Brackish Histories: Positioning the Global History Archive

• Department of History

The Keynote Lecture of the Inaugural Workshop of the Department of History and Civilisation, features a presentation by Martin Dusinberre.

It is an axiom that historians who work in global, transnational or entangled history engage in "multi-sited" archival research. But how can those sites be brought into conversation with each other if they belong to radically different knowledge systems, in which basic notions of "sources" or, indeed, "archives" do not align?

This lecture will draw on three archival sites in late-nineteenth century Australia and Japan in order to frame a problem often overlooked in debates about the future of global history, and to offer points of conceptual commonality. In so doing, it will argue that greater reflexivity in archival methodology must be central to the practice of history in a globalized world.