The incoming Director of University of Sydney’s China Studies Centre Professor Kerry Brown explores the new leadership of the Chinese Communist Party in China. He offers an assessment of the Hu and Wen period, and suggests how the future leaders will deal with a transition into an era in which the greatest challenges will be socio-political. SPEAKER: Kerry Brown, Professor of Chinese Politics at the University of Sydney
Oct 16, 2012•1 hr 2 min
Journalist Stephen Crittenden chairs a fascinating and robust conversation about the current state of Europe. What do historians say we can learn from history about how to manage the current crisis? Panellists include: Patricia Clavin, Fellow at Jesus College, Oxford; Professor Patrizia Dogliani, Professor of Contemporary and Modern European History at the University of Bologna; Dr Marco Duranti, University of Sydney; and Glenda Sluga, Professor of International History, University of Sydney. Fo...
Sep 04, 2012•1 hr 23 min
Many of those who engage with the Chinese world encounter the stories that are told about China–there is the monolithic narrative of the party-state, the multiple stories of individuals, companies, communities, and then there are the array of accounts told about China, some that try to deepen understand others that evoke. Geremie R Barmé considers how some of these stories have come to be told, by whom and for whom, and what this may mean for those who pay attention. This lecture will also intro...
May 01, 2012•1 hr 23 min
Les Malezer is from the Butchulla/Gubbi Gubbi peoples in southeast Queensland. He has extensive experience in campaigning for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander rights. On the occasion of International Human Rights Day, his presentation discusses how Aboriginal Peoples and Torres Strait Islander Peoples have greater capacity to take advantage of the legal opportunities and build social capital through ‘Indigenous Knowledges’, increasingly recognised in the United Nations Declaration on the Ri...
Dec 09, 2011•1 hr 28 min
Pablo Picasso painted his large scale Guernica (1937) in response to the bombing of the Spanish town by German and Italian forces during the Spanish Civil War. Art historian T J Clark discussed Guernica, examining how a work of such enduring political resonance emerged. He looked at the step-by-step creation of Guernica, taking advantage of the set of photographs of the work in progress taken by Dora Maar. For more info and speaker's biography see this page: http://sydney.edu.au/sydney_ideas/lec...
Jun 20, 2011•1 hr 46 min
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner Mick Gooda charts an agenda of hope that can guide us towards a reconciled Australia. Commissioner Gooda argued that effective engagement with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples should drive the work in the three key areas identified. His central thesis being, that without effective engagement the reconciliation agenda will stall. For more info and speaker's biography see this page: http://sydney.edu.au/sydney_ideas/lec...
May 30, 2011•1 hr 16 min
What do we learn when we revisit scientists' past worlds? How might one write a life as famous as Charles Darwin's? Why is biography the best-selling genre of all? Pre-eminent Darwin scholar and Harvard Professor of the History of Science Janet Browne, talks with University of Sydney historian Professor Iain McCalman, about the challenges and delights of the biographical genre for historians. In conversation with Alison Bashford, this is an evening that probes the intellectual life of these keen...
Aug 12, 2010•1 hr 17 min
Do we need our history to be global? Work, leisure, war and peace, these are some of the themes that historians are now mapping onto a global past. Join historians David Armitage, Joyce E. Chaplin and Erez Manela from Harvard University, along with Sunil Amrith from Birkbeck College, University of London, in a conversation led by Glenda Sluga from the University of Sydney, as they talk about how they approach the past globally, and hear the stories that they have to tell about our round world. F...
Jul 26, 2010•1 hr 29 min
The award-winning author and University of Sydney Alumna Kate Jennings, with her brother, Mambo founder Dare Jennings, discuss how they combine their creative passions and imaginations with a unique entrepreneurial spirit. Dare might be the most obvious entrepreneur but writers are entrepreneurial: every day the blank page, every day an act of invention. Anyone can try out an idea and throw it into the ether. But what does it take to make an idea work? ABC Radio broadcaster, writer and musician ...
Jun 30, 2010•1 hr 3 min
How to modernise art for a modern China? What ideas and practices should China adapt from the West? Such questions figured prominently in intellectual debate about modernisation at the start of the twentieth century. Within a few decades, art in China had undergone dramatic change, from conception through production to reception. This public lecture will look at Chinese art practice and art debate at the time with a focus on the first Chinese national art exhibition in Shanghai in 1929. SPEAKER:...
