New Fellows for 2011

At the 2011 Annual General Meeting of the Academy of the Humanities, 20 new Fellows and 7 Honorary Fellows were elected.

We congratulate the following new Fellows:

Edward Aspinall

Edward Aspinall is a Senior Fellow, Indonesian Politics and Head, Department of Political and Social Change at the Australian National University’s College of Asia and the Pacific. He is an outstanding young scholar of Indonesia’s political history, democratisation and civil society whose work is held in high esteem nationally and internationally. His scholarship is based on a thorough reading of often elusive sources and on close engagement with Indonesian informants, who are often interviewed under challenging conditions. In addition to this scholarly activity, Aspinall has been for several years a major coordinating editor of the magazine Inside Indonesia.

His publications include Opposing Suharto: Compromise, Resistance and Regime Change in Indonesia (2005), Islam and Nation: Separatist Rebellion in Aceh, Indonesia (2009) and The State and Illegality in Indonesia (2010, co-edited with Gerry van Klinken).

Clare Bradford

Clare Bradford is a Professor in the School of Communication and Creative Arts at Deakin University. She has a national and international reputation as a foundation scholar in the field of children’s literature. Clare Bradford was Australasian Children’s Literature Association for Research (ACLAR) inaugural Vice-President and became President in 1998, leading the organisation until 2002. Professor Bradford is currently President of the International Research Society for Children’s Literature. Since 1996 she has edited Papers: Explorations into Children’s Literature, mentoring the many Australian (and other) scholars who have published in the journal. In her own research Clare Bradford has pioneered the study and effects of representations of Indigeneity and Indigenous cultures in the literature written for children in settler societies.

Her publications include Reading Race: Aboriginality in Australian Children’s Literature (2001), Unsettling Narratives: Postcolonial Readings of Children’s Literature (2007); and New World Orders in Contemporary Children’s Literature: Utopian Transformations (2008).

David Carter

David Carter, Professor of Australian Literature and Cultural History at the University of Queensland, is the author, editor and co-editor of fifteen books that range across the fields of book history, Australian literature, literary and cultural history and Australian studies. David Carter is one of the most widely cited critics in contemporary Australian literary studies. His research on Australian literary institutions and their relationship to broader cultural forces – on the role of magazines, intellectual movements, the making of literary reputations, publishing practices and regimes of reading – has significantly shaped recent developments in literary historical studies.

His publications include Dispossession, Dreams and Diversity: Issues in Australian Studies (2006), A Career in Writing: Judah Waten and the Cultural Politics of a Literary Career (1997) and Modern Australian Criticism and Theory: A Critical Guide (2009, co-edited with Wang Guanglin).

William Christie

William Christie is Professor and Chair of English at the University of Sydney. Professor Christie is acknowledged as one of Australia’s leading Romanticists and was responsible for the establishment of a key network of Romantic scholars in the UK. His most significant contribution to the field has been to establish continuities between the transient world of periodical literature and the idealisations of Romantic poetry and fiction, and between the tensions and conflicts of Romantic culture and those of our own. Since 2003 he has been awarded three visiting fellowships at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (IASH) at the University of Edinburgh and invited to join the international Advisory Group of the Carlyle Letters Project and the research network Scottish Writing in the Nineteenth Century (SWINC), both at the University of Edinburgh.

His publications include The Edinburgh Review in the Literary Culture of Romantic Britain: Mammoth and Megalonyx (2009), Samuel Taylor Coleridge: A Literary Life (2006) and The Letters of Francis Jeffrey to Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle (2009, editor).

Alan Corkhill

Associate Professor Alan Corkhill has been the Head of German studies at the University of Queensland since 2000 and is the longstanding Australian editor of the Australian-Canadian publication, Seminar, A Journal of Germanic Studies. He is a leading scholar of German culture. His work has a double focus: firstly, on German literature, with special reference to the periods from 1770 and 1830 and since 1945 (East and West German and Austrian); and secondly on German-Australian literary and cultural relations. His book Antipodean Encounters: Australia and the German Literary Imagination 1754-1918 was recognised as a pioneering project on German preoccupations, perceptions and observations about Australia.

