School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Research Publications
Permanent URI for this collection
Search Results
1 - 10 of 1043
-
ItemSay her name: Madge Donohoe and the promise and problems of using Trove to write Australian suffrage histories(Informa UK Limited, 2021-01-01)Like most middle-ranking suffragists, the Sydney schoolteacher Madge Donohoe is largely invisible in Australian historiography. Until widespread newspaper digitisation, the task of uncovering her name, let alone tracing her rise from Kogarah Girls’ School to the British National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies’ executive committee, would have been unimaginable. In this paper, I outline how Trove has enriched Australian feminist histories from the suffrage era (1890–1910). Yet, as indispensable as it has become, new histories relying on newspapers to vividly retell the suffragists’ stories also reveal the database’s distorting effects, not least the absence of the vibrant women’s advocacy press from its collections. Trove, I argue, affords vital new points of entry into lives like Donohoe’s but, without careful interrogation, risks privileging the pressman’s gaze above understanding the quotidian realities of feminist activism.
-
Item"Woman as Wife, Mother, and Home-Maker": Equal Rights International and Australian Feminists' Interwar Advocacy for Mothers' Economic Rights(The University of Chicago Press, 2022)The reconsideration of wages for housework, among the most maligned strands of women’s liberation in the 1970s, has provoked vital debates about gender, care work, and the problem of accounting for reproductive labor. Yet such discussions typically ignore the campaign’s roots in first-wave feminism. In examining Australian journalist Linda Littlejohn’s tenure as chair of Equal Rights International (ERI; 1934–41), a lobby group often cast as the vanguard of legal equality feminism in interwar Geneva, this article explores its surprising role in spreading Antipodean ideas about the “money value” of “home work” through the League of Nations. In doing so, it first historicizes the contentious forty-year struggle to recognize women’s domestic labor in Australasia. Shifting from Sydney to Switzerland, it traces the international circulations that allowed Littlejohn and her allies in the United Associations of Women to redirect ERI away from its founders’ concern with an equal rights treaty and toward a brand of feminism constructed around the recognition of difference in the home and equality in economic and political life. Reading ERI through the lens of Littlejohn’s years as chair, I contend, not only complicates binaries between equality and difference within international interwar feminism, revealing a messier and less centralized history of feminist ideology, it also enriches our understanding of ongoing struggles to illuminate and compensate reproductive labor.
-
ItemDegradation profiles of silk textiles in diverse environments: Synchrotron based infrared micro-spectroscopy analysis(Springer, 2017)In this paper, synchrotron based infrared micro-spectroscopy was utilized to describe the degradation profile of fibroin contained in silk textiles (Bombyx mori). The spatial distributions of deterioration effects in silk samples artificially aged at an assortment of conditions (thermal, hydrolytic and ultraviolet) were distinctly visualised and in accordance with the findings from conventional infrared spectroscopy in references. Further this method was applied on a historic sample from a private collection in Melbourne, and presented consistent results. This established synchrotron IR chemical mapping method could enable museum professionals to better understand the preservation state of historic silk and make informed decisions for conservation.
-
ItemExploring the Outlands: A Case-Study on the Conservation Installation and Artist Interview of David Haines’ and Joyce Hinterding’s Time-Based Art Installation(Taylor and Francis Group, 2021)The artwork by David Haines and Joyce Hinterding, The outlands, 2011 is a time-based art installation composed of sculptural, software and gaming technology exhibited in a gallery space. The work was acquired by the Art Gallery of New South Wales after being awarded the 2011 Anne Landa Award Unguided Tours exhibition prize but has not been installed since. As such, any future iterations will be challenging due to its condition, functionality and machine dependency. This paper explores the value of installing Haines’ and Hinterding’s time-based art installation to chart the conservation assessment processes of documentation, functionality testing and the install itself. It discusses how in-situ artist interview affords artistic agency and contributes knowledge on the materials, conceptual and technical elements of the work, functional limitations and its future conservation management. The outcomes of the conservation interactions have allowed for a deeper understanding of conservation as a reiterative process as issues of software and hardware dependencies, and the situated and spatial relationships between various elements became more salient. This has assisted conservators in preparing for object obsolescence and aims to support future re-activations of The outlands, 2011.
