Public lectures

Dr Patrick Greene, 'What makes a great museum in the 21st Century?'

Professor Homi Bhabha, 'On Global Memory: Speculations on Barbaric Transmission'

Professor Homi Bhabha's Miegunyah Lecture in the Carillo Gantner Theatre was not retrievable due to a technical failure and a corrupt disc. Professor Bhabha is currently editing his lecture for publication in a journal, to be published by Mebourne University Press in January 2009. Professor Bhabha will also be re-recording part of his lecture, to be downloaded from this page, details to follow soon

Click here to Download Professor Terry Eagleton's lecture

Click here to Download Joanna Bourke's lecture - 'Sexual Atrocity in War: Reflections on Twentieth-Century Violence' Joanna Bourke is Professor of History at Birkbeck College, University of London, an internationally renowned cultural historian and a frequent TV and radio broadcaster in the UK.

Inaugural Professorial Lecture
'Imagining Sameness and Difference: Domestic and Colonial Sisters in Jane Austen's Mansfield Park'

Professor Deirdre Coleman, University of Melbourne

Monday 19 May, 6.30-7.30 pm
Theatre A, Elisabeth Murdoch Building

Readings of Mansfield Park which link the novel to empire and to Britain’s heavy investment in the slave trade have assumed centre stage in the last decade, so much so that there is now a discernible backlash. This lecture re-visits the debate by situating Mansfield Park within the abolitionist movement’s sentimental appeal to universal principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity, all of which engaged several key philosophical and political issues, such as the imagining of kinship, claims to personhood, and the vexed relations of equality and difference.
 

Deirdre Coleman completed Honours in English at the University of Melbourne before going to Oxford University where she graduated with a BPhil (1979) in Victorian literature and a DPhil (1986) on Coleridge's journalism. Since returning to Australia she has taught at the Universities of Wollongong, Adelaide and Sydney. She is the author of several books, including most recently Romantic Colonization and British Anti-Slavery (Cambridge University Press, 2005). She has published widely on eighteenth and nineteenth-century literature and cultural history, particularly in the areas of abolitionism, racial ideology, women's travel writing, colonialism and natural history. In December 2006 she was appointed Robert Wallace Chair of English at the University of Melbourne.

'The Sins of the Fathers: Iconoclasm in Melbourne and Massachusetts'

Professor James Simpson, Douglas P. and Katharine B. Loker Professor of English, Harvard University

Tuesday 20 May, 6.30-7.30 pm
Theatre A, Elisabeth Murdoch Building

Iconoclasm is not “somewhere else.” Instead, it lies buried deep within Western modernity, and especially deep within the Anglo-American tradition. This tradition insistently and violently repudiates idols and images as dangerous carriers of the old regime. The repudiation takes different but analogous forms across the centuries from the sixteenth to the twentieth. In this lecture I focus on some examples of American Abstract Expressionism. I argue that these paintings can only be understood within longer traditions of iconoclastic modernity. Such images might be displayed in the protected spaces of the museum, but they bear the scars of a tradition deeply hostile to the image.

James Simpson is Donald P. and Katherine B. Loker Professor of English at Harvard University (2004-). He was formerly based at the University of Cambridge, where he was successively a University Lecturer in English (1989-1999) and Chair of Medieval and Renaissance English (1999-2003). He is a Life Fellow of Fellow of Girton College and an Honorary Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. He was educated at Scotch College Melbourne, Melbourne University (BA) and Oxford University (MPhil). He holds a doctorate from the University of Cambridge. His books are as follows: Piers Plowman: An Introduction to the B-Text (Longman, 1990) (second, revised edition, 2007); Sciences and the Self in Medieval Poetry (Cambridge University Press, 1995); Reform and Cultural Revolution, being volume 2 in the Oxford English Literary History (Oxford University Press, 2002) (winner of the British Academy Sir Israel Gollancz Prize, 2007); and Burning to Read: English Fundamentalism and its Reformation Opponents (Harvard University Press, 2007)