His publications include Queensland and Germany. Ethnic, Socio-Cultural, Political and Trade Relations 1838-1991 (1992), Antipodean Encounters: Australia and the German Literary Imagination 1754-1918 (1990) and The Motif of Fate in the Works of Ludwig Tieck (1978).

Edmund Fung

Edmund Fung is a Professor of Asian Studies at the University of Western Sydney (UWS). He has had a distinguished career in the field of Asian studies, especially modern Chinese history, with research interests ranging from military to political to diplomatic to intellectual history; Chinese cultural and political thought in Republican era; in Chinese democracy; and in human rights issues. He has published several books and numerous important articles in leading journals. In addition to his major contribution as foundation Professor of Asian Studies at UWS, he played a leading role in the foundation and early history of the Chinese Studies Association of Australia and served a term as China Councillor for the Asian Studies Association of Australia.

His publications include The Military Dimension of the Chinese Revolution: The Role of the New Army in the Revolution of 1911 (1980). This book is a standard text on the subject in Western scholarship, and its Chinese translation, published in China in 1994, also remains a must-read for students of history in many universities in China and in Taiwan.The Intellectual Foundations of Chinese Modernity: Cultural and Political Thought in the Republican Era (2010), In Search of Chinese Democracy: Civil Opposition in Nationalist China, 1929-1949 (2000) and The Diplomacy of Imperial Retreat: Britain’s South China Policy, 1924-1931 (1991).

Bridget Griffen-Foley

Bridget Griffen-Foley is Professor in the Department of Modern History, and Director of the Centre for Media History at Macquarie University. As an historian of the public sphere, Professor Griffen-Foley’s work has led to a better understanding of the way that commercial imperatives have shaped Australian political culture. Her work has highlighted the political interests and interventions of three of Australia’s most prominent media proprietor-families: the Packers, the Murdochs and the Fairfaxes. Her recent work focuses on the history of and audience participation in Australian commercial radio. A media columnist for Australian Book Review, she also serves on the Library Council of NSW, the editorial board of Media International Australia and Media History, and the NSW Working Party of the Australian Dictionary of Biography. She is currently editing the Companion to the Australian Media, which includes contributions by over 100 scholars and media practitioners drawn from Australia and overseas.

Her publications include Changing Stations: The Story of Australian Commercial Radio (2009), Party Games: Australian Politicians and the Media from War to Dismissal (2003), Sir Frank Packer: The Young Master (2000) and The House of Packer: The Making of a Media Empire (1999).

Margaret Harris

Professor Margaret Harris is Director of Research at the University of Sydney’s Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. She has led key initiatives in the shaping of Australia’s research culture and commands an international reputation as a groundbreaking researcher, notably in her specialist area of Victorian fiction, but also in Australian literature. As one of the founders of the Australasian Victorian Studies Association in 1973, she served as President from 1983-89, and as a member of the executive at other times. She was Director of the Research Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Sydney (1999-2004). In 2004 she led a team that was awarded funding for the Australian Humanities e-Research Network.

Her publications include Dearest Munx: The Letters of Christina Stead and William J. Blake (2005), The Magic Phrase: Critical Essays on Christina Stead (2000) and The Journals of George Eliot (1998, co-edited with Judith Johnston).

Stephen Hetherington

Stephen Hetherington is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of New South Wales whose key research interests are in epistemology and metaphysics. With seven monographs, two edited collections and more than sixty articles, he has earned an international reputation for his revivification of epistemology. He has also produced several lively works introducing students to the history and current frontiers of epistemology, which have been translated into a number of languages and have been used for teaching in widely dispersed countries: the secret of their success lies partly in the way he includes his own original research, in enlivening the exposition of traditional debates. Professor Hetherington is currently General Editor of Philosophical Studies Series.

His publications include Epistemology’s Paradox: Is a Theory of Knowledge Possible? (1992), Good Knowledge, Bad Knowledge: On Two Dogmas of Epistemology (2001) and How To Know: A Practical Conception of Knowledge (2011).

