2025 Winner
Elizabeth Burrell (Monash), “Words for Wellbeing: Charms, Caregiving and Health in England, 1300–1550”
Elizabeth Burrell’s thesis is based on reading a wide variety of Latin and medieval English sources on charms, situated in a careful theoretical framing toward her reconstruction of the living performance of caregiving in the practice of medieval charms. She takes seriously, using Latour’s actor-network theory and Gell’s ‘social instruments’ theory, the work of words and their material traces in the lives of medieval people, to show how charms might have come alive for patients at their moment of expression. This is not just a thesis about folk medicines but about the ways in which charms engaged with up-to-date scientific knowledges in their time. We particularly commend the originality of her focus on charm patient perspectives via a history from below with its emphasis on non-elites, and its sophisticated discussion of the materiality of charms. We also commend her comprehensive engagement with a broad array of relevant fields of medieval scholarship on health, medicine, belief, literacy, class, social structures, religious hierarchies, and English cultural variation. She considers literacy not just through individuals but also through communities that included the non-literate, and notes the practices of men in areas of spiritual and physical care-giving that have been considered exclusively female. This is work that is likely to attract the highest degree of scholarly commendation.
Judges: Cath Kevin (Flinders), Morris Low (UQ), Alison Downham-Moore (UWS)
Highly Commended
Bronwyn Anne Beech Jones (Melbourne): “Textual Worlds: Rethinking self, community, and activism in colonial-era Sumatran women’s newspaper archives”
Beech Jones’ thesis exhibits impressive multilingual expertise in the use of Malay, Indonesian and Dutch sources. We were impressed by her recovery of overlooked historical subjects, women’s communities and her application of a matrixial approaches to translation. She shows a keen eye for colonial dynamics in her reading of the young women’s ideas about education, work and security, and detects subtle shifts in genre, ideas of audience and the different purposes of writing practices for different writers, including sensitive readings of the transitions from girlhood to womanhood. This is a history that traces embodiment and emotion and understands these as political. It tells the stories of the women themselves but also through their relationships, the histories of parents, families, husbands and friends. This thesis is rich on storytelling and readability. It will lend itself to publication in a series like the Routledge Asian Studies Association of Australia’s ‘Women in Asia’ series.
Iryna Skubii (Queens University, Canada): “Survival Under Extremes: Human, Environmental, and Material Relationships Amidst the Soviet Famines in Ukraine”
Iryna Skubii’s timely study is an ambitious and epic thesis that provides new insights on how people (and animals) in their environment survived the early twentieth century famines in Ukraine. It is a rigorous study, richly researched, with an innovative materiality frame. Her focus on eye-witness testimonies lends regional granular detail and lived experience dimension to her analysis. The incorporation of non-human agents is an innovative and central part of the approach taken, requiring new and sensitive readings of existing sources in the context of constrained access to archival materials. The inclusion of animals and plants as sharers of the human catastrophe expands our sense of what and who is a victim of famine. Her work also exhibits a sensitive exploration of the emotions and materiality of famine that includes the impact of famine on interspecies relationships, and an original focus on waste consumption which distinguished the Ukrainian famines. We also commend the careful attention to ethnically diverse populations as a pathway to decolonisation of Ukrainian history. This work will make a fine book of wide public readership appeal.
2024 Winner
Paige Donaghy (UQ), “Uncertain Knowledge: False Conceptions and Molas in European Medicine, 1500–1800”
A thesis that charts the evolution of lay and medical beliefs surrounding false conception and false generation in early modern England and beyond. Building on an original conceptual framework around ‘reproductive uncertainty’, the thesis conveys the liminality of pregnant embodiment, making a powerful argument about knowledge-making during the transformation and professionalisation of medical practice over the centuries. Elegantly written and persuasively argued, the thesis brings together an impressive number of archival materials. It deftly navigates the diverse contemporary debates in the scholarship while making a significant intervention into histories of medicine, reproduction, gender, and knowledge. This deeply interdisciplinary thesis underlines how pregnancy as we imagine it today has been historically determined. The author’s resolve to never simply assign to the past the categorisations of the present highlight the limitations of past systems of thought in favour of our supposed actual, objective and ‘scientific’ understanding. This was a brave and challenging approach. The end result is an accomplished, original, and daring thesis, that has made a considered contribution to the historical discipline.
Judges: Philip Dwyer (Newcastle), Prudence Flowers (Flinders), Giuseppe Finaldi (UWA)
Highly Commended
Henry-James Meiring (UQ), “Reading Morals: Charles Darwin and the Descent of Morality”
Divya Rama Gopalakrishnan (Melbourne), “Venereal Diseases and Bodily Excesses: A Social History of Contagions in the Madras Presidency (c. 1780 to 1900)”
2023 Winner
Freg (James) Stokes (Melbourne), “The Hummingbird’s Atlas: Mapping Guaraní Resistance in the Atlantic Rainforest during the Emergence of Capitalism (1500–1768)”
A remarkable thesis that tackles a highly original topic. Empirically rich, theoretically adventurous, the thesis shows a depth and difficulty of research that includes time in the archives and fieldwork, and extensive use of non-English language sources. It ties together novel archival research, work with Indigenous Guaraní speakers, and map-making to develop a compelling argument that the resistance of Indigenous populations in the Atlantic rainforest shaped the expansion (or not) of colonial agendas and also played a major role in the trajectories of global capitalism. It is a pioneering thesis that puts Indigenous peoples at the forefront of global history, and incorporates oral traditions and Indigenous knowledge alongside archival work. The thesis brings together and makes a significant contribution to the best and newest literature in the fields of labour history, environmental history, indigenous history, and global history in a sophisticated analysis that is complemented by an impressive collection of original maps and tables.
Judges: Mike McDonnell (Sydney), Katie Barclay (Adelaide), Patrick Jory (Notre Dame)
Highly Commended
Kathleen Burke (ANU), “Global Cuisine in the Dutch Indian Ocean Empire”
An original and impressively researched thesis that traces the movement of food and cuisine in the Dutch Indian Ocean empire. The dissertation features an impressive use of recipes as primary sources, which are read against the grain, yielding fascinating insights on topics rarely discussed in previous scholarship: everyday fare, the cravings of returning elites, the cuisine aboard ships, and the transmission of food cultures from place to place – all the while weaving in the documents of male colonists and the traces of enslaved and elite women in this process.
Douglas Pretsell (La Trobe), “The Age of the Urning: Queer Identities and Advocacy in Germany, 1864−1897”
This is an intensively researched and beautifully written study of the early German homosexual writer and theorist Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, his theory of ‘urnings’, and homosexuality in Germany between the 1860s-90s, before the concept of ‘homosexual’ was defined and widely adopted. Featuring frequent and detailed use of German language sources, including Ulrichs’ own works, it makes a convincing case for the importance of understanding earlier attempts to develop classificatory schemas of sexuality and concepts of masculinity in Germany, which were later superseded and thus largely forgotten.
Wilbert Wong (ANU), “Sir Richard Olaf Winstedt and the Historical Creation of ‘Malaya’ and ‘Tanah Melayu’”
Wong lays out a bold new argument about the role of the influential European colonial administrator-historian in British Malaya, Richard Olaf Winstedt in constructing a grand narrative of Malay history later adopted by Malay historians themselves. This is a refreshingly non-postcolonial study that uses English and Malay language sources to tease out an important genealogy of Malay historiography, and which helps explain the ideological foundation for the racial politics that bedevils Malaysia today. Wong shows how things could have been different.