I will be in Melbourne in September to speak as part of the University of Melbourne’s ‘Australia in the World’ history lecture and seminar series. I’m feeling very honoured to be included on a program with Joy Damousi and Sheila Fitzpatrick. If you’re in Melbourne on 18 September, I’d love to see you there!

Download the New Migration Histories flyer (pdf, 468kb)

New migration histories

In conventional histories of the nation, migrants have usually been represented as making a particular ‘contribution’ to the ‘national story’ in their capacity as members of an ethnic or national category. It is usually assumed that they come to stay eventually becoming members of the ‘migrant nation’. Recently, this narrative has been complicated by transnational frames of historical analysis that allow us to see the various ways in which migrants have lived ‘both here and there’ (in Adam McKeown’s words) both in terms of their subjective experience and in movement between old and new homelands. It has also been recognised that migrants’ lives can’t be reduced to an ‘ethnic’ experience, that ignores the formative economic, political, religious and familial dimensions of migration.

The transnational Chinese family in Australia

Kate Bagnall has published pioneering work on Chinese Australian family migration in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, including the migration of white Australian wives of Chinese men to China. She works in Canberra as a print and web editor as well as a historical researcher.

Australian Greek migration, war memory and its legacies

Joy Damousi is Professor of History at the University of Melbourne. Her current project is Greek War Stories, which examines memories of the Second World War and the Greek Civil War in post-war Greek migrant communities.

‘New Australians’ from the Soviet Union via DP camps

Sheila Fitzpatrick is an Honorary Professor at the University of Sydney and Professor Emerita at the University of Chicago. Primarily a Soviet historian, her current ARC project is about displaced persons from the Soviet Union who ended up in Australia after the Second World War.

Wednesday, 18 September 2013
4.00pm – 6.00pm
Gryphon Gallery
1888 Building
The University of Melbourne
PARKVILLE VIC 3010

Admission is free.
Bookings are required.
Seating is limited.

To register visit:
alumni.online.unimelb.edu.au/newmigration

For further information please contact Emma Shortis
eshortis@student.unimelb.edu.au or phone 9035 8358.