Roger Hillman

Dr Roger Hillman is a Reader and Associate Professor in the College of Arts and Social Sciences at the Australian National University. He began his academic career as a Germanist, publishing a study of the German novel and its depiction of society in the nineteenth century, but is now best known for his work in film studies in a series of influential analyses ranging across national and discipline boundaries to explore not merely the visual but the auditory in cinema. He has close connections to three Australian universities, Sydney, Adelaide and the ANU as well as a number of overseas institutions, especially Berkeley, and the universities of Graz and Bologna, where he has researched and taught. Hillman has been the recipient of an Alexander von Humboldt fellowship, and a CRASSH (Cambridge University’s Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities) fellowship, with a project focusing on representations of Gallipoli in film and literature. Throughout 2009 he was a member of the Humanities and Creative Arts panel of the ARC.

His publication include Zeitroman: The Novel and Society in Germany 1830-1900 (1983), Essays in German Literature, Music and Theatre (1991, co-edited with R. Alter and A. Stephens) and Unsettling Scores: German Film, Music and Ideology (2005).

Jeanette Kennett

Jeanette Kennett is a Professor of Moral Psychology (Philosophy) and holds a joint appointment between the Department of Philosophy and the Centre for Cognitive Science at Macquarie University. Professor Kennett’s work in moral psychology is internationally renowned and she has been at the forefront of a recent movement in philosophy which has seen increasing recourse to data from the sciences to inform debates in meta-ethics and moral psychology, and the increasing involvement of philosophers in interpreting and evaluating empirical studies of moral cognition. Her 2002 paper ‘Autism, Empathy and Moral Agency’ is widely regarded as groundbreaking and has influenced the course of subsequent philosophical debate on the role of empathy in the constitution of moral agency.

Her publications include Agency and Responsibility: A Common-Sense Moral Psychology (2001), Reasons, Emotion and the Psychopath (2010) and Mental Time Travel, Agency and Responsibility (2009, with Steve Matthews).

Diane Kirkby

Diane Kirkby is a Professor and Art History Coordinator in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at La Trobe University. She has made a distinguished contribution to both Australian and American History in four major areas – labour history, women’s history, law and history, and Australian cultural history (often combining these areas in innovative and influential ways). She was a pioneer in the field of law and history in Australia, organising many of the early conferences and colloquia in Australia and producing pioneering studies in such areas as married women’s property law, divorce reform, labour law and colonialism and the law. She has also edited some of the foundation collections in this field and serves on the editorial board of the major international journal Law & History Review.
 
Her publications include The Australian Pub (2010, with Tanja Luckin and Chris McConville), Voices From the Ships: Australia’s Seafarers and Their Union (2008) and Barmaids: A History of Women’s Work in Pubs (1997).

Susan Lawrence

Susan Lawrence is an Associate Professor of Archaeology at La Trobe University. She has directed numerous archaeological excavations and field projects on historical sites in south-eastern Australia with an emphasis on domestic and industrial sites and material culture. She has been a leader in developing several fields within Australian historical archaeology (gender, colonisation, material culture). Associate Professor Lawrence’s work on the topic of British colonisation has been instrumental in establishing ‘Britishness’ as an internationally significant theme within emerging post-colonial archaeologies. She is Past-President of the Australasian Society for Historical Archaeology and has been on the editorial board of the journal Australasian Historical Archaeology since 1997 and Australian Archaeology since 2008. In 2002 she was invited to deliver the annual Hancock Memorial Lecture at the Australian Academy of the Humanities and in 2009 she was recipient of a La Trobe University Deputy-Vice Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Research.

Her publications include An Archaeology of Australia Since 1788 (2010), Whalers and Free Men: Life on Tasmania’s Colonial Whaling Stations (2006) and Archaeologies of the British: Explorations of Identity in Great Britain and its Colonies 1600-1945 (2003).

Ian Lilley

Ian Lilley is a Professor of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies at the University of Queensland. He has undertaken archaeological research and cultural heritage studies throughout Australia and in the Pacific for three decades. His principal original contributions have been made in two areas. The first concerns migration, interaction and social identity in the north New Guinea-Bismarck Archipelago region over the last 3,500 years. He has also been interested in parallels between the Pacific and other island regions, especially the Mediterranean and Caribbean. Professor Lilley is a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London, an international World Heritage assessor for ICOMOS, the statutory advisory body to UNESCO on cultural heritage, and on the editorial boards of a number of national and international journals and monograph series. He has held senior executive roles on several other national and international professional bodies as well as being a Visiting Scholar at Academia Sinica (Taiwan), ANU, Berkeley, Orléans, Oxford and Stanford.

