Humanities Australia No. 10

Australian Academy of the Humanities 2019-12-04

We are delighted to launch the 10th edition of Humanities Australia coinciding with the our 50th anniversary year. Our anniversary, like our journal, provides an opportunity for us to celebrate the work of our humanities researchers and to think about the role our disciplines will play in ensuring a humanised future for all.

Established in 2010, Humanities Australia is the Academy’s flagship journal, showcasing some of the outstanding research and writing being carried out by our Fellows. It is an essential part of our commitment to supporting excellence in the humanities and communicating their value to the public.

The articles in this year’s edition span a number of disciplines, including history, linguistics, classical studies, English literature, Islamic studies and archaeology and they all refer, in different ways, to the theme of the Academy’s 50th anniversary celebrations: ‘Humanising the Past, Present and Future’. Whether through charting the history of the idea of ‘civilisation’, or examining how we communicate with our international counterparts, or exploring how we can look to the past to find new categories of interpretation, the articles in this edition look forward explicitly to how the humanities can play their role in fostering a truly human future despite the challenges which both the humanities in particular and the world in general will face in the next 50 years.

In addition to articles by our Fellows, this edition of Humanities Australia features edited versions of several of our key lectures including the annual Academy Lecture, the Trendall Lecture and the Hancock lecture and we are pleased to be able offer readers an accessible platform to engage with these addresses.

We hope that you enjoy reading the essays, poems and reflections on display in this edition and that they can begin to convey the excitement we feel about research in the humanities and its potential to address important issues.

In this edition:

Editor’s Introduction, by Graham Tulloch FAHA

Turning the Level of Civilisation Up – A Twenty-first Century Challenge, the 49th Annual Academy Lecture, by Julianne Schultz AM FAHA

Australians and Americans Talking, by Michael Haugh FAHA

Literature, History, Value: The Case of British Romanticism, by William Christie FAHA

The Force of Tradition in Early Greek Poetry and Painting, the 20th Trendall Lecture by Anne Mackay

Hybrid Civilisations or Clash of Civilisations: Rethinking the Muslim Other, the 8th Hancock Lecture by Raihan Ismail

Aleppo and the Clash of Civilisations, by Ross Burns FAHA

An Odyssey through Time: Nicolas Baudin’s Long Haul by Jean Fornasiero FAHA

Surveyors by John Kinsella FAHA

Download the entire edition.