FASS Public Lecture Series

The Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences at UNSW is pleased to offer
So, what? Public Lectures in contemporary humanities and social sciences.
This progressive public lecture series showcases the work of leading UNSW researchers and research collaborators. The series aims to challenge and inform public debate and understanding by pushing the boundaries of academic discourse.
2013 Lecture Series
Upcoming Lectures
Professor Steven Connor
Rustications: Animals in the Urban Mix
Wednesday 10 July
Tyree Room, John Niland Scientia Building
6.00pm - Reception
6.30pm - 7.30pm - Lecture & Q+A
Abstract:
When animals become audible in the city, it is often annoying, sometimes unnerving, but also now and again a kind of annunciation. Animals are an anomaly in the urban soundscape, which seems to be populated and made intelligible to itself exclusively by sounds of human origin. And yet cities have never become free of animals, which are all the time finding ways of recolonising urban space, and insinuating themselves into the syntax of its sounds. I will use this talk to listen out for and amplify the animal signatures in different urban soundscapes. Perhaps the sonic infiltrations of animals are not so much a haunting as a harbinger of a new, more convivial world-city.
Dickens wrote of underground stables ‘where cart-horses, troubled by rats, might be heard on a quiet Sunday rattling their halters, as disturbed spirits in tales of haunted houses are said to clank their chains’. But perhaps the sonic infiltrations of animals are not so much a haunting as a harbinger of a new, more convivial world-city.
Biography:
Steven Connor is Grace 2 Professor of English in the University of Cambridge and Fellow of Peterhouse. He is the author of books on Dickens, Beckett. Joyce, ventriloquism, skin, flies, and other topics in literary and cultural history. His most recent books are The Matter of Air: Science and Art of the Ethereal (2010), Paraphernalia: The Curious Lives of Magical Things (2011) and A Philosophy of Sport (2011).
To register for this lecture please click here
Professor David Armitage
Horizons of History: Space, Time and the Future of the Past
Thursday 15 August
Tyree Room, John Niland Scientia Building
6.00pm Reception
6.30pm - 7.30pm Lecture and Q+A
Abstract: Big is back across a wide range of historical fields. More historians are stretching space, to create international, transnational and global histories. Others are expanding time, to pursue Big History, Deep History and the history of the Anthropocene. What explains this broadening of horizons? And what does it mean for the future of history? This lecture will make a case for history as a discipline of social and political transformation amid crises of global governance, rising inequality and anthropogenic climate change.
Biography: David Armitage is the Lloyd C. Blankfein Professor of History and Chair of the Department of History at Harvard University. He is also an Honorary Professor of History at the University of Sydney. A prize-winning teacher and writer, he is the author or editor of over a dozen books, including The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (2000), The Declaration of Independence: A Global History (2007) and Foundations of Modern International Thought (2013).
Registration details forthcoming
For more information on the series, contact William Balfour t: (02) 9385 8512 e: so.what@unsw.edu.au
To register for the So, what? mailing list and to be informed of upcoming lectures please click here
Past Lectures
2013
26 February - Building a culture of nonviolence: the legacy of Mahatma Gandhi, Ela Gandhi
2012
4 December - Allegory and Dramaturgy in Wagner’s Ring Professor Fredric Jameson, Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature, Duke University
30 August - So, what does freedom mean to us? Professor Quentin Skinner, Barber Beaumont Professor of the Humanities, Queen Mary, University of London
26 July 2012 - What do we owe one another? New directions in thinking about community (Professor Vanessa Lemm)
10 May 2012 - Teaching Matters: the role of universities and education systems in lifting educational quality (Professor Michele Bruniges)
15 March 2012 - Grand Stakes: Australia's future between China and India (Rory Medcalf)
2011
15 September 2011 - Disabling justice: Social Justice, human rights and mental and cognitive disability in the criminal justice system (Professor Eileen Baldry)
21 July 2011 - Beyond the magic bullet: Social and behavioural approaches to the complexities of HIV prevention in an evolving epidemic (Professor John de Wit)
26 May 2011 - Modernism, Now and Then (Professor Julian Murphet)
14 April 2011 - Urban justice and the crisis of Neo-Liberalism (Professor Scott Lash)
24 February 2011 - Who cares? Migrant workers in the transnational care economy (Professor Fiona Williams)
2010
17 November 2010 - Beyond Ireland: cultures of encounter and exchange (Professor Ronan McDonald)
21 October 2010 - The minor fall, the major lift Music, powerand the composer's black art (Professor Andrew Schultz)
23rd September 2010 - Always with me: how mobile and social media are changing us (Associate Professor Kate Crawford)
20th May 2010 - Innocent victims, Illegal migrants or political pawns? Examining the fate of 35 million desperate people (Dr Eileen Pittaway)
25th March 2010 - Power and love: a theory and practice of social change (Adam Kahane)
2009
24th September 2009 - The heritage of Aboriginal Sydney: placing lost histories (Dr Grace Karskens)
20th August 2009 - Dialogue and nation building in contemporary Australia (Professor Patrick Dodson)
16th July 2009 - Can we support care and gender equality? (Professor Ann Orloff)
2008
8th October 2008 - American Empire, past present and future: the uses of history (Scientia Professor of History Ian Tyrrell)
4th September 2008 - Human decency: an impossible dream? (The Honourable Bob Carr)
16th July 2008 - Building a nation (Professor Michael Pusey)
15th May 2008 - Too Much, Too Young? Young people and new media (Professor Catharine Lumby)
7th March 2008 - New approach to child care and maternity leave (Professor Deborah Brennan)





