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.

“After the Good Life, the Impasse: Human Resources, Time Out, and the Precarious Present”

Professor Lauren Berlant, George M. Pullman Professor of English, University of Chicago

Wednesday 13 August, 6.30pm
Elisabeth Murdoch Theatre A, University of Melbourne, Parkville

For further details of this event, please contact Dr. Fiona Brideoake at fbr@unimelb.edu.au or 8344 5199

This is a paper about the fraying of a fantasy, a fantasy of “the good life.” When Margaret Thatcher announced, in 1987, that “there is no such thing as society” but only “individual men and women and . . . families,” she described the cultural program that accompanied the waning of the social democratic contract that had shaped, with variation, Western global economic policy since the end of World War II.  But the fantasy of meritocracy, of a national, economic, and intimate world that would reward hard work and good intentions so that people could think about life as a process of adding up to something, has worn out less quickly than the economic, political, and material infrastructure that supported it.  This talk takes two films by Laurent Cantet that document the intimate experience of the wearing out of that fantasy, the normative good life fantasy that sustained heterosexual intimacies in their most minute gestures for the last half century. All over Europe now, the word “precarity” stands for an alliance amongst everyone living the fraying of “the good life"” as a political promise and romantic fantasy:  the paper frames its investigation of the post-normative by questioning whether precarity describes well enough the new conditions of alliance that might produce not only new politics, but new fantasies about individual and collective flourishing.

Lauren Berlant is the George M. Pullman Professor of English and Chair of the Lesbian and Gay Studies Project at the University of Chicago. Her publications include a trilogy on national sentimentality in American culture -- The Anatomy of National Fantasy (Chicago, 1991), The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (Duke, 1997), and The Female Complaint: the Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture (Duke, 2008). Her interest in collective attachments and affects is followed throughout the edited volumes Intimacy (Chicago, 2000); Our Monica, Ourselves: Clinton and the Affairs of State (with Lisa Duggan, NYU, 2001); and Compassion: the Culture and Politics of an Emotion (Routledge, 2004). Professor Berlant is co-editor of the journal Critical Inquiry, and has recently edited two special issues of the journal entitled On the Case, which bring together leading thinkers to examine the “case”—the standard unit in law, medicine, psychoanalysis, the humanities, the sciences, and popular culture.

'Classical Myth and a New Zealand poet, James K. Baxter'

Professor John Davidson, Victoria University of Wellington (Norman Macgeorge Visiting Speaker)

Thursday 2 October 2008, 5.30pm
Old Arts Theatre A, University of Melbourne, Parkville

James K. Baxter (1926-1972) is one of New Zealand's best known poets and certainly the most prolific. From an early age he was attracted to the stories from classical and other myth systems (especially Norse and Indian) and applied them to the New Zealand context in which he was operating. The lecture will begin with a brief overview of Baxter's life. This will be followed by a consideration of the significance of myth in his writing in general, and an examination of his use of classical mythological figures throughout his career. Emphasis will be placed on early figures of the self (such as Icarus and Prometheus), female figures (especially the love goddess Venus/Aphrodite, the witch-woman figure personified by Medusa in particular, and mother Earth), Bacchus/Dionysus, hero figures (especially Odysseus), and Death. Attention will be paid to these figures as they relate both to Baxter himself and the creation of his own personal mythology (and the mythology of his personal relationships), and also to his scathing criticism of New Zealand society in the 1950s and 1960s for what he saw as its deadening monotony, puritanism, and support for militarism. Mention will also be made of his use of the same approach in the writing of some of the dramas of his second Dunedin period. It will be noted that Baxter's engagement with classical myth continued even into the final years of his life in which he increasingly identified with the values of the Maori way of life and Maori myth.

John Davidson is Professor of Classics, and Head of the School of Art History, Classics, and Religious Studies at the Victoria University of Wellington. His research interests include ancient Greek drama and myth, particularly the relationship between tragedy and Homeric texts. He has also published widely on classical myth in antipodean contexts, especially in the poetry of James K. Baxter, and is currently engaged in a major project that will culminate in a book-length study of Baxter and the use of classical mythology in his poetry and dramas.