-
ItemBronzino's portrait of Cosimo I de'Medici in armour re-examined(Burlington Magazine Publications, 2023-01)Technical analysis by the Art Gallery of New South Wales of its portrait by Bronzino of Cosimo I de’ Medici in armour has revealed more details of the mysterious underlying portrait first observed in a X-radiograph in the 1980s. It has also established that Bronzino hesitated between making the portrait half-length or three-quarter-length, confirming that the painting is the prime autograph version of the three-quarter-length image.
-
ItemLaw and Order Under La Trobe: The First Prisons of Port Phillip(The La Trobe Society, 2023)
-
ItemCultural responses to the migration of the barn swallow in Europe(ANU Press, 2019-05-09)This paper investigates the place of barn swallows in European folklore and science from the Bronze Age to the nineteenth century. It takes the swallow’s natural migratory patterns as a starting point, and investigates how different cultural groups across this period have responded to the bird’s departure in autumn and its subsequent return every spring. While my analysis is focused on classical European texts, including scientifc and theological writings, I have also considered the swallow’s representation in art. The aim of this article is to build a longue durée account of how beliefs about the swallow have evolved over time, even as the bird’s migratory patterns have remained the same. As I argue, the influence of classical texts on medieval and Renaissance thought in Europe allows us to consider a temporal progression (and sometimes regression) in the way barn swallow migration was explained and understood.
-
ItemTracing Breton footprints from Fleury to Reims: the codicological evidence for the exegetical compilation in Orléans 182 and Reims 395(CNRS Éditions, 2023)The focus of this article is a compilation of biblical exegesis, here entitled Glossae Floriacenses in Vetus et Nouum Testamentum, that ranges from short explanatory glosses to more extensive passages of interpretation, and also incorporates two independent works in their entirety: Adrevald of Fleury’s De benedictionibus patriarcharum and the Venerable Bede’s Nomina regionum atque locorum de Actibus apostolorum. The Glossae Floriacenses also preserve multiple layers of Old Breton glosses (main text, interlinear, marginal additions), as well as several Old English glosses. This dynamic work survives in two codices, Orléans, Médiathèque, MS 183, and Reims, Bibliothèque municipale, MS 395. The methodology employed here involves a detailed survey of these codicological contexts in order to expand our understanding of the transmission and use of the Glossae Floriacenses. In the case of Orléans 182, there is strong evidence for Fleury as the provenance of the codex as a whole, but this analysis also evidences substantial interactions with nearby regions, particularly Brittany and Auxerre. In the case of Reims 395, several manuscript in the codex date to the eleventh century, and include the Glossae Floriacenses, Odo of Cluny’s Sermo de sancto Benedicto, and a range of works dedicated to the celebration of Mary Magdalene. This grouping indicates links of transmission between a number of Loire Valley and Burgundy regions, particularly Brittany, Fleury, Cluny, Auxerre, and Vézelay.
-
ItemSearching for the potters behind the pots: re-examining the Tell Ahmar Neo-Assyrian ceramic assemblage(The Australian Institute of Archaeology, 2023)Ceramic studies have been crucial to the development of archaeology. This paper is concerned with a re-examination of the pottery, and the potters, of Tell Ahmar (ancient Til Barsib), Syria. It focuses on the ceramics from the Australian excavations in the Middle City (Area C), especially the more than 250,000 items from the 7th-century BCE Neo-Assyrian Stratum 2. The Stratum 2 assemblage was readily grouped into seventeen ware types. The various wares reflect different production systems: some hand-made products were manufactured locally, possibly by individual households; other wares, characterised by high rates of uniformity, were probably produced by large-scale, centralised pottery industries; another ware group exhibits considerable investment in the application of different surface treatments, indicating specific uses. The Area C assemblage provides a rare opportunity to examine a large and relatively complete well-dated corpus. Observations and explanations relating to the technology of preparing, forming, decorating, and firing these ceramic vessels casts light on the circumstances of their manufacture and, in turn, on the potters behind the pots of the Neo-Assyrian Empire.
-
ItemNo Preview AvailableSaint Catherine and the Clock: Possible Histories of Sound and Time in Fourteenth-and Fifteenth-Century France(University of Chicago Press, 2023-10-01)