Past Events
Annual Public Lecture
- Venue: Curtis Auditorium, Herschel Building, Newcastle University
- Start: Tue, 26 Mar 2019 17:30:00 GMT
- End: Tue, 26 Mar 2019 19:00:00 GMT
Celebrating our first year of operation as the Oral History Unit & Collective, we are pleased to announce that our Annual Public Lecture will be presented by internationally renowned cultural historian Prof Paula Hamilton:
Between the living and the dead: what are the limits of remembering through oral histories?
(Part of the Insights public lecture series)
The lecture will be followed by a drinks reception and celebration of the Oral History Unit & Collective's achievements in 2018.
The title of this lecture refers not only to the transmission of memories across generations, but asks when it is possible for some experiences to become public and why some and not others? Much of the discussion about oral history as a practice has been about its potential for liberation, social change – but what about the limits on what we can know through this medium? How do we ensure that oral history narratives that do become public are multivocal and not just one story?
To explore these questions I draw on my research about women working in the 20th century home as domestic servants utilising the framework of sensory history. I focus in particular on their experience of intimate relations with men, drawing a connecting line through what is now called harassment to illegitmate births and infanticide in order to highlight how shame shapes the historical record.
Paula Hamilton is Visiting Professor of History at the Australian Centre for Public History University of Technology Sydney, and School of History at Macquarie University in Sydney. She is a cultural historian who has published widely in oral history and memory studies and explores the links between personal and public memories. She has also taught oral history subjects at the postgraduate level and worked in public history for over thirty years, collaborating in a range of oral history projects with archives, community groups, museums, heritage agencies and trade unions. In 2016 she produced a Report for the NSW State Library which assessed the significance of their sound collection. Hamilton gives community talks and workshops on oral history. She was President of Oral History NSW from 2015-2017 and was keynote speaker at the International Oral History Conference in Jyvaskala, Finland in 2018.
Her most recent published books include A Cultural History of Sound, memory and the Senses (edited with Joy Damousi) Routledge USA 2017 and The Oxford Handbook of Public History (edited with James Gardner), 2017. She is currently editing a volume (with Kate Darian-Smith) on Migration, Memories and Heritage which is under contract to Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies Series to be submitted by end of 2018.