Apr 08, 2010•1 hr 8 min
This forum and open discussion with Australia’s leading China commentators was hosted by Dr James Reilly, Department of Government and International Relations at the University of Sydney. Participants included: Professor Michael Wesley, Executive Director of the Lowy Institute for International Policy Dr Richard Rigby, Executive Director of the ANU China Institute Dr John Garnaut, China correspondent, Sydney Morning Herald and The Age Chaired by Professor David Goodman, Chinese Politics, Univers...
Mar 11, 2010•1 hr 31 min
Confucius (traditional dates 551-479 BCE) lived during the waning years of the Zhou dynasty. He was deeply troubled by the disorder of his age and took it upon himself to teach others about Zhou virtues as well as to instruct them on how to cultivate such virtue in themselves. Confucius’s efforts mark the beginning of the traditional Chinese emphasis on education and the crucial role of self-improvement and self-cultivation in any ethical system. Some of his followers refined his teachings on th...
Oct 21, 2009•43 min
In 2004, construction began in Jerusalem on the local branch of the Los Angeles-based Museum of Tolerance, designed by the leading American architect, Frank Gehry. The museum is now being built over the remains of what had been the largest and most important Muslim cemetery in Palestine, which had been in continual use from the time of the Crusades up until 1948. Professor Saree Makdisi examines the clash between the two competing claims to the same site, and offers a paradigmatic case to explor...
Sep 22, 2009•1 hr 36 min
SPEAKER: Professor David Goodman, Professor of Chinese Politics, and Director, Institute of Social Sciences Mao Zedong (1893-1976) is best known as the founder of the People’s Republic of China. He led the Chinese Communist Party from 1935 until his death, and brought it to political power in 1949. Mao is well known as a revolutionary, a guerrilla leader, a political and military strategist and icon for post-modern art. During the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution that started in the mid-196...
Sep 02, 2009•1 hr 25 min
How does the past shape the present? Should history play a role in shaping politics today? Should we be held accountable for the wrongs of the past? Does history divide or unite us? Join prominent Australian and American scholars for an open discussion of these and other issues. Panellists will also explore how and what we remember collectively, and how this contributes to our sense of patriotism, nationalism, or indeed, alienation. With: Bob Carr, former Premier of New South Wales; Professor Da...
Jul 28, 2009•1 hr 33 min
Artist, curator and producer Fiona Winning discusses the often problematic relationship between the hard and soft infrastructure - of arts buildings and the artists and organisations that work in them. This lecture was the 2009 Rex Cramphorn Lecture. For more info and speaker's biography see this page: http://sydney.edu.au/sydney_ideas/lectures/2009/rex_cramphorn.shtml
Mar 02, 2009•1 hr 19 min
Dr Sara Roy, a senior research scholar at the Centre for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University, explained how the "stunning" economic and social changes of the past decade in Israel and the Occupied Territories have undermined the possibility of peace in the region. Dr Roy was in Australia to deliver the University of Adelaide's Edward Said Memorial Lecture. For more info and speaker's biography see this page: http://sydney.edu.au/sydney_ideas/lectures/2008/beyond_occupation.shtml
Oct 13, 2008•1 hr 26 min
Prominent Palestinian-British author and academic, Dr Ghada Karmi, had just released her book - Married to Another Man: Israel's Dilemma in Palestine, when she spoke at Sydney Ideas in 2007 to say the two-sate solution promoted by the West is no longer viable. Dr Karmi was in Australia as the presenter of the 2007 Edward Said Memorial Lecture at the University of Adelaide. For more info and speaker's biography see this page: http://sydney.edu.au/news/84.html?newsstoryid=1974
Oct 09, 2007•1 hr 35 min
UK activist, historian and author Tariq Ali took the Sydney Ideas audience through a world divided between privilege and poverty and demonstrated the situation in Latin America could not be more different to the Arab world. Both Latin America and the Arab world have sparked intense hostility from the West by challenging neoliberalism, but according to Ali, the resistance in the Middle East is divided and without the social vision to unite people. For more info and speaker's biography see this pa...
Jun 19, 2007•1 hr 36 min
In Australia to deliver the University of Adelaide's Edward Said Memorial Lecture, eminent Israeli academic, author and linguist Tanya Reinhart argued that speaking out against Israel's handling of the Palestinian conflict is the best act of solidarity one can show towards Israelis and the Jewish people. "When I think of Edward Said, I not only think about a voice of reason and justice, but also a life in exile, losing the landscape of your childhood," she said. For more info and speaker's biogr...
Oct 09, 2006•1 hr 38 min