'State, Nation, Economy, Democracy: Conflicting Temporalities'

Associate Professor Wayne Hope, Associate Professor of Communication Studies, Auckland University of Technology

Tuesday 24 June, 4.30-5.30 pm
Room 216A, John Medley Building

The ICT driven, real time tendencies of global capitalism are historically distinctive but they are not ineluctable. I will argue that such tendencies generate uncertainty and instability; fast, short term profits undermine long term strategies of capital accumulation. In this respect the structures and activities of global capitalism are riven by temporal contradictions. Such is evident between and within different fractions of capital. Fast and long term imperatives also conflict within transnational corporations and business administration. On a global scale the clash between different cultural traditions of capitalism reflects opposing temporal logics of accumulation and reinvestment. How then do these temporal contradictions play out empirically? My response to this question explores the general idea that spatio-temporal fixes enable the cohesion and reproduction of capitalist systems. To this end I will point out that under global capitalism spatio-temporal fixes cannot be guaranteed. There are no built in synchronicities connecting state, nation, economy and society. Global networks of finance, production and corporate governance may weaken the synchronicities between nation, state, economy and society and exacerbate the temporal fissures within nation, state, economy and society. From these observations I will argue that state centred constructions of time and temporality are weakening against the general real time tendencies of global capitalism. This sharpens temporal conflicts within the nationally circumscribed state. As upper reaches of the nation state respond to the temporal urgency of capital flows and corporate decision making the marginalised national polity is answerable to the slower temporal rhythms of representative assembly, the election cycle, public policy formation and civil society. Finally, against this background I will suggest that worldwide coalitions opposed to ruling global interests are also riven by conflicting temporalities.  

Wayne Hope is Associate Professor of Communication Studies at the Auckland University of Technology, New Zealand. His areas of research include public sphere analysis, political economy of communication, sport-media relationships and globalisation. He has published on these themes internationally and in the context of recent New Zealand history. He is at present writing a series of linked essays on temporality and global capitalism.   

'Strange Intimations'

Associate Professor Adam Frank, Associate Professor of English, University of British Columbia

Monday 30 June, 6.30-7.30 pm
Theatre D, Old Arts Building

This paper explores the ways that television has been described and understood as a socio-affective steersman or cybernetic object and agent in the second half of the 20th century. Mid-century cybernetics and systems theory, a transdisciplinary enterprise including anthropologists, mathematicians, neurophysiologists, psychoanalysts, and engineers, aimed to theorize communication and control and offered ways to imagine linking biological and other physical processes with social or cultural networks. This heady mix of theory served as a crucial background context for thinking about television as a figure for powerfully intimate affective experience or transferential relations. My paper will read the appearance of television in Norbert Wiener’s Cybernetics (1948) and Andy Warhol’s The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (1975), bringing Silvan Tomkins' affect theory together with the late Foucault's writing on subjectivation and “the care of the self” to unfold the implications of the context of cybernetics for thinking about the phenomena of television.

‘Game Theory (and beyond)’

Associate Professor McKenzie Wark, New School for Social Research and Eugene Lang College, New York

Monday 21 July, 4.30-5.30 pm
Theatrette 3, Economics and Commerce Building

The study of culture faces two problems. One is to embrace new problems, new sites of conflict and development, in ways that do not merely add these to traditional approaches to the study of culture, but transform them. The other problem is to retain a critical edge to the study of culture, to prevent critical theory from slipping into hypocritical theory. I will broach both problems - which I do not pretend to have solved - with reference to three recent bodies of work that look at questions of intellectual property, computer games, and the intellectual legacy of the Situationist International, the last of the avant gardes.

McKenzie Wark is the author of A Hacker Manifesto (Harvard UP), Gamer Theory (Harvard UP), 50 Years of Recuperation: the Situationist International (Princeton Architectural) among other things. Originally from Australia, he currently teaches at the New School for Social Research and Eugene Lang College in New York City.

 

 

top of page