Funded Research

A new way to combat youth violence

Dr Tamara Blakemore
E: Tamara.Blakemore@newcastle.edu.au

2021-2023, Westpac’s Safer Children, Safer Communities initiative, $600,000

This funding will expand learnings from the Name.Narrate.Navigate (NNN) pilot program – a preventive-intervention program developed to address the significant, yet underserviced, issue of youth violence. Taking a unique approach, NNN acknowledges young people who use violence have often been victims/survivors of violence themselves. It uses trauma-informed practice to provide sensitive and culturally safe education, skill development and support to young people who have used or are at risk of using violence. The funds will help to deliver specialist training for practitioners in regional, rural, and remote Australia where preventive interventions for young people who have been both victims/survivors and perpetrators of harm are lacking but sorely needed.

The ‘Peace’ of Lausanne (1923): Genesis, Legacies, Paradoxes.

Associate Professor Hans-Lukas Kieser

2021-2023, ARC funded Discovery Project, $158,991

This study aims to revisit the foundation of the modern Middle East by investigating the still valid 1923 Peace Treaty of Lausanne. Through a combined analysis of the Treaty's prehistory, protracted negotiations and paradigmatic impact, it will reassess the Conference's and Treaty's role in Modern History. By exploring international diplomacy's endorsement of authoritarian rule, demographic engineering and mass violence, it will problematise the notion of realpolitik and challenge views that the Treaty of Lausanne led to sustainable peace in Turkey and its neighbourhood. This will prompt a re-evaluation of topical questions like border disputes, the Kurdish conflict, post-Ottoman state-building, the caliphate, and the Armenian genocide.

A Century of Sex and the Australian Military, 1914-2020.

Professor Noah Riseman; Dr Tristan Moss; Dr Elizabeth Roberts-Pedersen; Dr Alana Piper

2021-2023, ARC funded Discovery Project, $264,435

This project aims to explore how the Australian military and its members have dealt with sex and sexuality. Through uncovering policy, health and disciplinary files, as well as medical literature, civilian police, newspaper and court records, the project intends to analyse how the Australian military evolved its approach to members’ sexual and intimate relations, and the consequences military life had for individuals’ sexual and romantic partnerships. By illuminating the relationships between the Australian military, sexual cultures, the law, health and public policy, the findings should benefit the Australian Defence Force’s ongoing process of culture change and inform policy formulation around veterans’ health and welfare.

Global Patterns of Mass Violence: Ottoman Borderlands in Context, 1890-1920.

Dr Ümit Kurt

2021-2024, Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA), $369,424

This project examines the transformative dimensions of mass violence committed against the minorities of the Ottoman Empire – Armenians, Assyrians, Yazidis, and Greeks – and the historical impact and consequences of the Empire’s violent history on the Balkans and the Levant (Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon). In particular, it highlights the crucial role played by international, inter-state, central, and regional actors, who undertook critical roles in the national and community-building process of the Empire, resulting in the foundation of the new Turkish Republic (1923). It will rethink the classical historical narrative about the emergence of the post-Ottoman Middle East, and seek to understand the wider, global dimensions of mass violence.

Aftermaths of War: Violence, Trauma, Displacement, 1815-1950

Professor Joy Damousi; Professor Philip Dwyer; Professor Mark Edele; Associate Professor Frances Clarke; Associate Professor Hans Kieser; Professor Peter Gatrell; Associate Professor Rebecca Plant; Dr Reto Hofmann

2020-2024 ARC funded Discovery Project, $448,000.00

This project aims to investigate the cultural, social and psychological aftermaths of wars between 1815 to 1950 from a comparative, transnational perspective. By connecting the displacement of people, the brutalization of warfare and the trauma associated with it, this study will offer a broader and more complex understanding of the experience of civilians and combatants in the wake of armed conflicts. In so doing, it will challenge traditional periodizations which delineate between periods of war and peace, and seek to uncover the profound legacies of war not just within but beyond nation states. This will prompt a re-evaluation of our understanding of what constitutes warfare and its aftermaths.

Between Death & Commemoration: An Australian History of the War Corpse

Dr Kate Ariotti
2020-2022, Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA), $379,405

This project aims to provide the first ever account of the changing policies, practices and attitudes that have shaped how the physical remains of Australian war dead have been dealt with between the First World War and the recent wars in the Middle East (1915-2015). By investigating this invisible aspect of our military past, it will create new directions in Australian war history and provide an Australian perspective on global conversations about the history of the corpse in war. New knowledge about the war corpse will advance national understandings about the realities of war, and provide valuable information and more informed perspectives about death in war to history educators, cultural institutions, military units and the public.

