Cultural Translations: Remaking the Early European Past in Australasia

A symposium sponsored by the ARC Network for Early European Research
2-3 November 2006
State Library of Victoria, Melbourne

http://www.english.unimelb.edu.au/culturaltranslations

Cultural Translations symposium has two broad themes. The first relates to the issue of British and European cultural memory in Australasia, and the long histories of European institutions, and social, intellectual and cultural practices, as they have been played out in Australia. How has the experience of colonialism and its aftermath shaped the way Australasia has imagined, used, forgotten, or repudiated the early European past? What uses have nationalist discourses in these societies found, or failed to find, in medieval and early modern cultural moments? What have been the broader cultural politics of remembering the medieval or early modern in these two settler societies? And what is the future of such remembering in a multicultural, postcolonial, and globalized twenty-first century Australasia?

A second theme asks how the early European past has been reconstructed by scholars and intellectuals in Australia and New Zealand. What contributions to the study and interpretation of these key phases in the history of Western civilization have been made by scholarship in Australia and New Zealand? What function has the study of Medieval, Renaissance, or Enlightenment cultural and intellectual modes and movements played in the political, social, and cultural life of Australasia? What role have particular scholars, institutions (schools, universities, museums, churches, parliaments), or practices (antiquarianism, collecting, editing and bibliography, curatorship) devoted to the British or European medieval or early modern pasts played in Australia or New Zealand?

Convenors: Peter Holbrook and Stephanie Trigg
Contact: Helen Hickey: h.hickey@pgrad.unimelb.edu.au
Department of English with Cultural Studies