Date: Thursday 8^th December, 5:30pm for a 6:00pm start.
Venue:Village Road Show Theatrette, State Library of Victoria, Entry 3, La Trobe Street Melbourne

Professor Winter holds the distinguished Charles J. Stille Chair in History at Yale University. He is the author of a dozen books and the winner of an Emmy Award for his acclaimed television series, “The Great War and the Shaping of the 20th Century” and is also General Editor of the forthcoming Cambridge history of the Great War. Professor Winter is currently a Visiting Professor in the Faculty of Arts at Monash University.

Professor Winter will speak on “Faces, voices, and the shadow of war”.

Monash University would like to acknowledge the support of the State Library of Victoria and the State Library of Victoria Foundation.

Where: BMW Edge Federation Square
When: Wednesday 18 November 2009
Time: 6.00pm

Marking the 75th anniversary of the Shrine, Professor Bruce Scates will be joined by a panel of leading historians: Ken Inglis, Joan Beaumontand Katti Williams to debate the past, present and future of the Shrine of Remembrance.

This year marks the 75th anniversary of the dedication of the Shrine of Remembrance. Raised in the midst of the Great Depression, the subject of bitter public debate and a personal crusade for Sir John Monash, the Shrine is the largest state memorial Australia built and probably the most controversial.

Join Professor Bruce Scates, Director of the National Centre for Australian Studies, as he charts the Shrine’s history from the first fatalities of the Gallipoli Landing to the ‘Memory Wars’ of the present day. The author of the Cambridge history of the Shrine, Professor Scates will bring the building to life though powerful personal stories, archival intrigues and a stunning visual archive.

A panel of leading historians will explore the memorial’s fascinating symbolism, explain how it came to command the landscape of Melbourne and consider the changing nature of our traumatic memories of war. A place of pilgrimage and a tourist destination, a centre for education and a vibrant heritage site, a forum for dissent and itself a battlefield, this is the story of one of the world’s most impressive and most controversial memorials.

A Place to Remember: The History of the Shrine of Remembrance will be launched by the Governor of Victoria, Professor David de Kretser, AC and is published by Cambridge University Press.

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Date: Wednesday 14^th September, 5:30pm for a 6:00pm start.
Venue:Seminar Room 1, State Library of Victoria, Entry 3, La Trobe Street Melbourne

Join Professor Rae Frances, Dean of Arts and Associate Professor Chandani Lokuge, Director of the Centre for Postcolonial Writing at the tenth Monash Arts Public Lecture with Professor Robert J.C. Young.

Opening address: Professor Rae Frances

Introduction: Associate Professor Chandani Lokuge

The lecture will consider the circumstances of Walter Benjamin’s death as he attempted to smuggle himself across the border from France into Spain in the context of the available route for refugees out of France in 1940. These routes will be compared to earlier and later routes in and out of Europe, demonstrating that contemporary migration into Europe follows paths already well-travelled over the centuries. It will be argued that it was Europe itself which initiated modern mass migration together with the contemporary world of boundaries and borders and that the ‘illegal’ migrants who move across continents today are engaged in new forms of transnational subaltern struggle.

Robert J.C. Young is Julius Silver Professor of English and Comparative Literature at New York University, and Distinguished Visiting Scholar in the Centre for Postcolonial Writing, Faculty of Arts.

His White Mythologies: Writing History and the West (1990), Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Culture, Theory and Race (Routledge, 1995), and Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction (Blackwell, 2001), have been some of the most influential books in the field of postcolonial studies.

He has also written Postcolonialism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2003), The Idea of English Ethnicity (Blackwell, 2008), and is currently writing a book on translation. Prior to moving to New York, Young was Professor of English and Critical Theory and a fellow of Wadham College, Oxford University. As a graduate student at Oxford, he was one of the founding editors of the Oxford Literary Review, the first British journal devoted to literary and philosophical theory. Young is general editor of the quarterly Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies. His work has been translated into 20 languages.

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Presented by Professor Peter Singer.

6:00pm, 4 June 2009

BMW Edge
Federation Square
Corner of Swanston Street and Flinders Street,
Melbourne.

Light refreshments will be provided.

Recent work in animal studies, psychology and the neurosciences has greatly enhanced our understanding of the nature of ethics. But what does this mean for our own decisions about how we ought to live? Does it undermine traditional ideas about the objectivity of ethics? Is there still a role for reason to play in ethics? Peter Singer will discuss these and other questions as he explores the foundations for his own conclusions on a range of controversial ethical issues.

For more information on Peter’s work you can visit his website.

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Professor Rae Frances, Dean of Arts, hosted the fourth Arts public lecture presented by Professor Amanda Lynch FTSE. Professor Lynch is an internationally recognised climate expert who focuses on bridging the gap between the natural and social sciences to better address the challenges of climate change.

Titled Democracy and Climate Change: Finding the Common Interest, the lecture explored Professor Lynch’s recommendation of a value commitment to the common interest of the community to address the great challenge of climate change.

Professor Lynch says: “Our response to the great challenge of climate change will be most effective if we reassert the empowerment of democratic processes to engage the common interest of civil societies.”

Amanda Lynch is Professor of Geography at Monash University. She is the author of many publications and is one of the eight scientists from Monash sharing in the prestige of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize awarded jointly in October to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and former US Vice-President Al Gore.

