Sea Time: Tales, Temporalities, and Anthropocene Oceans

Image by Le gray, 'Brig on the Water' from the MET

DAY ONE: Public Talk Tuesday 12 June 2018 | 5.00 – 6.30PM Venue New Law School LT 104 Eastern Ave |

DAY TWO: Workshop Wednesday 13 June 2018 | 9.00 – 5.00PM Cullen Room, Holme Building Science Road | University of Sydney

CONVENORS:

CHAIR Professor Iain Duncan McCalman AO, FRHistS, FASSA, FAHA, FRNSW, was born in Nyasaland (Malawi), , was schooled in Zimbabwe, and earned his BA, MA and PhD in Canberra and Melbourne, . He was awarded the Inaugural Vice Chancellor’s Prize for Teaching Excellence at the Australian National University in 1994, and was made an Officer of the Order of Australia in 2007 for services to history and the humanities. He is a Fellow of four Learned Academies and is a former President of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. He was Director of the Humanities Research Centre, ANU, from 1995-2002.

Iain has written numerous books, including The Last Alchemist: Count Cagliostro, Master of Magic in the Age of Reason (Harper Collins, New York, 2003), which was translated into twelve languages and Darwin’s Armada: how four voyagers to Australasia won the battle for evolution and changed the world, which was published in separate editions in the USA, UK and Australia, won three book prizes, and was the basis of a TV Series (ABC, Canada, Germany, NZ ) and an exhibition at the Australian National Maritime Museum.

Iain, a former Federation Fellow, is currently a Research Professor in history at the University of Sydney and co-Director of the Sydney Environment Institute. His award- winning book, The Reef – A Passionate History, from Captain Cook to Climate Change (2014, 2016), was published by Penguin in Australia and by Farrar, Strauss and Giroux/Scientific American in the USA.

Dr Killian Quigley’s dissertation research, which he conducted at Vanderbilt University’s Department of English and completed in 2016, attended to relations among literature, aesthetic theory, and natural history in eighteenth-century Britain, Ireland, and France. At SEI, he is elaborating part of that work into a book called Seascape and the Submarine: Aesthetics and the Eighteenth-Century Ocean. This project observes the ocean’s complex and indeterminate relationships to lastingly influential conventions in Western European poetics and aesthetics, such as the pastoral, the Rococo, the picturesque, and the sublime. The sea repeatedly functions as a limit case, or testing ground, for these conventions, and the resulting experiments and debates are consequential not only for the history of literature and art, but for cultural understandings of the ocean.

Quigley is also in the process of co-editing (with Margaret Cohen) a volume of essays entitled Senses of the Submarine. His writings are available in Eighteenth-Century Life, on SEI’s blog, in the 2017 newsletter of the Australia Coral Reef Society, and in the reviews section of MAKE magazine. His work is forthcoming in Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation (Winter 2017), MAKE’s print issue #17 (Winter 2017), A Cultural History of the Sea in the Age of Enlightenment (Bloomsbury Academic), and Ireland’s Imperial Connections, 1775-1947 (Palgrave Macmillan).

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1 DAY ONE: Public Talk Tuesday 12 June 2018 | 5.00 – 6.30PM Venue New Law School LT 104 Eastern Ave | University of Sydney

Stories and Seaways

How do oceans remember? What times do they record? Whose histories – and whose futures – are visible by sea-light? The Sydney Environment Institute welcomes Alice Te Punga Somerville and David Farrier, two internationally-renowned scholars, and authors, of ocean stories. Discussion will flow through hemispheric boundaries, to incorporate southern and northern seas and to interrogate and enliven compositions of oceanic place, language, knowledge, and tradition. From deep times – and deep futures – seas speak and move momentously, and uncannily. Against narrative, temporal, and geographical homogeneity, rich and varied seascapes resist intellectual, ecological, spiritual, and political impoverishment. A vital and vexing oceanic present requires inquiries and interventions like these.

Alice Te Punga Somerville (Te Atiawa, Taranaki) is an associate professor at the Faculty of Maori and Indigenous Studies at the University of Waikato, where her research and teaching sits at the intersections of literary, cultural, Indigenous and Pacific studies. She has taught in Indigenous Studies and English in New Zealand, Hawai‘i, Canada and Australia. Her first book was Once Were Pacific: Maori connections to (2012). She is currently working on a multi-stranded research project titled ‘Writing the new world: Indigenous texts 1900-1975.’ She also writes the occasional poem.

Dr David Farrier is a senior lecturer at the University of Edinburgh, where he convenes the Edinburgh Environmental Humanities Network (www.environmentalhumanities.ed.ac.uk). In 2017 he was a Leverhulme Research Fellow at the University of New South Wales. Anthropocene Poetics: Deep Time, Sacrifice Zones, and Extinction will be published by the University of Minnesota Press in 2019. Footprints: In Search of Future Fossils, for which he won the Royal Society of Literature’s Giles St Aubyn award for non-fiction in 2017, will be published by 4th Estate and Farrar, Straus & Giroux, also in 2019. His work has appeared in Aeon Magazine and The Atlantic.

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DAY TWO: Workshop Wednesday 13 June 2018 9.00 – 5.00 Venue: Cullen Room Science Rd | University of Sydney

9.00 – 9.15 Welcome

9.15 – 10.30 Session 1: Cultures and Countries of Submergence

Ingrid Ward, and James Bradley Provocateur: Ann Elias

10.30 – 11.00 Morning Tea

11.00 – 12.15 Session 2: Registering Oceanic Pasts, Predicting Oceanic Futures

Jody Webster and Brigitte Sommer Provocateur: David Farrier

12.15 – 1.15 Lunch

1.15 – 2.30 Session 3: Marine Time Beyond Humans

Dinesh Wadiwel and Elspeth Probyn Provocateur: Killian Quigley

2.30 – 3.00 Afternoon Tea

3.00 – 4.15 Session 4: Timing Chemical, Military, and Poetic Seas

Christine Hansen and Astrida Neimanis Provocateur: Sue Reid

4.15 – 5.00 Closing Discussion Iain McCalman

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