His publications include An Archaeological Life: Papers in Honour of Jay Hall (2006, editor) Archaeology of Oceania: Australia and the Pacific Islands (2006, editor) and Archaeology, Diaspora and Decolonisation (2006).

David Philip Miller

David Philip Miller is a Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of New South Wales. He has an international reputation as an authority on the history of science in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain, during the peak of the Industrial Revolution. His early work on the Royal Society of London during that period forced other scholars to re-think some of their most basic assumptions about the British intellectual community of the day. He has played a leading role within his discipline, having served as both Head of his School at UNSW and chair of the National Committee for History and Philosophy of Science of the Australian Academy of Science. He is currently, for the second time, President of the Australasian Association for the History, Philosophy and Social Studies of Science.

His publications include James Watt, Chemist: Understanding the Origins of the Steam Age (2009), Discovering Water: James Watt, Henry Cavendish and the Nineteenth-Century ‘Water Controversy’ (2004) and Visions of Empire: Voyages, Botany and Representations of Nature (1996, co-edited with P. H. Reill).

Margaret Miller

Margaret Miller is the Arthur and Renee George Professor of Classical Archaeology at the University of Sydney. Professor Miller’s magisterial and prize-winning monograph (awarded Le prix Roman and Tania Ghirshman, Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, Paris, for 2001) entitled Athens and Persia in the Fifth Century B.C. A Study in Cultural Receptivity (Cambridge, 1997, reprinted 2004), has greatly enhanced understanding of the Aegean world. It has redressed orthodox scholarly accounts of the period by critically re-evaluating the relationship between fifth-century ‘superpowers’ Athens and Persia.

Her publications include The Poetics of Emulation in the Achaemenid World: The Figured Bowls of the ‘Lydian Treasure’ (2007), From Ritual to Drama: The Prehistory of Theatre in Ancient Greece and Elsewhere (1997, editor), and Athens and Persia in the Fifth Century B.C. A Study in Cultural Receptivity (1997).

Clive Moore

Professor Clive Moore is the Head of School of History at the University of Queensland. He has attained international distinction as an innovative and original scholar of Australian and Pacific social and political history. Professor Moore has been prominent in his efforts to develop Pacific studies in Australia, and to connect his continuing scholarly work in all fields with public policy and community needs and demands. He has worked as a consultant and advisor in fields as disparate as Distance and Flexible Learning in Papua New Guinea, art and museum studies and native title claims. He was inaugural President of the Australian Association for the Advancement of Pacific Studies (2006-2010). Professor Moore co-authored the National Strategy for the Study of the Pacific. In 2005 he received the award of the Cross of Solomon Islands for his work on the history of Malaita Island.

His publications include Kanaka: A History of Melanesian Mackay (1985), and New Guinea: Crossing Boundaries and History (2003) and Happy Isles in Crisis: The Historical Causes of a Failing State in Solomon Islands, 1998-2004 (2004).

Brian Nelson

Brian Nelson is Emeritus Professor of French Studies and Translation Studies at Monash University. Highly-regarded both as a critic and as a translator for his work in late-nineteenth-century French Studies, Nelson is best known for his studies and translations of the novelist Emile Zola. Editor of the Cambridge Companion to Emile Zola, he is also the author of Zola and the Bourgeoisie and translator of four of Zola’s novels, in prestigious and well-reviewed editions for which he has provided scholarly notes and introductions. He was Founding President of the Australian Society for French Studies (1994-96; member since 1994) and in 2005 played an instrumental role in the launch of the Australian Association for Literary Translation, serving as President from 2007.

His publications include Emile Zola: A Selective Analytical Bibliography (1982), The Cambridge Companion to Emile Zola (2007, editor) and After Blanchot: Literature, Philosophy, Criticism (2005, co-edited with Leslie Hill and Dimitris Vardoulakis).

