School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Research Publications
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ItemNo Preview AvailableEsteban Villanueva’sThe Basi Revolt paintings of Ilocos: Unlocking their material evidence(National Museum of the Philippines, 2020-11-01)The series of fourteen works that comprise Esteban Villanueva’s The Basi Revolt is examined historically and physically to have a clear idea of the paintings’ material authenticity, particularly necessary for conservation treatment. Among the questions dealt with involved the production and authorship, the extent of variation of the surface and paint layers, as well as the pigment types across all fourteen works. As The Basi Revolt is a series that depicts an important historical event in the Philippines, the course of conservation needs to be assessed as a whole, to reinstate a unified visual narrative. Methods used to attempt to answer these involved the examination of available historical records and the use of reflected raking and ultra-violet lights, microscopic magnification, and elemental analysis. To have a much stronger evidence-based understanding of The Basi Revolt, as well as of other early 19th century paintings by Filipino artists, setting up a database of the range of materials available and used during that time is essential for their conservation.
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ItemSexual and Family Violence in Europe(Cambridge University Press, 2020-01-01)In early modern Europe the killing of spouses, children or servants was a serious crime, as was the physical or sexual abuse of them. Yet convictions for what today we would call ‘domestic violence’ were rare. This chapter will analyse the understandings of gender that underpinned attitudes towards intimate violence. Male heads of households, for instance, were entitled, indeed expected, to employ physical force in order to maintain discipline amongst those under their control. The use of violence was not at issue; instead questions concerned the levels and types of violence employed. But if the head had licence to use violence, the reverse was certainly not the case: violence by dependants was widely interpreted as a form of treason. Attitudes to certain forms of intimate violence shifted significantly during 1500–1800. For instance, although rape continued to be treated primarily as a property crime and remained difficult to prove, nevertheless it also emerged increasingly as a moral offence. Regulation of illegitimacy and infanticide increased after 1500, yet by 1800 communal and judicial tolerance of the latter was on the rise. The chapter will not only highlight such gradual changes, but also seek to explain why they occurred and what they meant.
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ItemWomen, Early Modern: Society and Sociability(Springer International Publishing, 2020)Definition/Introduction: Beginning in the fifteenth century, European women began to question misogynist literature that attempted to justify their relegation to a subordinate position within society, generating the querelle des femmes. In time they developed new models of ideal social relationships between the sexes, along with concepts of society and sociability that elevated women’s social role. While the earliest defenses of women accepted women’s subjection within marriage as analogous to the legitimate subjection of citizens to their monarch, as Protestants and republicans questioned the legitimacy of arbitrary monarchical power, the justice of a husband’s rule over his wife also came into question. The concept of modernity embraced new developments in vernacular literature, hospitable to female participation, and the novel became a powerful vehicle for the articulation of egalitarian models of love and friendship between the sexes. The level of civilization of society came to be measured in relation to the social role and participation of women, and the possibility of equal friendship between the sexes outside marriage, slowly transformed into the ideal of marriage as an affective and more or less egalitarian companionship.
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ItemReason and Experience in women’s responses to Descartes and Locke(Springer, 2020-02-13)Definition/Introduction: From the nineteenth to the twentieth century, commentators characteristically divided the epistemological trends of the seventeenth century into two streams, the rationalists and empiricists. Cartesian rationalism, in particular, was associated with a distinctive form of metaphysical dualism and a sharp mind/body divide. Reason was not only claimed to be a more reliable source of knowledge than sensory experience, it provided access to an immaterial realm of immutable truths. Having been educated in this tradition, a significant group of late twentieth century feminist interpreters of early modern epistemology and metaphysics argued, from a number of perspectives, that Cartesian dualism, with its associated high evaluation of pure reason, was entangled with metaphorical and psychological tendencies that debased the bodily, sensual, emotional, and natural features of existence. The latter were marked feminine, while reason and the mind were elevated and conceptualized as masculine. These feminists argued that, at least metaphorically, rationalism excluded women. In response to such claims, other scholars pointed out that Cartesian rationalism had been attractive to many early modern women interested in philosophy, and that the idea of an immaterial mind or soul, which has no sex, fostered claims for the intellectual equality of the sexes. More recent detailed scholarship into the philosophical writings of early modern women reveals that many were, in fact, suspicious of philosophies that imposed a sharp opposition between reason and experience, or mind and body. Reading the works of these women demonstrates that even when influenced by Descartes, women philosophers questioned Cartesian forms of dualism, developing their own theories of the relationship between reason, sense perception, and knowledge. The complexity and variety of the positions they developed highlights the crudity of the historiographic tendencies to read historical texts through simple dichotomies such as rationalism and empiricism.
