University of Sydney receives first Australian Mellon grant

Travellers in scientific and exploratory expeditions such as Darwin used voyages to the Pacific and elsewhere as a kind of laboratory, says Professor Iain McCalman.

The University of Sydney has become the first Australian institution to win a prestigious Sawyer Seminar grant from the US-based Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

The grant will support a one-year program of research and expert seminars into the way in which ideas flowed between the Indo-Pacific worlds and the Atlantic worlds over three centuries, from 1700 until today.

Titled The Antipodean laboratory: Humanity, Sovereignty, and Environment in Southern Oceans and Lands, 1700-2009, the Seminar will support cross-disciplinary research into how "the northern hemisphere used comparisons with the Pacific and the Antipodes as a way of thinking about the world," says Professor Iain McCalman AO.

"Awareness of the South shook all sort of people's ideas, but it also became a great comparator," he says. "Travellers in scientific and exploratory expeditions such as Darwin used voyages to the Pacific and elsewhere as a kind of laboratory, resulting, for example, in theories of evolution as a way of explaining how species of animals and plants spread across the world."

Throughout 2009, in a series of ten workshops, scholars from the University of Sydney, elsewhere in Australia and around the world will explore themes and topics such as ecology, health, climate, oceans, anthropology and sexuality. Other seminars will look at human rights, disease and human biology, and the limits and role of states, political power and colonisation.

Alison Bashford and Andrew Fitzmaurice will convene a seminar of experts on the Antarctica and its influence on our ideas about sovereignty and property, as well as how the new problem of global warming has created challenges for science and law in that region.

Cassandra Pybus and Emma Christopher will host a seminar on the history of "unfree labour in the Antipodes", and the curious fact that while "slavery was being questioned in other parts of the empire … increasingly ferocious set of punishments were being devised" in the Antipodes.

A seminar led by Robert Aldrich, Sexuality in the South Seas, will range from Malinowski and Mead to the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras, considering how the "South Pacific has been a laboratory for the investigation of human behaviours, the projection of foreign fantasies and the metamorphosis of sexual cultures."

The program is being organised by fifteen scholars from the School of Philosophical and Historical Inquiry (SOPHI), based in the Faculty of Arts. "Our faculty has been repeatedly acknowledged as one of the leading centres for research in the humanities in the region and the world," says Professor Duncan Ivison, head of SOPHI.

"We have not only internationally-famous and eminent professors, but also the best mid- and early-career researchers in many disciplines," he says. "Many of these happen to concentrate on one of the most cutting edge fields in the humanities today - that of the border between Atlantic studies and Pacific studies."

A series of books and special journals, as well as a two-day international conference in July 2010, titled The Atlantic World in a Pacific Field, will be among the key outcomes of the Seminar. Each session will be open to the public and scholars of all disciplines are encouraged to attend.

About the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and John E Sawyer Seminar program

The non-profit Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, established in 1969, makes grants in the areas of: Higher Education and Scholarship; Scholarly Communications; Research in Information Technology; Museums and Art Conservation; Performing Arts; and Conservation and the Environment.

Grant applications are by invitation only, and recipients are selected through a rigorous international competition from submissions invited from a select group of research universities

The Sawyer Seminar provides funding for international visitors, a one year Postdoctoral Fellowship, PhD student incentive grants and administrative support.

For more information about the foundation, visit the website.

Contact: Kath Kenny

Phone: 02 9351 2261 or 0434 606 100