Presented by Nick Eckstein and Sophie Loy-Wilson, both of the History Department at the University of Sydney, HWIR? asks why historians do what they do.
What makes someone study modern China, colonial Australia, renaissance Italy, the indigenous peoples of Canada, or freedom fighters in West Papua?
Why do historians become obsessed by their subject, and can they ever really find out "how it really was" in the past?
HWIR? asks how talking to the past changes the present, and how it transforms the way we think about ourselves today.
Nick Eckstein
Cassamarca Associate Professor Nick Eckstein is a historian of Renaissance and Early-Modern Italy in the History Department at the University of Sydney.
Sophie Loy-Wilson
Dr Sophie Loy-Wilson is a Senior Lecturer in the History Department at the University of Sydney, where she specialises in the social and cultural history of Australia’s engagement with China.
Series Producer: Peter Adams
Theme Music:
Performed by Dr Vanessa Witton
Written & Produced By
Dr Vanessa Witton / Peter Adams
Additional spoken introductions: Dr Vanessa Witton
When a pandemic plague hit Florence in 1630, why were city health officers worried about smells?
When the pandemic plague hit, the first action taken by the government was to impose an emergency lockdown. It was known that the disease could pass from person to person, so movement and personal contact were strictly controlled. If you developed symptoms, if you had been in contact with someone who had symptoms, if you had been somewhere the disease was known to be present, you were isolated or forced to remain indoors. Australia 2020? No, this is Florence, 1630. But why were Florentines so frightened of bad smells? And why did the health office create a walking map of their city?
About Nick Eckstein - Nick Eckstein is Cassamarca Associate Professor of Renaissance History in the History Department at Sydney University. His research and publications emphasise the social and cultural history of renaissance and early-modern Italy. Recently he has published articles on the ways in which early modern Italians responded to plague. He is currently writing a book on the same subject, provisionally entitled Plague Time: Space, Fear and Emergency Statecraft in Early-Modern Italy. With Sophie Loy-Wilson, Nick is the regular co-host of How Was It Really. Reading for this episode Nicholas A. Eckstein, ‘Florence on Foot: An Eye-Level Mapping of the Early Modern City in Time of Plague’, Renaissance Studies 30, no. 2 (1 April 2016): 273–97, https://doi.org/10.1111/rest.12144 (https://doi.org/10.1111/rest.12144).
4 May 2021
How did West Papuan people become invisible?
In geographical terms, the island of Papua New Guinea is one of Australia's closest neighbours. Yet most Australians know little about it, and we know even less about the island's western half, named West Papua. Why is West Papua not on our radar? Why do we - and for that matter, much of the world's population - not 'see' West Papua and its people?
In this HWIR, one of Sydney's most courageous young historians, Emma Kluge, lays bare the West Papuan people's heroic struggle to be seen, to be heard, and to speak for themselves. How did they become invisible in the first place? What does it mean to be "twice colonised"? And can a scholar who is not West Papuan write a West Papuan history?
About Emma Kluge - Dr Emma Kluge is a PhD graduate of the History Department at the University of Sydney, where she completed her doctoral thesis on West Papua's struggle for independence in the 1960s and 1970s. Learn more about the themes discussed in this episode by reading Emma's recent article: Emma Kluge, ‘West Papua and the International History of Decolonization, 1961-69’, The International History Review 42, no. 6 (1 November 2020): 1155–72, https://doi.org/10.1080/07075332.2019.1694052 (https://doi.org/10.1080/07075332.2019.1694052).
13 Apr 2021
Why did the duck go to the Canadian supreme court?
Sometimes progressive politics and good intentions create unexpected consequences for the marginal groups they are supposed to help. In this HWIR Sydney historian, Miranda Johnson, talks with Nick and Sophie about indigenous identity in Canada, land rights, and stories that resonate powerfully with the experience of aboriginal people in Australia. How did the concept of the "Treaty Indian" emerge? What is "Treaty Talk"? How does language erase some people's experience while giving licence and agency to others? And what happened when indigenous Dene man, Michael Sikyea, shot the Million Dollar Duck?
