Join us at Deakin Downtown for a special, end-of-trimester seminar showcasing several of our talented PhD candidates.
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Kate Davis: ‘Out of Place: Representations of Historical Figures in Anachronistic Popular Media’
The popularity of the Bridgerton television series continues to spur the creation of anachronistic historical representations that reimagine the experiences of women from the past. Particularly popular as television series, these texts use the past as a framework through which they tell a presentist story. Twenty-first century language, references and visual elements are combined with historical detail, or lack thereof, to highlight the experiences of women from the past. These texts elevate emotion and authenticity and reveal the constructed nature of history. Despite the potential impact that these texts may have on historical consciousness, scholarly attention towards them remains rare, particularly from historians. In my thesis I will aim to explore the relationship between a selection of these texts and their creators, the pasts they reimagine and their audiences. This paper will outline my research project, before discussing some early analysis of the anachronistic historical television series The Great. I will demonstrate how the creative teams’ relationships with the past informed their decision to represent a version of Catherine the Great that captured her essence more than it reflected historical detail.
Catherine Stuart: ‘Making of Community Housing in New South Wales’
In Australia, community housing emerged out of the broader welfare sector in the late 1970s as a not-for-profit alternative to public housing. It was a response to the perceived failure of state housing authorities to meet community needs. Its vision was to offer a smaller scale, locally focused and more supportive response to the housing needs of people with a low income. After about a decade and a half of growth fostered by access to limited Commonwealth and state government assistance, the community housing industry in New South Wales started to grow rapidly under the state government’s 1996 Community Housing Strategy. The Strategy aimed to ‘grow’ community housing as an ‘alternative provider system’ in competition with public housing. But how did the Strategy’s vision of a fundamentally reshaped system of housing assistance for people with low incomes come about, and why was it, on the whole, embraced by the emerging community housing industry? In this paper I explore some of the contradictions and pressures prevailing at the time of the Strategy’s release and how they may have influenced the vision of the 1996 Community Housing Strategy, and convinced the emerging community housing industry to begin a journey from ‘ratbag’ alternative to part of the system.
Tonia Sellers: ‘WWII Memory and Popular Culture: Remembering Australian-American Home Front Relationships and the Floozy-Predator Myth’
WWII Australia hosted over one million American servicepeople serving in the Pacific conflict. In the close proximity of the home front, many romantic or intimate relationships developed between Australian civilians and visiting Americans, which Australian society viewed as controversial, or even transgressive. Subsequent popular narratives of this difficult time in Australia’s history typically positioned the (hetero-presenting) people who participated in these relationships along stereotypical lines. American men were often remembered as exploitative and sex-driven, and Australian women were disloyal and materialistic. Their relationships seen as were self-serving, women seeking rationed material goods that men offered in exchange for companionship; American men were destructive to Australian women, who, by choosing Americans, could be seen as betraying both Australia and Australian men. My research questions why and how this narrative rose to prominence in the postwar years, and why it continues to remain relatively unchallenged in the present day. By looking at pop culture sources including magazines, popular film and fiction, and reflective sources such as autobiographies and oral histories, I track understandings and interpretations of home front Australian-American relationships, as popular narratives developed, changed, and coalesced between the 1940s and 2010s. I demonstrate how this significant cross-cultural contact between Australians and Americans reflected cultural anxieties, and how Australians made sense of wartime shifts to the hetero-patriarchal gender order, both personally and in broader social contexts.
20 May 2026, 11am AEST.
Zoom: Click here.
Kate Davis is a PhD candidate at Deakin University, whose research examines the representation of women from the past in anachronistic historical television series. Her thesis examines the relationship between these texts, their creators and audiences, and the past. She is particularly interested in representations that explore the experiences of women and queer people. Kate completed a Bachelor of Arts (First Class Honours) at Deakin University in 2024, where she examined the representation of the six wives of Henry VIII in the anachronistic stage show Six: The Musical. She also holds a Master of Information Studies (Librarianship) from Charles Sturt University and has experience in historical and special collection management.
Catherine Stuart is a Graduate Researcher in history at Deakin University. Her research focuses on the emergence of the community housing industry in New South Wales during the last quarter of the twentieth century. Catherine’s research interests in the histories of grassroots housing activism, public and community housing and build on long term professional experience in the social housing industry.
Tonia Sellers is a PhD candidate at Deakin University. She is currently researching the mythologising of relationships between Australian civilians and American servicepeople during the Second World War, and the persistence of these narratives, through popular histories, to the present day. Her previous postgraduate research has been about the Australian radical Left in the early-mid twentieth century, with a focus on the early years of the Communist Party of Australia. She is interested in gender, labour, and emotions histories.
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