Validating Historical Voyeurism: A Case for Archival Work
Lecture
While much great academic work happens exclusively in the mind, any sort of detailed, original historical research requires archival work, often in far-flung, remote locations with limited opening hours, complicated catalogues, and seemingly arbitrary rules. This masterclass explores the challenges…
Inversion: On Some Poetics and Politics in the Discourse of the Sublime
Lecture
Presented by the ANU Humanities Research Centre This talk looks into how language works in the discourse of the sublime, zeroing on the figure of inversion from Longinus to Milton’s Paradise Lost (read through Edmund Burke) to Friedrich Hölderlin and beyond. Inversion emerges as a…
Haunting History: Past Possibles and Possible Pasts
Lecture
Presented as part of the Humanities Research Centre Seminar Series This paper uses works of fiction and of history to argue for a deconstructive approach to the past. If the past has an ontology, it is a latent ontology that is activated when one does history. Here, it is the presence of past…
German Studies Association of Australia (GSAA) International Conference
Conference
German Studies Association of Australia (GSAA)International Conference30 November – 2 December 2016Australian National University, Canberra The Australian National University is delighted to host the 2016 International Conference of the German Studies Association of Australia (GSAA) in…
Urban Discourse: City space, city language, city planning
Lecture
Eco-semiotic approaches to planning urban sustainability (with a look at the current transformation of the Tempelhof airport into a refugee camp). Sustainable urban planning is to be understood as a communicative process, which interlinks city architecture, technology, city district management and…
Exotic Words: A Typology of Splits
Lecture
Presented as part of the Linguistics Seminar Series Different forms of a word often express grammatical meaning through inflection in a perfectly transparent way: adding -s to a verb like talk or play gives the 3rd person singular present tense (s/he talks, s/he plays), and adding -ed gives the…
Book Launch: A Difficult Neighbourhood
Meeting
A Difficult Neighbourhood Essays on Russia and East-Central Europesince World War II Through a series of essays on key events in recent years in Russia, the western ex-republics of the USSR and the countries of the one-time Warsaw Pact, John Besemeres seeks to illuminate the…