Scotland’s Colony?
The Centre for Irish and Scottish Studies is hosting a one-day FREE symposium at the Hocken Collections on Monday 16 December from 9.30am on ‘Rethinking Otago’s Caledonian Connections’. There’s a great line-up of speakers and topics, which are listed below.
Session 1 (9.30-10.45): Texts and Contexts
Catriona MacDonald (University of Glasgow)
‘Exporting the past, historicising the nation: making histories in Scotland and New Zealand’
Ben Wilkie (CISS, Otago)
‘Scotland’s Antipodean Archipelago: The Otago Settlement and its Australasian Context’
Session II (11-12.15): Scottish Institutions in Otago and New Zealand
Valerie Wallace (Victoria University of Wellington)
‘Scots Law and British Colonialism in New Zealand’
Liam McIlvanney (CISS, Otago)
‘Scottish Presbyterianism in Early Otago: Thomas Burns and D.M. Stuart’
Session III (1.45-3): Print Culture Between Scotland and Otago
John Stenhouse (Otago)
‘Sam Lister, the Otago Workman Newspaper and Denominational Tensions in Late Nineteenth-Century Dunedin’
David Goldie (Strathclyde)
‘From Lee to Lea: Imperial Hybridity in Scottish and New Zealand Poetry of the First World War’
Session IV (3.15-4): A Roundtable discussion on Scotland’s Colony? To what extent was Otago a Scottish Colony? How does Otago complicate our understanding of Scotland’s involvement in Empire?
CfP. Encounters and Exchanges: Exploring the History of Science, Technology and Mātauranga (Indigenous Knowledge)
Our Centre is supporting this forthcoming conference linked to the Tuia 250 commemoration activities taking place across the country this year. Please consider submitting an abstract. Submission deadline is 8 May.
Call for Papers: Encounters and Exchanges
The University of Otago and the Tōtaranui 250 Trust announce a conference to take place in Blenheim, New Zealand from 1-3 December 2019 that will explore the global history of science, technology, medicine, and mātauranga (indigenous knowledge). The conference will be part of a sequence of national events in New Zealand titled Tuia – Encounters 250 Commemoration. These mark the 250th anniversary of James Cook’s first Pacific voyage and the first onshore meetings between Europeans and Māori.
The conference is especially interested in analysing the implications for the global history of science, technology, medicine, and indigenous knowledge. The two major themes central to the Tuia – Encounters 250 Commemoration, ‘dual heritage-shared future’ and the importance of voyaging, pose a range of questions about knowledge, how it is generated, how it is communicated and translated, and how it is entangled with power. The emphasis on the important role of voyaging is consistent with a recent emphasis in the academic field of the history of science on ‘knowledge in transit’ or how science, technology, and indigenous knowledge – involving people, instruments, tools, communications, values, and epistemology – travel from one region to another and are transformed, reworked or contested. We welcome papers or panels that explore these kinds of questions, either within the specific contexts of the southern Pacific in the 1760s and 1770s, or in any other context where encounters and exchanges were integral to knowledge making.
Building on the ‘dual heritage-shared future’ theme of the Tuia – Encounters 250 Commemoration, conference participants will explore recent efforts to analyse reciprocal relationships, the places where exchanges, negotiations, trade, and transactions have taken place, and the important role of mediators or go-betweens in the history of science, technology and indigenous knowledge. Participants will be encouraged to discuss the value of models for interactions that emphasise such concepts as ‘cultural borderlands’, ‘contact zones’, and ‘trading zones’. The conference will be especially interested in exploring the complex role of indigenous people in the history of science. Recent scholarship has emphasised that local people in all parts of the world not only gathered information but also helped categorize and conceptualize the information. Distinctions between amateurs and professionals as well as producers and users are no longer sharply conceived. As a contribution to the recent emphasis on exploring history of science in a global context, the conference will encourage research covering all parts of the world. The organisers plan to publish selected papers in an edited volume on the global history of science, technology, medicine, and indigenous knowledge.
