Daily Archives: 28 September 2023

Fellowship: ANU Humanities Research Centre

Applications for the 2024 ANU Humanities Research Centre Visiting Fellowship Program on the theme of “Time, Place, Everywhen” are now open.

Applications close Friday 20 October 2023

Apply Now

2024 marks the 50th year of the ANU Humanities Research Centre (HRC). To celebrate, the HRC is supporting research into different ideas of time and place and paying respect to Indigenous people through the theme of ‘everywhen’.

Everywhen brings together a sense of ever-present time with people, culture, law, the landscape and cosmos. While the term is associated with ANU anthropologist W.E.H Stanner, the fusion of time and place has deep origins and broad application.

Via research projects, as well as lectures, advocacy and art, the HRC invites world-class Indigenous and non-Indigenous researchers to showcase the flourishing of the humanities and cognate fields by addressing the following questions and topics.

  • How have people from around the world and throughout history integrated time and place?
  • How can different conceptions of time and place unsettle practices of assimilation, extraction, and domination?
  • Regenerative approaches to knowledge and culture in higher education and the Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums (GLAM) sector.
  • Everywhen-related examples of art, activism, public engagement and collaboration that advance truth telling, healing and belonging.
  • Through studies of language, literature, religion, material culture and history, what can be known and registered about everywhen and what can’t be?

How can changing ideas of time and place foster creativity and wellbeing?

2024 marks the 50th year of the ANU Humanities Research Centre (HRC). To celebrate, the HRC is supporting research into different ideas of time and place and paying respect to Indigenous people through the theme of ‘everywhen’.

Everywhen brings together a sense of ever-present time with people, culture, law, the landscape and cosmos. While the term is associated with ANU anthropologist W.E.H Stanner, the fusion of time and place has deep origins and broad application.

Via research projects, as well as lectures, advocacy and art, the HRC invites world-class Indigenous and non-Indigenous researchers to showcase the flourishing of the humanities and cognate fields by addressing the following questions and topics.

  • How have people from around the world and throughout history integrated time and place?
  • How can different conceptions of time and place unsettle practices of assimilation, extraction, and domination?
  • Regenerative approaches to knowledge and culture in higher education and the Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums (GLAM) sector.
  • Everywhen-related examples of art, activism, public engagement and collaboration that advance truth telling, healing and belonging.
  • Through studies of language, literature, religion, material culture and history, what can be known and registered about everywhen and what can’t be?
  • How can changing ideas of time and place foster creativity and wellbeing?

More details on ANU website

Member Publication: Addressing Injustice in the Medieval Body Politic

Long-standing ANZAMEMS members Constant Mews and Kathleen Neal have just had their edited collection, Addressing Injustice in the Medieval Body Politic, published with Amsterdam University Press.

Justice and injustice were subjects of ongoing debate in medieval Europe. Received classical and biblical models both influenced how these qualities of moral and political life were perceived, discussed and acted upon. Important among these influences was the anonymous seventh-century Irish text, On The Twelve Abuses of the Age, a biblically-inspired discussion of the moral duties particular to each sector of society. This volume probes its long influence, and its interaction with the revival of classical ideas. By bringing together scholars of political thought and practice, in lay and religious contexts spanning the seventh to fourteenth centuries, this volume crosses boundaries of periodisation, discipline and approach to reflect upon the medieval evolution of concepts of injustice and means of redress. Contributions address how ideas about justice and injustice were discussed among scholars and theologians, and how those ideas were translated into action through complaint and advice throughout the medieval period.

CONSTANT J. MEWS is Emeritus Professor and formerly Director of the Centre for Religious Studies, Monash University (Australia). He specializes in the religious and intellectual history of Europe in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, on which he has published widely, but is also completing Aidan Breen’s edition of DDAS for the Corpus Christianorum.

KATHLEEN B. NEAL is Senior Lecturer in History and Director of the Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at Monash University (Australia). She specializes in later-medieval political culture and communication. Her monograph The Letters of Edward I: Political Communication in the Thirteenth Century was published by Boydell Press in 2021.

Order your copy of Addressing Injustice in the Medieval Body Politic here!

Seminar: The Scattering of Shahjahanabad – Indian Musicians’ Lives in a Time of Crisis, 1739-88

Tuesday 31 October 2023
6:30 pm (AEDST) online only
ANU Centre for Early Modern Studies

Dr Katherine Butler Schofield
Senior Lecturer, King’s College London

Register Here

After more than a decade of political insecurity in Mughal India, the relative stability of the first twenty years of emperor Muhammad Shah’s reign (r. 1720–48) ushered in a significant revival of the arts at the imperial Mughal court in Delhi, Shahjahanabad. Right at the centre of this vibrant milieu was the emperor’s singing teacher and master of the imperial musicians, Anjha Baras Khan. But posterity has forgotten him. Instead, it is his rivals Ni‘mat Khan “Sadarang” and Firoz Khan “Adarang” whom we remember today as the greatest Indian classical musicians of the eighteenth century. Why?

This musical rivalry played out against the geopolitical backdrop of a much more tumultuous drama: what eyewitnesses called the “scattering of Shahjahanabad”. Delhi was repeatedly invaded, sacked, and occupied 1739–61, and Mughal court musicians were forced to flee to the four corners of India, where they had to seek new patrons and employ novel strategies to survive. What happened to Delhi’s musicians during this time of crisis is copiously documented in a biographical genre new to Indian musical literature at this time: the commemorative compendium of “lives”, or tazkira. In this talk, I will be looking at musicians’ biographies and genealogies in Persian, Urdu and classical Hindi as both a product of this era’s upheaval, dispersal, diversification, innovation, and anxieties; and as a record of these things. Both views give us unusual access to the history of elite artisans on the move in late Mughal India.

Dr Katherine Butler Schofield is a historian of music and listening in Mughal India and the paracolonial Indian Ocean. Working with Persian, Urdu, and visual sources for elite musical culture in North India and the Deccan c.1570–1860, Katherine’s research interests lie in South Asian music, visual art, and cinema; the history of Mughal India; Islam and Sufism; empire and the paracolonial; musicians at risk; and the intersecting histories of the emotions, the senses, aesthetics, ethics, and the supernatural. She has been Principal Investigator of a European Research Council Starting Grant (2011–15/16) and a British Academy Mid-Career Fellow (2018). Her books include Music and Musicians in Late Mughal India: Histories of the Ephemeral, 1748–1858 (CUP, 2023), Tellings and Texts: Music, Literature, and Performance in North India, with Francesca Orsini (Open Book, 2015), and Monsoon Feelings: a History of Emotions in the Rain, with Imke Rajamani and Margrit Pernau (Niyogi, 2018).

Katherine trained as a viola player before embarking on postgraduate studies in Indian music history at SOAS University of London. She came to King’s in 2009 after a research fellowship at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, and a lectureship at Leeds. She was formerly known as Katherine Butler Brown.