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Presented by Professor Barbara Katz Rothman, Professor of Sociology at the City University of New York. Visiting Fellow, Sociology, School of Political and Social Inquiry, Faculty of Arts, Monash University.

Where:
Monash University Law Chambers,
Seminar Rooms 1 & 2 (ground Floor)
472 Bourke St, Melbourne.

When: 26th May 2010.
Time: 5:30pm, for a 6pm start.

Stem cell research has been presented to us as the next great hope, the new path to a long healthy life, with replaceable parts, grown to order as need be. The questions is: are we driven by the desire to cure, to care, or to generate profit?

In this lecture, internationally acclaimed Professor of Sociology, Barbara Katz Rothman, critically examines some of the arguments made about stem cell science and treatments. She encourages us to think about what is happening in stem cell science now, about the implications for women, who increasingly are encouraged to sell embryos for research, and about the economics and ethics of a field which is full of great promise.

“Stem cell research is perhaps best understood as the tail end of the last great biomedical paradigm -genetics. (The new paradigm, the neurosciences, has yet to produce much of anything in the way of treatment.) Stem cell research has raised a host of ‘bioethical questions’. To my mind, one of the most interesting of those is just precisely what constitutes a ‘bioethical’ problem. When is a problem one of ethics, and when it is one of justice? Coming from a country without (as of this writing) national health insurance, that is not an insignificant issue in biomedicine. However these bioethical issues are presented, framed and discarded, stem cell research is ongoing and presented as a new hope for a host of conditions. Using a model first established in the era of the chemical paradigm, ‘treatments’ are created, tried out on animals and then humans, and then marketed. But is that what is actually happening? Is stem cell research following the path of a ’search for a cure’, or is it – as I would argue – the search for a market.

These days, lab mice are as likely to suffer the harms of research to test a new version of an existing drug (developed to extend its patent life, or a new use for an existing drug), as they are to suffer such harms in the context of research to test a new drug for an existing unsolved disease. Drug companies with patents look for markets. Rather than starting with a problem, they start with a solution, an object in the world in search of its economic place. In this case, the object is stem cells. So, is there money to be made? …..Could be, could well be…..Let’s find out, let the research begin.”

See also Postcard Brochure [PDF, 790k]

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Professor Jay Winter, the world’s leading scholar of war and commemoration, will speak on “The Social Construction of Silence”. He will also announce an international conference on the memory of Gallipoli/Çanakkale, an Anzac Centenary event hosted by Monash University and Çanakkale Onsekiz Mart University, Turkey.

Professor Winter holds the distinguished Charles J. Stille Chair in History at Yale University. He is the author of a dozen books and the winner of an Emmy Award for his acclaimed television series, “The Great War and the Shaping of the 20^th Century.”

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16 April 2009

BMW Edge
Federation Square
Melbourne

5:30pm (for a 6:00pm start)
Refreshments will be provided

Professor Julian Savulescu presents the fifth Arts Public Lecture on ‘Should we use technology to change our genetic destiny?’

Criminality, self-control, intelligence, and even success in relationships have all been found to have some biological basis. Recent developments in human enhancement technologies have meant that we can use science and medical technology not just to prevent or treat disease, but to intervene at the most basic biological levels to improve biology and enhance people’s lives. Using technology we can overcome the genetic lottery that limits us, enabling us to lead better lives with greater wellbeing both for individuals and society as a whole.

Savulescu will argue the case for human enhancement, dealing with a range of objections and arguing that there are good social and public interest arguments in favour of obligatory population level enhancements based on social and economic arguments, and the necessity to liberate humanity. Evolution by natural selection has left us with genetic barriers to wellbeing in our current environment. Savulescu will argue that enhancement technologies, by allowing us to enter a new stage of evolution, ‘evolution under reason’, can liberate humanity. Human liberation by biological means can improve people’s lives, promote social justice, economic productive as well as improving human relationships and moral behaviour.

Professor Julian Savulescu, University of Oxford, United Kingdom

Professor Julian Savulescu is qualified in medicine, bioethics and analytic philosophy. He holds the Uehiro Chair in Practical Ethics and is Director of the Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics at Oxford, Director of the Oxford Centre for Neuroethics, and Director of the Program on the Ethics of the New Biosciences. He was also recently awarded a major Arts and Humanities Research Council grant on ‘Cognitive Science and Religious Conflict’. He is engaged in research, education and stimulating open discussion around the ethical issues arising in everyday life and has worked broadly in the ethics of science and medicine. His main research interests are the ethics of the new biosciences: cloning, stem cells, genetics, artificial reproduction and neuroscience. He established and was Director of the Ethics of Genetics Unit at the Murdoch Childrens Research Institute in Melbourne.

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21 May 2008

‘Adopt as your fundamental creed that you will equip yourself for life, not solely for your own benefit but for the benefit of the whole community’ — Sir John Monash.

Leading the discussion was Sir John Monash Distinguished Professor Graeme Davison. Professor Davison presented Monash’s founding years, exploring the intentions and plans of its founders in the broader social and cultural expectations of the era, whilst reflecting on the distance which now separates the University of the 1960s from the present.

Professor Graeme Davison is the author of a number of books which include ‘The Rise and Fall of Marvellous Melbourne’, ‘The Unforgiving Minute: How Australia Learned to Tell the Time’ and ‘Car Wars: How The Car Won Our Hearts and Conquered Our Cities’. His current projects include a collaborative history of the Powerhouse Museum and a history of suburban Australia.

 

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