Destabilising Human Embodiment: Prostheses, Biotechnologies and Assemblages
Seminar
In the era of postmodernity, issues of bodies and biotechnologies increasingly challenge not only the normative performance of the human subject, but also the very boundaries of what counts as human. Where in the past, the term prosthesis intended some material object that compensated for a…
Conversations Across the Creek | Habitecture and Digital Nature: Design for Biodiversity
Seminar
Conversations Across the Creek is an initiative by the Humanities Research Centre (HRC) and the Research School of Chemistry (RSC) to provide a space for continuing dialogue among scientists, social scientists, and humanities scholars. Meetings are held monthly, with the…
Public Lecture | The Wedge Collection and the Conundrum of Humane Colonisation
Lecture
Surveyor John Helder Wedge collected Indigenous artefacts at the close of the Van Diemen's Land 'Black War' and the first months of settlement in Port Phillip in 1835. They remain in Saffron Walden Museum in Essex. It has been suggested that Wedge sought the artefacts out of a rare ‘…
Books that Changed Humanity: The Story of the Stone/Dream of the Red Chamber
Seminar
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…
Seminar | An Australian Republic and the Politics of Hope
Seminar
Where to now for Australian republicans? Nearly two decades on from the demoralising referendum defeat in 1999, the republican flame is being rekindled and Bill Shorten has committed to a plebiscite on the issue if he wins office. Can the mistakes from the 1990s campaign be avoided this time…
Seminar | “Two millions of De Quinceys created in China”: Thomas De Quincey, the Opium and China Case, and Debate on the First Opium War 1840-42
Seminar
This paper will explore the moment of the outbreak of the First Opium War between Britain and Qing China from 1839-1840. It is concerned with Romantic politics in the both the larger conceptual sense of the relation of Romantic period writers to what we think of as organic nationalism, or indeed,…
Satire and the Public Emotions, or What Does Satire Actually Do?
Seminar
‘“Poetry makes nothing happen” (W.H. Auden, “In Memory of W. B. Yeats”, 1940): what if this is also true of satire? Satire is the most obviously worldly of artistic modes, commenting directly on current events and people. When we read or view a really good piece of satire, we are confident that its…