The Cultural History Project of the University of the Queensland (UQ) brings together faculty members who practice cultural history in its various forms, supports their multidisciplinary conversations and collaborations, and provides new opportunities to enhance their national and international profiles. Established with strategic funding from UQ in 2008, the Project enjoys the support of the Faculty of Arts and its four Schools, and has links with the Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies and the Centre for the History of European Discourses. The members of the Project coordinate discussions, group meetings, and other forms of research stimulus in areas of current or emerging prominence in their field. These groups bring together colleagues who share research interests in global modernity and cultural expression, cross-cultural encounters in the modern Pacific, television studies, American studies, and the interplay of democracy, public discourse and foreign policy in world history. In July 2010 the Project will host a two day conference called, Clint Eastwood: Monument of American Cinema. In 2009 the UQ Cultural History Project hosted the second conference of the International Society for Cultural History. It also convenes public lectures and seminars by local and visiting cultural historians and workshops for UQ postgraduates and staff. To maximize their research impact and community outreach, recordings of these events, along with other research-related materials, are freely available in the Project’s open-access collection.
Cultural History
Cultural history describes a group of research-subjects, approaches and assumptions which have emerged as shared concerns of the humanities over the last thirty years. Two related developments have brought about this convergence. History as a discipline has been affected by a so-called “cultural turn.” For much of the previous century historians had commonly viewed culture as the product of relations between social classes or of economic conditions, which, they believed, were the primary determinants of reality and historical change. From the late 1970s historians began challenging those assumptions. They showed how conceptions of, for example, class, national character, or sexuality helped constitute the human behaviors which they purportedly only described. Cultural history has moved from the periphery to the mainstream of the discipline.
A contemporaneous development has been the “historical turn” in literary studies, the visual arts, and media and cultural studies. This move enhances and extends previous approaches which tended to focus principally on texts, images, or genres with ones which seek to integrate objects of culture into the “social context” of their production and first interpretations. Scholars of ancient theater, for example, study how Greek tragedies confounded the mentality of their original audiences, art historians consider how paintings bear out the larger developments of their day, and cultural-studies scholars turn to the production-histories of the contemporary media which they are studying to account for their particular patterns. Many practitioners of this contextualizing of texts and images consider their research to be a form of cultural history.
Networking UQ Cultural Historians
This convergence of subjects, approaches and assumptions provides an opportunity to encourage dialogue across disciplines of the humanities and social sciences. In the Faculty of Arts at UQ researchers are already producing high-quality cultural history in its various manifestations. But we are regularly unaware of others conducting cultural history which touches on our own research,and hence miss opportunities for collaboration beyond our Disciplines, Schools, and Centers. The UQ Cultural History Project seeks to assist members of the Faculty reap the benefits of collaboration which cultural history can facilitate. It does so, in part, by encouraging dialogue across the Faculty. Such conversations help us identify – and test the scholarly validity of – discipline-based assumptions which inform our explanations. They also provide fresh ideas and new insights for understanding and explaining the particular cultural phenomena we are studying. Finally, by bringing cultural historians together the UQ Cultural History Project builds capacity to investigate a solitary case study from multiple perspectives, or a common research question across a number of case studies.
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Associate Professor Chris Dixon (Co-ordinator)
Publications
Chris Dixon’s principal research and teaching interests are in the cultural history of the United States. A graduate of the University of Western Australia and the University of New south Wales, Chris’s first two books explored the social and cultural dimensions of racial and gender reform during the pre-Civil War period. He has also co-authored text-books dealing with the Pacific and Indochinese wars, and has written on the cultural history of the Vietnam War.
Chris is currently working on several collaborative projects exploring cultural aspects of the Pacific War, and he has a developing interest in the history of African Americans’ involvement in the Vietnam War. Prior to taking up his appointment at the University of Queensland in 2007, Chris worked at the Universities of New South Wales, Sydney, and Newcastle, as well as Massey University in New Zealand. At the University of Queensland Chris is based in the School of History, Philosophy, Religion, and Classics.
Associate Professor Chris Dixon
School of History, Philosophy, Religion & Classics (HPRC)
Office: Forgan Smith E332
Phone: (+61 7) 3365 2162
Email: c.dixon1@uq.edu.au
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Dr. Prudence Ahrens
Publications
Prue Ahrens’ research interests lie mainly in the history of cross-cultural exchange, particularly case histories of Euro-American and Pacific encounters. Her publications in the field explore the impact of nineteenth century European missionary work in Pacific Islands, American presence in the Pacific during WWII, and the impact of Polynesian communities on Australian cultures.
Prue is currently investigating case histories which relate to Pacific experiences of Euro-American urbanisation, monetarism and cultural modernity, and is working collaboratively on projects exploring the cultural aspects of Australian and American maritime crossings of the Pacific Ocean.
Dr (Prue) Prudence Ahrens
School of English, Media Studies and Art History
Office: 528 Michie
Phone: (+61 7) 3365 2710
Email: p.ahrens@uq.edu.au
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Associate Professor Jason Jacobs
Publications
Jason Jacobs is a cultural historian of screen media focusing particularly on television, film and computer screens. A graduate of the University of Warwick and the University of East Anglia in the UK, his first book explored the relations between aesthetics, technology and institutions in the development of early television.
His second book examined contemporary anxieties about the body as they were played out on screen. He is currently working on several projects that explore the evaluation and judgment of emerging media, including a book on the origins of the commodity form of television.
Associate Professor Jason Jacobs
School of English, Media Studies and Art History
Office: 604 Michie
Phone: (+61 7) 3365 2960
Email: j.jacobs@uq.edu.au
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Dr David Pritchard
Publications
David Pritchard is a cultural and social historian of ancient Greece. His publications have investigated the evolving shared idenitites of classical Athenians, cultural and educational participation under the Athenian democracy, the position of Attic women, and the ancient Olympic Games. Before joining the Cultural History Project in July 2008, David held postdoctoral research fellowships at the University of Sydney and Macquarie University where he gained a PhD and University Medal in Ancient History.
David is currently estimating systematically the monetary costs of festivals and war in classical Athens and exploring how the open debates and popular culture of its democracy fed directly into the achievements and costly excesses of its war-making. In addition he is finalising a sole-authored book on the relationship between sport and war in classical Athens and has been contracted to write another on the cultural and institutional history of the armed forces of Athens during the fifth century BC.
Dr David Pritchard
Discipline of Classics and Ancient History
School of History, Philosophy, Religion and Classics
Office: 318 Michie
Phone: (+61 7) 3365 3338
Email: d.pritchard@uq.edu.au
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