Paul Patton

Paul Patton is Professor in Philosophy at the University of New South Wales. He has a strong international reputation for his work both in political philosophy – especially on issues of political liberalism, historical injustice and indigenous rights – and in contemporary European philosophy. He has played a central role in the dissemination and critical interpretation of European philosophy in Australia and has been recognised through numerous conference and lecture invitations in Europe, North America and Asia. Patton currently holds a Research Professorship in Philosophy at the University of New South Wales where he was Associate Dean of Research in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences during 2009-2010.

His publications include Deleuzian Concepts: Philosophy, Colonization, Politics (2010), Deleuze and the Political (2000) and Nietzsche, Feminism and Political Theory (1993).

Robin Prior

Robin Prior is a Visiting Professorial Fellow, History, the University of Adelaide. He spent twenty years at the Australian Defence Force Academy, University of New South Wales, for many years as the Head of the School of History. Prior is one of the leading authorities, nationally and internationally, on the history of warfare. He is widely esteemed on the world stage for his contribution in clarifying the essential problems and failed endeavours of major battles of the First World War. His recent work on Gallipoli contributes to a deeper understanding of war and society.

His publications include Gallipoli: The End of the Myth (2009), The Somme (2005, with Trevor Wilson) and The First World War (1999).

New Honorary Fellows

The Academy is also delighted to announce the election of 7 new Honorary Fellows. Honorary Fellows are distinguished public figures who advocate for the humanities, practitioners of the arts, overseas scholars in the humanities who have a close association with Australia, or Australian-based scholars who have made substantial contributions to the humanities throughout their careers.

The 2011 Honorary Fellows are:

Hugh Anderson

Hugh Anderson is a historian and Fellow of the Australian Centre at the University of Melbourne. His groundbreaking work on Australian folklore and popular culture established the study of folklore as a scholarly field in Australia, and over several decades he has made an outstanding contribution to folklore studies, literary history, bibliography and local history. Much of his work was undertaken while he worked as a schoolteacher, and since 1953 he has written more than a dozen monographs, edited a score of collections of primary sources, compiled eight bibliographies of Australian writers, contributed thirteen entries to the Australian Dictionary of Biography and produced twenty-two textbooks. Hugh Anderson’s standing in the field was demonstrated by his appointment by the Commonwealth government to chair the Commission of Inquiry into Folklife in Australia in 1986, whose report influenced the efforts in other countries to collect and preserve their folk materials. He was a founding member of the editorial board of Australian Folklore, a member of the committee of management of the Australian Society of Authors, and a Councillor and Vice-President of the Royal Victorian Historical Society.

David Armitage

David Armitage is Lloyd C. Blankfein Professor of History at Harvard University and Honorary Professor of History at the University of Sydney. His work is of extraordinary breadth and scope, and explores the impact of modern political thought in a global context. His seminal work, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge UP, 2000), winner of the History Today prize, merged domestic and imperial history in its discussion of the way in which imperial justifications drew on a range of intellectual traditions going back to classical times. This wide reach has expanded further still in more recent works such as The Declaration of Independence: A Global History (Harvard UP, 2007) which shows the global resonance of key ideas which justified the American Revolution. Professor Armitage is currently working on several projects, including ideas of civil war from Rome to Iraq; a study of the foundations of modern international thought; an edition of John Locke’s colonial writings; and a co-edited volume of essays on Pacific history. David Armitage has been a frequent visitor to Australia having held two fellowships at ANU and, since 2009, as honorary visiting professor at the University of Sydney. He has been an active member of the Australian Studies Committee at Harvard University.

Shirley Hazzard

Shirley Hazzard is one of Australia’s most distinguished living novelists, and has been described as ‘one of the greatest writers working in English today.’ Her book, Transit of Venus was awarded the National Book Critics’ Circle in 1980 and The Bay of Noon, was short-listed for the Lost Man Booker Prize in 2010. She has published two collections of short stories, Cliffs of Fall in 1963 and People in Glass Houses in 1967 along with a number of non-fictional writings, including two books sharply critical of the United Nations, Defeat of an Ideal: A Study of the Self-Destruction of the United Nations (1973) and Countenance of Truth: The United Nations and the Waldheim Case (1990).

