News & Events - Stop Press!

Congratulations to the following staff members for their excellent achievements!

• Professor David Lemmings was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities on 21 November 2009
• Dr Paul Sendziuk has been awarded the 2009 Stephen Cole the Elder Award for Excellence in Teaching for Early Career  Teaching. The citation states that it is in recognition of his contribution to learning and teaching at the University since 2005.
• Associate Professor Rob Foster has been awarded an ARC Discovery Grant - The rule of law in history and memory: Australian and Canadian settler frontiers. The Grant was awarded to Associate Professor Amanda Nettlebeck, Associate Professor Rob Foster, Doctor RC Smandych and Emeritus Professor L Knafla

Australia New Zealand American Studies Association Conference
Further appointments in the School of History & Politics
Georgian London project
High profile personalities join the School of History & Politics
New appointments in the School of History & Politics
Online courses in Art History
2010 Summer School Course

Australia New Zealand American Studies Association Conference
Tom Buchanan is chairing the Australia New Zealand American Studies Association Conference, July 1-4, 2010 University of Adelaide. For registrations and paper submissions please consult the organisation's website http://www.anzasa.arts.usyd.edu.au/conference/docs/index.htm

Further appointments in the School of History & Politics
In semester 2, 2010, the School of History & Politics will make a further two appointments, a Lecturer in Australian Politics / Public Policy and a Lecturer in International Studies. For further information on these positions, please visit Current Available Positions - Academic.

Georgian London Project
A striking recent development in education has been the rapid acceptance, mainly in the United States, of the multi-user virtual environment (MUVE). Educational MUVEs are an offshoot of the virtual worlds developed by online gamers for entertainment, such as the hugely popular World of Warcraft (an estimated 11.5 million players) (Blizzard, 2008). Educators use them for more scholarly purposes: to support active, inquiry-based learning and build conceptual understanding. Typically, students are able to enter a context or virtual environment and, through the use of an avatar to represent them, can interact with objects in the environment, including other student avatars and their lecturers. Well-known MUVEs which support ‘substantive teaching and learning’ (Dieterte and Clark, in press) are online spaces such as Second Life, There, Active Worlds and OpenSimulator.
For further information on this project visit the website.

High profile personalities join the School of History & Politics
Professor Alexander Downer has joined the School as a Visiting Professor after 23 years in the Federal Parliament and nearly 12 years as the Foreign Minister of Australia. He also works as an Undersecretary General of the United Nations with responsibility for the Cyprus peace talks. Alexander gives occasional lectures on politics and international relations and is happy to assist students in areas where he has real life experience. The School is giving Alexander substantial assistance with his work on Cyprus having set up a Cyprus working group which meets with him every three or four weeks.

New appointments in the School of History & Politics
Professor Kanishka Jayasuriya is currently the Acting Diretor and Principal Senior Research Fellow at the Asia Research Centre (ARC), Murdoch University. He is a graduate in political science from the University of Western Australia and obtained his PhD from the Australian National University. He has held teaching and research appointments in several Australian and overseas universities including the ANU, the Univeristy of Sydney, Murdoch University, National University of Singapore, and City University of Hong Kong.

His research interests and special expertise lie mainly in the areas of political economy, in particular, globalisation and the transformation of stage structures and law as well as changes in the global order in the post cold war era. Professor Jayasuriya will start in semester 1 2010 as the Convenor of the International Studies Program.

Dr Matt McDonald completed his Bachelor of Arts, MA and PhD degrees in the School of Political Science and International Studies at the University of Queensland, Australia. He worked at the University of New South Wales and the University of Birmingham before joining the department in April 2007. From April-June 2007 he was a visiting fellow in the Department of International Relations at the ANU.

He is currently working on an ESRC-funded project (with Richard Jackson) on justifications for military intervention in the 'war on terror' by the leaders of the US, UK and Australia. He is also working on a project exploring the relationship between environmental change and security, and is coordinating a Warwick International Security Initiative project on the relationship between climate change and security. His general area of research interest is in critical approaches to security. He has published and organised workshops and panels on this theme (for example ISA, 2007), and serves on the editorial board of the new journal, Critical Studies on Terrorism. He is co-editor (with Anthony Burke) of Critical Security in the Asia-Pacific (Manchester UP 2007).

Online courses in Art History
Australian art will be taught online in semester 1, and Australian Indigenous art will be taught online in semester 2. These courses will continue the innovative approach of the oncampus courses, with Gallery sessions given in the Art Gallery also being available online.

European art since the Renaissance and Japanese art will be taught online from 2011. Each online course will have a 2 hour online tutorial each week on Thursday evenings from 7:00 - 9:00pm central Australian time.

2010 Summer School Course
The United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights embodies an ideal based on a recognition of the 'inalienable rights of all members of the human family'. That ideal is one which emerges from the profoundly important mission of imagining and realising a global human dignity. It's an ideal which is couched in a language and an imagination of global goals and aspirations and a universal human family. But that language does not exist in a political vacuum. It does not exist above or outside of ideology. There are many contentious issues related to the issue of universal human rights, and many ideological battlegrounds. This course will engage with some of these issues, primarily through a postcolonial theoretical lens. The course will explore some postcolonial critiques of dominant human rights discourses, and other related critiques too. Broadly, questions of whether absolutist frameworks are adequate to ethical and rights based issues will be addressed with the aim of critically examining what constitutes an appropriate imagination for the aspirations of the human family. For further information see the course planner.