The conference will include keynotes from leading scholars as well as a programme of special public events in the evenings. Notable participants include Naomi Oreskes, Professor of the History of Science at Harvard University; Jane Lydon, Wesfarmers Chair in Australian History at the University of Western Australia; Peter Moore, author of Endeavour: The Ship and the Attitude that Changed the World (2018 book of the year by the Sunday Times); New Zealand filmmaker Lala Rolls, who will present her feature-length documentary film Tupaia’s Endeavour; Damon Salesa, Pro-Vice-Chancellor, Pacific at the University of Auckland; Matariki Williams, Curator Mātauranga Māori, Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa; and critic and former Poet Laureate of New Zealand, Ian Wedde.
This gathering will be held in Blenheim, a small city with a rich cultural heritage and which is surrounded by vineyards and stunning scenery. It will be distinguished by the integral role of local iwi (tribal communities), and participants will have the opportunity to learn about and engage with the knowledge traditions and historical experiences of the tangata whenua (people of the land). This is particularly important as the conference will be a forum for a range of vantage points on how knowledge is created and shared and it will enable genuine and critical reflection on the often painful and contested legacy of Cook’s voyages and the histories of empire and colonization that followed.
To submit a proposal, see the instructions on the conference website
The deadline for proposals is 8 May.
To express an interest in the event or to ask a question, please contact: encounters-exchanges@otago.ac.nz
Travel grants will be available for postgraduate students at New Zealand universities and early-career scholars in New Zealand. If you are interested in one of these travel grants, send an expression of interest to the conference email address as soon as possible: encounters-exchanges@otago.ac.nz. More details will be available later about the formal application process.
Connecting the Colonies: Empires and Networks in the History of the Book
The Bibliographical Society of Australia and New Zealand Inc (BSANZ) Annual Conference 2017
Connecting the Colonies: Empires and Networks in the History of the Book
Hobart, Tasmania, Australia
22-24 November 2017
Call for Papers
Empires of all kinds – commercial, geo-political, bureaucratic – are defined by their peripheries as well as their centres, by the flows of information that maintain or destabilise their structures of authority and control.
BSANZ, in collaboration with the Society for the History of Authorship Reading and Publishing, invites scholars and researchers to consider the printed word, the book, and texts of all kinds, as both mechanism and matter of transmission.
We invite proposals for 20-minute papers on any matters of bibliographical interest, traditional and contemporary. Possible topics include, but are not limited to:
- Commercial empires: the book as a commodity in colonial contexts
- Across boundaries: print networks across geo-political, commercial or bureaucratic borders
- The trans-temporal: the afterlife of books and re-imagining of ideas
- Indigenous cultures, frontier encounters, and the presence or absence of print
- The stuff of legend: the role of print in constructing colonial and imperial consciousness
- The book as treasured possession: emotion, ownership and display
Proposals for three-person panel discussions are also welcome.
Some financial assistance towards travel costs may be available for postgraduate students who are presenting papers. Please enquire when submitting your proposal, and include a brief budget outlining your anticipated travel costs.
Proposals – including, a 250-word abstract title of paper, name and institutional affiliation of each author, a brief biography of each author, email address of each author, and 3-5 keywords – should be sent to the convenor, Ian Morrison ian.morrison@education.tas.gov.au.
Presenters must be members of the Bibliographical Society of Australia and New Zealand. The deadline for submissions is Friday 31 March 2017.
Soldiers of Empire Marsden Project
We’d like to congratulate our colleague Professor Charlotte Macdonald (Victoria University of Wellington) on her Royal Society of New Zealand Marsden Project, Soldiers of Empire, and alert you to the project website. Charlotte is working with Dr. Rebecca Lenihan “to put a face to the British army and navy presence in New Zealand. In doing so we aim to link the service of men in this part of the world to the wider British empire. Our interest focuses on the ways in which war takes people, goods, ideas and habits around the world. Engaged to suppress resistance to British expansion, the armed forces also served as vectors of empire. We are focusing on the world beyond the battlefields.” We encourage all interested in the project to look at their fantastic website, and bookmark it so you can keep up-to-date on the progress of their research.
