Books that Changed Humanity: Oxford English Dictionary
Lecture
The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) is one of the foremost English-language reference works in the world. First conceived of as a project in 1857, the first fascicle of the first edition (A-ant) was published in 1884. The first edition was only completed in 1928. Today the OED is online, ever…
Works that Shaped the World: Charles E Rosenberg’s The Cholera Years (1962) and the Family Resemblances of Pandemics
Lecture
The crisis of the COVID-19 pandemic has flushed out a gaggle of historians of medicine, all of us eager to read the lessons of history or, alternatively, make preliminary sketches for a history of the present. What do the various modes of historical analysis have to contribute to understanding our…
Books that Changed Humanity: The Qur’an
Seminar
Few books have changed humanity as much as the Qur’an, the sacred scripture of Muslims. In this public lecture, Dr Hakan Çoruh of Charles Sturt University will offer an introduction and overview of the Qur’an, and discuss modern interpretations and contemporary hermeneutics. Dr Hakan Çoruh is a…
‘Every Station Open to All’? Mechanics’ Institutes on the Victorian Goldfields
Seminar
During his speech at the Ballaarat Mechanics’ Institute’s soirée in 1862, Richard Heales captured the sense of the mechanics’ institute as a symbol of home when he argued that ‘nothing bound us to the old country like its institutions, and what would bind us to the new country [but] institutions…
Noir/horror: Reconsidering the “woman question” in mid-twentieth-century American popular fiction and cinema
Seminar
Writing in 1946, Frankfurt School critic Siegfried Kracauer expressed dismay in response to what he saw as a new vogue for ‘horror sheerly for the sake of entertainment’ in Hollywood—on display, he argued, in films like Robert Siodmak’s The Spiral Staircase (released the same year) and Alfred…
Books that Changed Humanity: “Govardhanram Tripathi’s Saraswatichandra”
Lecture
Published in serialised form between 1887 and 1901, Govardhanram Tripathi’s four-volume text was written during a transformative period in colonial India when new systems and social structures were being put in place. A canonical text in modern Indian literature, Saraswatichandra captured public…
Works that Shaped the World: No single story: Medical Humanities from the Parallel Chart to Performance Art
Lecture
Following the inspiration of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, this presentation explores the multiple history of the Medical Humanities, selecting three moments in this history to consider whether, and if so, how, the Medical Humanities have changed Medicine. Beginning in late 1978 with the…