While historians often talk about the ways that the unresolved past continues to influence the present, they rarely speculate about how spiritual experiences have shaped historical figures or events. Typically, historians are disciplined to deal in hard, cold empirical facts rather than subjective experiences and encounters.
Our panel of expert historians advocate for a more curious, critical, and creative way to respectfully research histories and biographies. But how do you do this in a primarily objective industry?
This tantalising talk will challenge and delight those seeking more creative and engaging histories. Hear historical stories of the unexplained, animate objects, uncanny experiences, spiritual forces, unique beliefs, and practices.
Panelists: Professor Penny Edmonds, Dr Jessica White, and Dr Peter Cahalan
Chair: Dr Kiera Lindsey, History Trust of SA’s History Advocate
Date: 17 October 2023
Time: 6:20pm – 8:00pm
Refreshments available from 5:45pm to 6:15pm
Free event: bookings essential via Eventbrite
Location: UniSA City West Campus, Bradley Forum H 5-02, Hawke Building, 55 North Terrace, Adelaide 5000
This is an interactive event with a Q&A at the end.
City West Campus and Access Map
Parking is available at the Wilson City West Carpark.
SPEAKERS
Chair: Dr Kiera Lindsey
Dr Kiera Lindsey is South Australia’s History Advocate & the History Trust of SA’s principal public spokesperson on South Australian history. In this capacity, Kiera undertakes research, advocacy and outreach to historical organisations, individual practitioners and the broader community while also working with urban and regional communities & other groups to increase appreciation of our distinctive history. Kiera is also an award-winning historian who has been enthusiastically exploring historical ideas and deepening our interest in and understandings of the past, via books and articles, radio and podcasts, film, and television, teaching and talking.
Professor Penny Edmonds
Penny Edmonds is Matthew Flinders Professor in History at Flinders University. She is an award-winning historian, with a PhD History from University of Melbourne, which she combines with a professional background in museum and heritage studies. A former ARC Future Fellow, Penny’s research is distinguished by over two decades of creative and interdisciplinary work in the areas of Australian history, empire and postcolonialism, Indigenous and settler colonial histories, and on cultural history, performance, reconciliation and heritage. In the museums sector she has worked collaboratively with Indigenous staff and collections at the Australian Museum (3 years), and later at Museum Victoria (8 years), where she worked on the first Bunjilaka Aboriginal gallery. Penny was Andrew W. Mellon Fellow at the National Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC. 1991-1994 (3 years). Penny’s book Settler Colonialism and Reconciliation: Frontier Violence, Affective Performances, and Imaginative Refoundings (Palgrave 2016) was shortlisted for the University of Melbourne’s Ernest Scott Prize for best book in Australian and New Zealand colonial history. Interested in awe, wonder, and the histories and the distinctive political ecologies of the Anthropocene in Australia, she published ‘Uncanny Objects in the Anthropocene’ (co-edited K. Schlunke) Australian Humanities Review, in 2018.
Dr Jessica White
Dr Jessica White is the author of the award-winning A Curious Intimacy and Entitlement, and a hybrid memoir about deafness, Hearing Maud, which won the 2020 Michael Crouch Award for a debut work of biography and was shortlisted for four national awards, including the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Nonfiction. Jessica has received funding from the Australia Research Council, the Australia Council for the Arts, Arts Queensland and Arts South Australia and has undertaken national and international residencies and fellowships. She was a 2020-2021 Juncture Fellow for the Sydney Review of Books and is a 2022-2023 Arts Leader for the Australia Council for the Arts. Jessica is currently a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing and Literature at the University of South Australia. Her ecobiography of 19th century Western Australian botanist Georgiana Molloy will be published in January 2025.
Dr Peter Cahalan
After initially training as a teacher, Peter Cahalan undertook a PhD in British history from a Canadian university, where he developed his life-long commitment to South Australian history He became founding director of the Constitutional Museum of SA in 1978 and the first CEO of the History Trust of SA in 1981. During his time at the History Trust he worked closely with a number of other agencies, particularly the SA Tourism Commission, to ensure that historical projects were to the fore in a range of major celebratory events ranging over the next two decades. He moved from the History Trust to the Tourism Commission in 2000 and there undertook a range of jobs from managing interpretive projects to serving as the regional manager for the State’s economically two largest regions, the Flinders Ranges and Outback and the Fleurieu Peninsula. He retired in 2021 but continues to work part-time and continues his involvement in history as a trustee of the National railway Museum and on the Advisory Board of the Mary MacKillop Museum in Kensington.