all its diversity – is transforming our understanding of Australian history. In announcing the new Australian curriculum for schools, ACARA specified three cross-curriculum priorities that should guide the development of the curriculum in all subjects including Australian history. One priority is ‘Asia and Australia’s engagement with Asia’, an orientation that has increasingly captured the imagination of some of our most innovative historians, whose focus on Australia in its regional context challenges the idea of Australia as an imperial outpost bounded by a British world.

• The panel, comprising historians working at all levels of the profession will talk about the research questions that guided their investigations, their new understandings of Australian history and the challenges, including linguistic ones, they have encountered along the way.

• Speakers: Ms Sophie Loy-Wilson ( University of Sydney), Dr Agnieszka Sobocinska (Monash University), Dr Julia Martinez ( University of Wollongong).

• Discussant: Professor David Walker (Deakin University)

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• Plenary Panel: Big Questions in Australian History

  ‘Writing National Histories in Transnational Times’

• This conversation brings together some of the world’s leading practitioners of national history, imperial history, and global history. It is prompted by the commissioning of a New National History of Australia by Cambridge University Press. The august tradition of Cambridge National Histories was invented in another era when history was the nation. The New National History Series, by contrast, emerges at a time when the discipline is deeply engaged with transnationalism, internationalism, and globalization. Productively incorporating these insights into a genre built from different assumptions is an intellectually challenging exercise. What have our transnational times done to “the new national history” idea? What might the challenge of a 2 volume “New History of Australia” offer to our transnational times? And is there something about the substance and the style of Australian history specifically, that invites these questions?  In conversation, professors here will be asked to reflect on their long experience and engagements with nations and history.

• Sponsored by the Harvard University Australian Studies Committee

• Panellists: Professor David Armitage, Lloyd C. Blankfein Professor of History and Chair of the Department of History, Harvard University; Professor Sir Christopher Bayly, Vere Harmsworth Professor of Imperial and Naval History, University of Cambridge; Professor Joyce Chaplin, James Duncan Phillips Professor of Early American History, Harvard University; Professor Ann Curthoys, ARC Professorial Fellow in History at the University of Sydney; Professor Stuart Macintyre, Ernest Scott Professor of History and ARC Professorial Fellow in History at the University of Melbourne.

  Moderator: Professor Alison Bashford, Professor of Modern History, University of Sydney.