W K Hancock Professor of History Inaugural Lecture
Tom Griffiths introduced by Emeritus Professor D.A. Low
Tuesday 20 September 2011 5pm, followed by a reception in the foyer
Hedley Bull Theatre ANU
Keith Hancock championed a rapprochement of science and the humanities and was a pioneering environmental historian of the Australian high country, the Monaro. He was also an eminent historian of the Commonwealth and applied his historical sensibility to global environmental and political questions. In the spirit of Hancock’s quest, this lecture makes a case for the role historians can play in understanding the great global environmental challenge of our own time, that of climate change. One way to make sense of our predicament is to look deeply into the ice we are losing.
Tom Griffiths is the W K Hancock Professor of History in the Research School of Social Sciences. His books and essays have won prizes in literature, history, science, politics and journalism, most recently the Prime Minister’s Prize for Australian History (2008) and the Alfred Deakin Prize (2009). His books includeHunters and Collectors (1996), Forests of Ash (2001) and Slicing the Silence: Voyaging to Antarctica(2007). In 2008 he was the Distinguished Visiting Professor of Australian Studies at the University of Copenhagen where he continues as an Adjunct Professor of Climate Research. He is Chair of the Editorial Board of the Australian Dictionary of Biography, Director of the Centre for Environmental History and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities.
Professor Anthony Low is Former Vice-Chancellor of ANU and Smuts Professor of the History of the British Commonwealth and President of Clare Hall in the University of Cambridge.
In 1974 the University Council established the William Keith Hancock Chair of History to commemorate the first quarter century of the Research School of Social Sciences. It was named after Sir Keith Hancock, the first Director of RSSS, and its foundation professor of History.
Enquiries
E: Karen.Smith@anu.edu.au T: 6125 2354
This lecture is free and open to the public
Brett Bennett is currently a PhD candidate in history at the University of Texas at Austin and a visiting resident in the Centre for Environmental History at the Australian National University. In 2011 he will take up a position as lecturer in modern history at the University of Western Sydney. He has published widely on forestry history in Australia, India, South Africa, and Southeast Asia. His masters thesis and article in the May 2009 issue of Environment and History explored the founding of the Australian Forestry School. Most recently he wrote an editorial in the 28 April Canberra Times calling for the protection of the former school buildings.
Paul Warde is a Reader in Early Modern History at the University of East Anglia. His books include Economy, Ecology and State Formation in Early Modern Germany (2006) and (co-edited with Sverker Sörlin) Nature’s End: History and the Environment (Palgrave, 2009). Paul runs the project 
Sverker Sörlin is professor of Environmental History in the Division of History of Science and Technology at the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, and he serves on the Advisory Board of the Stockholm Resilience Centre, where he is also senior researcher.