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ItemAutomating Digital Afterlives(Oxford University Press, 2021-08-26)The question of how the dead “live on” by maintaining a presence and connecting to the living within social networks has garnered the attention of users, entrepreneurs, platforms, and researchers alike. In this chapter we investigate the increasingly ambiguous terrain of posthumous connection and disconnection by focusing on a diverse set of practices implemented by users and offered by commercial services to plan for and manage social media communication, connection, and presence after life. Drawing on theories of self-presentation (Goffman) and technological forms of life (Lash), we argue that moderated and automated performances of posthumous digital presence cannot be understood as a continuation of personal identity or self-presentation. Rather, as forms of mediated human (after)life, posthumous social media presence materializes ambiguities of connection/disconnection and self/identity.
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ItemPost-truth dystopia: Huxleyan distraction or Orwellian control?(Routledge, 2021-01-01)This book engages with post-truth as a problem of societal order and for scholarly analysis. It claims that post-truth discourse is more deeply entangled with main Western imaginations of knowledge societies than commonly recognised.
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ItemNegotiating an Old Masters Collection for the Melbourne National Gallery(Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2020)
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ItemBe Here, Be Heard: Enabling and Representing Student Voice and Agency,(Student Voice Australia, 2021)Be Here, Be Heard (BHBH) is an on-going student voice and agency project embedded within the Faculty of Arts at the University of Melbourne. This project recognises that student engagement sits within a broader transformative learning pedagogical context. This initiative builds on and extends the experiential nature of student engagement and representation of student voice.
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ItemAll in All, It’s Just Another Stone in the Wall: From Safi to Sicily, 12th-Century Monumental Architecture in the Mediterranean(De Gruyter, 2021-10-25)Worked stone in Philistia has been frequently limited to highly visible elements such as column bases, pavements, and ritual features such as altars (Hitchcock andMaeir 2017). This contribution presents a study of a selected group of Iron I monu-mental buildings and building elements in Areas A and C at Tell eṣ-Ṣâfī/Gath.1These remains can be potentially situated within the context of what is known about Sea Peoples’ architecture in the Mediterranean, as seen at the 12thcentury B.C.E.“Anaktoron”at Pantalica, Sicily, and in changes in Final Bronze Age Sardinia. Strati-graphic excavations of the Iron IIB siege tower in the lower city in Area C at Telleṣ-Ṣâfī/Gath indicate that the tower was built on the foundations of an earlier Iron I building (Gur-Arieh and Maeir 2020).
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ItemOn 'Dynastic' Inequality(Oxford University Press, 2021)This chapter investigates whether the replication of inequality is, other things being equal, morally objectionable in ways not applicable to inequality that remains confined to a single generation or “birth cohort.” The focus is both theoretical and practical. The chapter considers the philosophical foundations that might lie behind an objection to dynastic inequality, negotiating the diversity of egalitarian views supporting this position and the complexity around the causal mechanisms at work in cases where inequality has a dynastic tendency. It then discusses the policy reforms that might target inequalities that replicate old distributive trends while leaving newly produced trends more intact, with a focus on tax policy. Current tax rules in most developed economies do not make a distinction between new and old influences on the material distribution. Accordingly, it is likely that the tax reforms implied could be quite extensive.