The Australia-China Council is proud to support the establishment of the Foundation for Australian Studies in China (FASIC).

The Foundation is an independent non-profit foundation in Australia established to support Australian Studies Centres located across China and to provide funding and other assistance to the BHP Billiton Chair of Australian Studies located at Peking University in Beijing, People’s Republic of China.

The Foundation will play a significant role in the promotion of Australian Studies in China and will further expand and strengthen research and teaching alliances and links between Australian and Chinese universities.

The key objectives of the Foundation are to:
Bridge two Countries: Support programs or activities that enhance the mutual understanding and engagement between people of Australia and China
Enhance Understanding: Enhance the understanding of Australia in China through funding and other support provided to Australian Studies Centres
Sponsor Educational Activities: Provide scholarships for educational exchanges between Australia and China as well as funding support to a Chair of Australian Studies

The Foundation is now seeking Expressions of Interest from qualified applicants for the BHP Billiton Chair of Australian Studies at Peking University (Chair). Full job description and selection criteria are available at: 

http://fasic.org.au/new/index.php/apply-for-the-chair

Applications may be for academic, creative, literary, museological or bibliographic projects, which can draw on relevant collections held in Canberra, elsewhere in Australia or overseas.

Applications close on 1 July 2012.

For application forms and further information visit the Museum’s website, email David Joliffe or call (02) 6270 8239.

Keynote Speakers:

• Professor Mary Louise Pratt, Silver Professor, New York University
• Professor Renato Rosaldo, Lucie Stern Professor in the Social Sciences, New York University
• Professor Charles Forsdick, James Barrow Professor of French, University of Liverpool
• Professor Tim Youngs, Professor of English & Travel Studies, Nottingham Trent University

The convenors invite papers (and panels) that focus on either the trajectory or the destination or encompass both, and which will contribute to an overall program that demonstrates the pluralism of ideals in travel writing, cultural tourism and mobility studies. Proposals are welcome from various disciplines including anthropology, area studies, cinema studies, creative writing, cultural studies, geography, historical studies, language and literature studies, media and communications, migration and mobility studies, philosophy, postcolonial studies, sociology, tourism, and travel writing and other relevant areas, as well as interdisciplinary approaches.
Postgraduate students are most welcome to submit proposals for papers and panels in the program and there will be activities and sessions designed to address specific research issues for postgraduate students during the conference.

This conference is organised by the Travel Research Network for Travel Writing, Cultural Tourism and Mobility Studies at the University of Melbourne.
Convenor: Dr Jacqueline Dutton (French Studies & Travel Writing)

Please send abstracts of 200-300 words including Paper/Panel title, Institutional Affiliation and Contact Details before 30 April 2012 to Josiane Smith.
Please visit the conference website to register your interest.

The Fellowship is worth $5,000. Any Australian writer with a significant publication record is eligible.

Closing date: 20 March 2012.

Guidelines are available from the ABR‘s website.

This collaborative symposium will take place over four days in two locations, during which Australian and international scholars, curators and artists will discuss all aspects of Bernard Smith’s wide-ranging work.

Dates: Melbourne, September 20-21, 2012
Sydney, November 9-10, 2012.

Convenors: Jaynie Anderson FAHA, Herald Professor of Fine Arts, University of Melbourne; Mark Ledbury, Power Professor of Art History and Visual Culture at the University of Sydney; Christopher Marshall, Senior Lecturer in Art History and Museum Studies, University of Melbourne.

Major themes:

• Encountering Australia: Bernard Smith’ s seminal European Vision and the South Pacific (1960) remains perhaps his best-known work internationally, and pioneered a set of questions about power, vision and encounter that shaped studies not only in Australia but worldwide.
• Imagining Australia, Defining Australian Art: Smith’s fundamentalAustralian Painting, 1788-2000 was the first convincing narrative of Australian art, and in other work he pondered what being Australian meant in a cultural sense.
• Thinking the Modern and Contemporary: Bernard Smith FAHA was a profound historian of visual encounters with early Australia, as well as an impassioned critic and historian of contemporary art in Australia.
• Being with Art: Prof. Smith’s work as a cataloguer of collections (particularly at the Art Gallery of New South Wales) and his exploration of contemporary art in a journalistic and critical mode, was a substantial area of his activity as an intellectual.
• Bernard Smith the activist: His concern for his community and his involvement in politics, from local to global.
• Bernard Smith the writer: Bernard Smith was a prose writer of great gifts, not just in criticism and art history. His memoirs, particularly The Boy Adeodatusare important examples of the genre.

Submit your abstract paper proposals: Please send a 100-word abstract of your proposed paper and a CV to Powerinstitute Events by April 15 2012.
A decision on the selection will be made by May 15 2012. For more information, please email the Power Institute.

Conference Dates: 5-7 December 2012, Melbourne

Keynote speakers: Gillian Whitlock, Adrian Franklin, Susan Ryan & Kim Scott

Borders obstruct through a variety of guises – geopolitically, between disciplines, across publics and counter publics. The 2012 InASA Conference will explore the conditions under which borders are breached and enforced. Attention to the transnational circuits of information, technologies, bodies and ideas is increasingly seen against the discontinuities, lapses and blockages that characterize the growing political preoccupation with border security, internet restriction and the trafficking of people and animals. Mobility itself is racialised and subject to the countervailing forces of disparate regimes of gender, class and sexuality. Security, sovereignty and secrets are pitted against protest, asylum and leaks.