Janet Holmes à Court AC

Janet Holmes à Court is a leading patron of the arts in Australia. The Holmes à Court Gallery houses a collection of 4,000 artworks with a programme of lending to galleries around Australia. Holmes à Court was awarded a Companion of the Order of Australia in 2007 for services to business, the advancement of Western Australia’s musical and theatre culture, to the visual arts, and to the community. She has been a strong promoter of public ethics in corporate life, her own philanthropy inspiring other business people to invest in the arts. She has been Chair of the Australian Children’s Television Foundation since 1986 and the Western Australia Symphony Orchestra since 1998. Holmes à Court is also a patron and board member of a wide range of cultural and arts organisations in Australia with interests ranging across theatre, art, music, and urban design and architecture.

Janet Holmes à Court was Pro-chancellor at the University of Western Australia (1990-94) and a Senate member at both Murdoch University and the University of Western Australia. She holds honorary doctorates from three Australian universities. In 2003 she developed the Perth ‘Day of Ideas’, now run in collaboration with the Institute of Advanced Studies at University of Western Australia and with Manning Clarke House where she also a patron. This has allowed exploration of a number of socially progressive themes (such as ‘living in a time of fear’, ‘beyond sorry’ and ‘refuge’) and demonstrates Holmes à Court’s hands-on, practical and involved approach to numerous intellectual and creative projects.

Geoffrey Lancaster AM

For the past thirty years, Geoffrey Lancaster has been at the forefront of the historically-informed performance practice movement. Lancaster is a Professor of Keyboard at the Australian National University. One of the world’s leading forte pianists, he has appeared with all of Australian’s major symphony orchestras and the Australian Chamber Orchestra. Internationally Dr Lancaster has appeared to critical acclaim as a concerto soloist with leading orchestras in Leipzig, Cologne, Düsseldorf, Geneva, Toronto, New Zealand, Rotterdam, Copenhagen and Stockholm. He became the first Australian to win a major international competition receiving First Prize at the 23rd Festival van Vlaaneren International Competition, Bruges. The combination of outstanding keyboard mastery and profound scholarly insights mark Geoffrey Lancaster as unique in Australia, and largely unmatched elsewhere. His honours include the Australian Artists Creative Fellowship for outstanding artistic contribution to the nation, and the HC Coombs Creative Arts Fellowship and the Order of Australia (AM) for services to the arts.

Alex Miller

Alex Miller is best known for his fiction writing which demonstrates his profound insight into the human condition. He has been hailed as the most deeply philosophical of contemporary Australian novelists. Miller’s work has long been celebrated in Australia, winning the Miles Franklin Literary Award in 1993 for The Ancestor Game (1992) and again in 2003 for Journey to the Stone Country, regarded as one of the most insightful examinations of relations between Aboriginal and white Australians on both a personal and political level. Miller achieved international recognition with his third novel, The Ancestor Game, a complex, wide-ranging historical work which moves in space and time between China, Germany and Australia, through the 1840s to the 1970s. His work continues to attract critical acclaim, with Landscape of Farewell (2007) receiving the 2008 Manning Clark House National Cultural Award. Lovesong (2009) won the 2010 Age Book of the Year Award Fiction Prize and the Book of the Year Prize, the Christina Stead Prize for Fiction and the People’s Choice Award at the 2011 New South Wales Premier’s Literary Awards.

Lionel Sawkins

Australian-born and London-based musicologist Dr Lionel Sawkins has been at the forefront of research into French baroque music for a number of years. His most significant publication – almost a lifetime’s work – is the Thematic Catalogue of the Works of Michel-Richard de Lalande 1657-1726, published by Oxford University Press with the support of the British Academy (Lalande being the most important and prolific composer of sacred music at the court of Louis XIV). In 1982-83 Sawkins helped establish the Centre d’information et de documentation (Recherche Musicale) of the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) in Paris, at the same time contributing more than 400 citations (mostly of the motets of Lully and Lalande) to the Catalogue thématique du grand motet français.

In 1996 the French Minister of Culture named Lionel Sawkins as Chevalier (later Officier) de l’Ordre des Arts and des Lettres in recognition of his ‘contributions à la diffusion de la musique français en Grand-Bretagne et dans le monde’.