Introducing Global Dunedin
March 23 is Otago Anniversary Day, but it also happens to be the occasion for the launch of a new initiative from the Centre for Research on Colonial Culture: Global Dunedin. Have a look at Global Dunedin’s Blog, which is designed to serve as a forum for discussing Dunedin’s historical development and its changing economy, social life, and cultural pattern. The project will showcase how the city has changed over time and the ways in which its pasts have shaped its current and future prospects. The blog – together with an associated Facebook page and Twitter account (@GlobalDunedin) – will disseminate reflections on the city’s history and life here now.
In addition to a social media presence, the Global Dunedin project team are also running a public lecture series in conjunction with Toitū Otago Settlers Museum: in these Sunday afternoon talks, leading local researchers and thinkers will reflect on different aspects of Dunedin’s past and present.
Follow us and join in the conversations!
Crowns and Colonies: Monarchies and Colonial Empires
An international conference convened by Robert Aldrich and Cindy McCreery
With a keynote address by Professor Miles Taylor, Director of the Institute for Historical Research, University of London, on Queen Victoria and India
Department of History,
School of Philosophical and Historical Inquiry
University of Sydney
11-13 June 2014
From the time of Alexander the Great and the Roman Caesars down to the empire of Queen Victoria and beyond, monarchism and imperialism have often been linked – indeed, republican colonial empires have been notable exceptions in international history. Napoleon III dreamed of constructing an ‘Arab kingdom’, Victoria was proclaimed Empress of India, King Leopold created his own realm the Congo, and Italy’s King Victor Emmanuel III was named Emperor of Ethiopia. Even today the Commonwealth of Nations is bound together by the figure of the British monarch, and the Danish queen reigns over Greenland and the Faeroe Islands.
Outside of Europe, as well, monarchs ruled over disparate peoples, their hereditary and often sacred positions bringing together under a crown the empires of China, Japan, the Ottoman state and several pre-colonial African empires. Non-Western monarchs – Zulu chieftains, Indian maharajahs, Emperor Haile Selassie, the king of Korea among others – were themselves often displaced by imperial conquest. Nationalist movements sometimes campaigned for the restoration of dynasties, at other times for abandonment of ‘feudal’ rule.
This international conference, and a proposed collection of essays commissioned from participants, explores the links between crowned rulers and their colonial possessions. Paper proposals are invited on any historical period or region.
Themes may include but are not limited to:
- different theories of kingship in relation to colonial empire;
- royal initiatives in colonial expansion and patronage of colonial expeditions, chartered companies and learned societies;
- the legal position and prerogatives of monarchs in colonial systems;
- interventions by monarchs in colonial politics and governance;
- royal visits to colonies (and visits by colonial rajas, sultans and other rulers to colonial metropoles);
- royal personages in the colonial military and administration; representations of monarchs in colonies (statues, buildings, artwork) and commemoration of royal births, anniversaries and deaths; royal honours, decorations and investitures;
- movements for the restoration of indigenous dynasties abolished by colonial authorities;
- the repercussions of metropolitan and nationalist republicanism and dissolution of monarchies in the colonial world;
- and links between former colonies and monarchies (as in the Commonwealth).
Please send proposals of papers by 15 February 2014
Please include the following:
- Your academic or professional affiliation and full contact details (email, telephone and postal address)
- The title of your proposed presentation
- A 250-word abstract
- A one-page cv or list of your major publications
All proposals will be assessed after the deadline of 15 February 2014.
Please note that there will be no registration fee for the conference. There will be a conference dinner at participants’ own expense.
Contact: robert.aldrich@sydney.edu.au; cindy.mccreery@sydney.edu.au
