The organising committee is pleased announce that Dr. Alastair Blanshard, Dr. Sarah Pinto and Dr. Ian Hasketh have each agreed to deliver Key Note Addresses at Perspectives on Progress, 2013.
Dr. Blanshard is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Classics and Ancient History at the University of Sydney. His most recent monograph is Sex, Vice, and Love from Antiquity to Modernity (Wiley Blackwell, 2010). In addition to his work on ancient sexuality, Dr. Blanshard is also concerned with examining the role that the classical past plays in the history of ideas.
Dr. Pinto is a Lecturer in Australian History at the University of Queensland’s School of History, Philosophy, Religion and Classics. She has published extensively on the history of emotions, history & gender, and historical fiction, including a chapter in the forthcoming Kate Grenville: Essays and Interviews.
Dr. Hesketh is a postdoctoral research fellow based at the University of Queensland’s Centre for the History of European Discourses currently working on the “Science, Progress and History” project, funded by the Templeton World Charity Foundation. Most broadly, his research considers the relationship between history, science, and religion in nineteenth-century Britain. His publications include Of Apes and Ancestors: Evolution, Christianity, and the Oxford Debate (University of Toronto Press 2009), and The Science of History in Victorian Britain (Pickering & Chatto, 2011). Dr. Hesketh was also the Assistant Editor and Project Manager of The Oxford History of Historical Writing. (Oxford University Press, 2011–12).
Call for Papers
In 1968, historian Sidney Pollard defined the Victorian ideal of ‘progress’ as, “the assumption that a pattern of change exists in the history of mankind… that it consists of irreversible changes in one direction only, and that this direction is towards improvement.” Despite the increasingly problematic nature of this ideal, the ‘progress myth’ still remains pervasive in the Western cultural tradition.
This postgraduate and early career researcher conference seeks to promote innovative interdisciplinary dialogues interrogating the concept of progress by bringing together scholars from across the humanities and social sciences.
Contributions are invited from disciplines ranging from history, classics, religion and philosophy through literary, media and cultural studies to anthropology, psychology and political science. Conference delegates will be invited to consider how the idea of progress influences their own work, while being given the opportunity to explore how this intersects with scholarship in other disciplines.
The conference committee invites proposals for papers in the form of an abstract of between 250 and 300 words to perspectivesonprogress2013@gmail.com by 31 May 2013. Paper format is a 20 minute paper with a 10 minute period for questions and answers.
Please see the original call for papers for more information.