Despite Australia’s economic buoyancy throughout the Global Financial Crisis, largely through its resource boom and exports markets to China and India, the nation remains anxious about its borders, and much else besides. The extradition of Wikileaks frontman Julian Assange, the decline of the Murdoch media empire, the loss of servicemen in Afghanistan, the detention of tourists for drug trafficking in Bali, the drowning of dozens of asylum seekers-all point to the ongoing dilemmas of Australia and Australians’ relationships with the region and the world. At home, the decline in the standard of debate around the critical issues of climate change, the place of Indigenous Australians in the Federal Constitution, and local versions of the Occupy movement have reignited debate about the way Australians see themselves and imagine their future. At times fretful and fearful, on other occasions Australia and Australians seem exultant and ascendant.

The 2012 InASA Conference, jointly hosted by Monash University’s History Department and its National Centre for Australian Studies, will provide a forum for much needed complex analysis and discussion around these issues through its theme: Border Breach. The conference is designed to encourage reflection on both Australian effects in transnational circuits of meaning and ideas, but also the inherently interdisciplinary and global nature of Australian studies. The movement of ideas and people across Australian borders is mirrored in the academy, compelling an immensely productive, constantly shifting context for thought and contention that this Biennial InASA conference will showcase.

Panels and papers are invited which address the following themes, in terms of contemporary debates and historical/cultural perspectives:

• Debate: climate change, corporate accountability and democracy

• Mobility: migration, diasporas, refugees and trafficking

• Difference: citizenship and multiculturalism

• Economy: trade, ethics and counter publics

• Finance: crisis, trade barriers and sovereignty

• Security: resistance, protest and hacking

• Communication: cyber activism, media empires, citizen journalism

• Land: resource, territory and place

• Indigeniety: interventions, global and local connections

We also hope to encourage discussion of the future of Australian studies itself. In its 25th year, how is Australian Studies changing to embrace new areas of scholarship such as cultural and media studies, to project Australian research and teaching beyond our borders and the challenge to engage beyond the academy? How might research in Australian studies engage with the broader national debate, through the media, in public policy and in the new national curriculum

Online Abstract Submission via our websiteConference Website: http://www.arts.monash.edu.au/history/conferences/inasa-2012/

Email:  InASA2012@gmail.com or join our mailing list

Image Courtesy: http://www.boat-people.org Photo: Tanja Milbourne

10 August 2012 – 11 August 2012

Time: 8:00am

Location: University of Sydney, Australia

Plenary speakers:

• Kuan-Hsing Chen, National Chiao Tung University, Taiwan
• Jacqueline Lo, Australian National University
• Donald E. Pease, Dartmouth College, USA

In the period after World War II, the development of American Studies in Britain and other parts of Western Europe was crucially shaped by the efforts of US cultural diplomacy to expand the country’s influence in the face of perceived Soviet threats during the Cold War. In the twenty-first century, as more US political and diplomatic energies are focused on the rise of the People’s Republic of China, it is likely that Australia will be positioned in a similar triangular situation, with the United States keen to preserve and increase ties to its traditional “Western” ally and Australia itself caught between different political, economic and geographical pressures.

This symposium will examine ways in which the twenty-first century has already reoriented the field of American Studies in relation to the PRC and Australia, and how this process is likely to continue and develop. It brings together scholars from around the world working within and across American Studies, Asian Studies and Asian diasporic studies, to look not only at shifting relationships between the Chinese mainland and the West, but also how these shifts resonate in the Asia Pacific region (ie. Australasia, Southeast Asia and East Asia). In the process, the symposium takes the transnational turn in American Studies outside the national boundaries and ideological frameworks of the US. At the same time, it attempts to promote intercultural dialogue around the ongoing processes of deimperialisation and decolonisation throughout the Pacific Rim in the post-9/11 era.

We seek papers about the historical, political and economic dynamics of the triangular relationships among the Chinese mainland, Australia and the US. In particular, we invite research that examines how representations of Asia and Australasia increasingly are working their way into the US body politic and how these representations, as well as those of the US, are being produced, consumed and reworked in the Asia Pacific region. The symposium will consider developments in transnational history, literature, film and media, as well as political and cultural history, and it will aim to make a critical intervention across a broad range of transpacific cultures.

Proposals for 20-minute presentations should include a title and an abstract of no more than 200 words. All proposals should include your name, institution, and e-mail address. Send proposals to pacifictriangles@gmail.com by 15 April 2012.

Grant applications can be submitted up until close of business on Friday 23 March 2012 using the online application form.

Applicants are asked to indicate on page 3 of their application whether there is scope for their project to commence earlier than 1 July 2012.

Australia-Japan Foundation (AJF) grants are intended to provide seed funding for innovative proposals relevant to the objectives and key themes of the AJF (click here for more information). This includes proposals which demonstrate the potential for the development of long-term links between individuals and institutions in Australia and their counterparts in Japan. In addition to the objectives and themes set out below, the AJF Board is interested in receiving grant applications for proposals that aim to assist communities in the Tohoku region of Japan recover from the Greater Tohoku Earthquake and Tsunami in March 2011.

As applications are assessed against the AJF funding guidelines, all applicants should familiarise themselves with these guidelines before submitting an online application for funding.

The online application form will only be available until Friday 23 March 2012. Enquiries may be directed to the AJF Secretariat on (02) 6261 3898 (Australia) or +81-3-5232-4065 (Japan) or to the AJF emails (ajf.australia@dfat.gov.au and ajf.japan@dfat.gov.au).

2012 marks the 40th Anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between Australia and the People’s Republic of China. To commemorate this important milestone, in the 2012-2013 grant round the Council welcomes proposals that celebrate and showcase the achievements of the 40 years of Australia-China engagement.

More information: Applying for a grant

The deadline for submitting articles is April 30, 2012. Please email your
contributions to vicki.grieves@sydney.edu.au

For the detailed CFP please click JEASACFP1. If you have questions, please contact
vicki.grieves@sydney.edu.au or mhorakov@phil.muni.cz