This public lecture will be presented as part of the international conference "Refashioning Myth: Poetic Transformations and Metamorphoses".
For further details, see http://www.culture-communication.unimelb.edu.au/conferences.html

'The Promise of Art / The Place of Art: Can the "Other" of Art History Speak?'

Professor Claire Farago, University of Colorado at Boulder

Thursday 16 October 2008, 6.30pm
Elisabeth Murdoch Theatre A, University of Melbourne, Parkville 0

Critical understanding of the institutional history of the discipline of art history calls for integrated attempts to define the issues that produced the narratives of our current disciplinary formations. The fundamental lesson for historians today is the responsibility to recognize the undigested projections of past generations in our present-day theoretical extensions of existing scholarship. For the visual sign does not necessarily "reveal" its meaning -- the visual hides as much as it shows. This lecture opens with a series of questions regarding the ethical responsibilities of art historians towards their subjects of study and their present-day audiences. It then examines, through a series of strategic case studies, how the modern European definition of art was the product of a complex weave of changing attitudes towards human knowledge in the Early Modern era, arguing that theories of images were refocused to a concern with the mentality of image-maker during this time, setting up new cultural barriers as well as expanding previous European horizons. It concludes by asking how the historical complexities of collective identity formation and dissolution might re-organize research protocols at the institutional level.

Claire Farago is Professor of Renaissance art, theory, and criticism at the University of Colorado at Boulder. She has published widely on art theory and historiography and on the manuscripts of Leonardo da Vinci, including Leonardo da Vinci’s Paragone: A Critical Interpretation (1992), Reframing the Renaissance: Visual Culture in Europe and Latin America 1450 to 1650 (1995), Compelling Visuality: The Work of Art in and out of History, co-edited with Robert Zwijnenberg (2003), Grasping the World: The Idea of the Museum, co-edited with Donald Preziosi (2004), and Transforming Images: New Mexican Santos in-between Worlds, co-authored with Donna Pierce (2006). Her most recent book, Leonardo da Vinci and the Ethics of Style, is an edited volume due to appear in September 2008. Another edited volume to be published in 2009, Re-Reading Leonardo: The Treatise on Painting across Europe from 1550-1900, combines the work of 20 scholars from eight countries to assess the varied historical reception of Leonardo’s influential writings during the era of academic artistic instruction and nation-state formation. The project that brings her to Australia as Macgeorge Fellow at the University of Melbourne is a book-length provocation co-authored with her husband Donald Preziosi on the idea of art in the present era of globalization.

The Cultural Politics of Blogs and Web 2.0

Geert Lovink

Tuesday, 16th December 4.30
Theatrette 1 in the Economics & Commerce Building University of Melbourne

What's left of Web 2.0 in time of financial meltdown and economic crisis? Are new media part of the problem called global capitalism or do they contribute to the development of a more equal, sustainable society? How do we research these web spheres, populated by millions of users? These are some questions that need to be asked before we return to the realtime craze of Twitter, Flickr, blogging and social networking that have dominated Internet culture over the past years.

What are the strategic questions for critical media theory for the next years?

Geert Lovink, founding director of the Institute of Network Cultures, is a Dutch-Australian media theorist and critic. He holds a PhD from the University of Melbourne and in 2003 was at the Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies, University of Queensland. In 2004, Lovink was appointed as Research Professor at the Hogeschool van Amsterdam and Associate Professor at University of Amsterdam. He is the founder of Internet projects such as nettime and fibreculture. His recent book titles are Dark Fiber (2002), Uncanny Networks (2002) and My First Recession (2003). In 2005-06 he was a fellow at the Berlin Institute for Advanced Study where he finished his third volume on critical Internet culture, Zero Comments (2007) that also came out in Italian and German translations.


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