About Miranda Johnson - Dr Miranda Johnson is a leading historian of the modern Pacific world who focuses on issues of race, indigeneity citizenship and identity. She author of The Land is Our History: Indigeneity, Law and the Settler State (Oxford University Press, 2016), which won the 2018 Hancock Prize from the Australian Historical Association. Since this HWIR was recorded, Dr Miranda Johnson, a historian in the History Department at the University of Sydney, has returned to her original home in New Zealand. She is now at the University of Christchurch. The conversation in this episode draws on a major article by Miranda Johnson that was published in the American Historical Review. Find it here: Reading for this episode Miranda Johnson, ‘The Case of the Million-Dollar Duck: A Hunter, His Treaty, and the Bending of the Settler Contract’, The American Historical Review 124, no. 1 (1 February 2019): 56–86, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhy576 (https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhy576).
12 Apr 2021
How do you build your own personal archive of China's Cultural Revolution?
When she began Saturday-morning Chinese language classes as a 7-year-old, Minerva Inwald could hardly have imagined what she would be doing in far-off 2010. That year would find her in Beijing, entirely on her own, a doctoral candidate tracking down the rapidly vanishing material evidence of China's Cultural Revolution. Trawling markets for artistic ephemera, buying up runs of revolutionary newsletters, listening to the memories of those who were there, Minerva amassed her own archive of a tumultuous historical moment. In this HWIR episode, we meet a scholar who is also a collector, who interprets China's history by assembling objects from its recent past.
About Minerva Inwald - Dr Minerva Inwald is a Research Affiliate in the Department of History at The University of Sydney. Her research focuses on the cultural history of the People's Republic of China. As of May 2021 she is Judith Neilson Post-Doctoral Fellow in Contemporary Art at UNSW. She is co-author of the book Floating Time: Chinese Prints, 1954–2002 (Sydney: Power Publications, 2016). She was co-curator of the exhibitions Provocations: Avant-Garde Art in China in the 1980s (2017) and Floating Time: Chinese Prints, 1954–2002 (2016).
7 Apr 2021
How close could prostitutes get to nuns in Renaissance Florence?
The DECIMA Project, based at the University of Toronto, is a mapping tool that allows 21st-century humans to explore the streets and piazzas of Florence as it was in the 16th century. Where did Florentine bakers live and work? What did a Florentine household look like? Did contemporary citizens worry about noise? Was there a red light district, or did the city's sex workers live among the rest of the Florentine population? These are just some of the issues that come up in our conversation with our guest Nick Terpstra, for this episode of HWIR.
About Nick Terpstra - Professor of History at the University of Toronto, Nicholas Terpstra, is one of the world's leading historians of early-modern Italy. His many articles and pathbreaking books explore themes related to gender, politics, charity, religion, civil and uncivil society, and religious refugees. Most recently he has led the DECIMA project that is the subject of his interview for HWIR. An innovative online mapping tool, the DECIMA project brings early modern social realities and relations into view as never before. Find out more about DECIMA: You can learn more about DECIMA, and explore the digital mapping tool of Florence for yourself, by clicking on this link: https://decima-map.net/ (https://decima-map.net/)
6 Apr 2021
What is an "archive of grievance"? And did the Chinese miners get to keep their gold?
In the first episode of HWIR, Dr Sophie Loy-Wilson talks about how people remember, and how nations forget. We learn how Sophie's own experience as a young girl in Beijing inspired a lifelong fascination with history, and how her interest in both China and Australia led to the rediscovery of a forgotten injustice.
About Sophie Loy-Wilson - Sophie Loy-Wilson is a Senior Lecturer in Australian history at the University of Sydney. Sophie’s research and publications all seek to read Australian history through non-Anglo lens, with a particular focus on Asian-Australian and Chinese-Australian visions of Australia’s past. This has led her to economic history, and she has researched widely in Chinese Australian business history and social history, especially in her work on Chinese shopkeepers and the Kwok family business empire; focusing on business history reveals a ‘shadow economy’ of Chinese Australian social life previously kept hidden from view. Together with Hannah Forsyth, she has called for a ‘New Materialist’ approach to Australian history in a co-written article in Australian Historical Studies (2017).
Recent books and articles include a study of Chinese Australian Daisy Kwok and her life in China before and after the 1949 Revolution in Julia Martinez and Kate Bagnall edited collection, Chinese Women: Historical Mobility between China and Australia, and a Special Issue of Labour History co-edited with Hannah Forsyth on the New History of Capitalism in Australia entitled ‘Getting the Politics Right.’ Article Sophie Loy-Wilson, ‘Coolie Alibis: Seizing Gold from Chinese Miners in New South Wales’, International Labor and Working-Class History 91 (ed 2017): 28–45, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0147547916000338 (https://doi.org/10.1017/S0147547916000338).
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