Sexual Harms and Medical Encounters (SHaME)

Professor Joanna Bourke
A collaboration with Birkbeck University of London, SHaME is an interdisciplinary research hub for scholarship on the interlinks between sexual violence, medicine, and psychiatry. Sexual harms are experienced by people across different societies and are often shrouded in complex feelings around shame. We aim to move beyond shame to address this global health crisis.

Perpetrator Package - Young Perpetrators activity

Dr Tamara Blakemore
$872,361. Funding body: Department of Social Services

The Impact of Solitary Confinement on Convicts, 1817-1853

Professor Hamish Maxwell-Stewart; Professor Catharine Coleborne; Dr Jeremy Prichard; Professor Stefan Petrow; Professor Kris Inwood; Professor Hilary Marland; Dr Catherine Cox
2018-2020 ARC funded Discovery Project, $417,684

This project aims to explore the impact of solitary confinement on the health and well-being of 72,500 convicts transported to Australia between 1817 and 1853. It will do so by linking detailed life course histories for these men and women to psychiatric admission data for Tasmanian 19th century institutions. The project results will inform policy as well as increasing on-line access to Australia's UNESCO Memory of the World registered convict records. The project outcomes will help to contextualise the risks associated with different types and rates of solitary confinement exposure.

Unquiet Minds: Psychiatry in World War Two and its Aftermaths

Dr Elizabeth Roberts-Pedersen
2016-2018, Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA), ($354,000)

This project aims to provide the first comprehensive account of psychiatry in World War Two and its consequences in American, British and Australian contexts. World War Two was a watershed in the theory and practice of psychiatry in the western world, yet it figures less in the literature than the shell shock of World War One and the post-traumatic stress disorder of the Vietnam War. The projects aims to investigate the diverse patient cohorts – such as prisoners of war, veterans and children separated from caregivers – encountered by psychiatrists and the impact of the theories and practices that resulted from these interactions. It expects to provide historical context for current psychiatric concepts and practicehttps://www.newcastle.edu.au/research-and-innovation/centre/csov/research/_edit#s.

Intimacy and Violence in Anglo Pacific Rim Colonial Societies, 1830-1930

Prof Lyndall Ryan; Prof Amanda Nettelbeck (Adelaide); A/Prof Anna Johnston (Utas); A/Prof Penelope Edmonds (Utas); A/Prof Victoria Haskins; Dr Angela Wanhalla (University of Otago)
2015-2018 ARC funded project, $500,137

Violence and intimacy were both fundamental to the formation of settler colonial societies, yet we know surprisingly little of how they were connected. Through a large-scale collaboration of leading scholars, this project aims to produce the first transnational analysis of intimacy and violence as key, intertwined vectors in the development of settler societies across the colonial Anglophone Pacific Rim. Drawing out connections between the broad-scale dynamics of colonial rule and the violent and intimate domains of its implementation on the ground, the project aims to generate new comparative insights into the development of colonial settler cultures and create enhanced understanding of their legacies for western settler democracies today.

Violence on the Australian Colonial Frontier, 1788-1960

Prof Lyndall Ryan, and Dr Jonathan Richards (UQ)
2013-2016 ARC funded project, $289,000.00

How many Aborigines and settlers were killed on the Australian frontier? Were they mostly killed in ones and twos or in mass killings? How can we know? These questions are of first national importance in understanding the past. This project takes a fresh approach to frontier violence by employing new analytical methods to investigate the complex array of sources to produce new estimates of casualties 1788 to 1960. The findings will be made available in online maps and transform our understanding of the ongoing trauma of frontier violence that persists in Australian society today

War, Violence, and Apocalyptic-Millenarianism in the Middle East: Talat Pasha and the Foundation of Modern Turkey, 1874-1921

ARC Future Fellow A/Prof Hans-Lukas Kieser 2013-2017 ARC funded Future Fellowship, $790,764.00

This research project considers the Young Turk Revolution of 1908, the Ottoman entry into the First Word War on the side of the Axis powers, and the subsequent demise of the Ottoman Empire in a broad international context. It addresses matters of deep analytical import - state formation, political violence, and genocide - and the relationship between these elements. It focuses in particular on the Grand Vizir, Talat Pasha, the founder of the modern Turkish nation-state, and the architect of the Armenian genocide. This history is essential for a contemporary understanding of the most controversial problems - the Kurdish conflict, the Armenian question, Palestine - facing Turkey and the Middle East today.

Massacre and Colonization, 1780-1820

Prof Philip Dwyer, Prof Lyndall Ryan, Nigel Penn (UCT) and Barbara Mann (Toledo),
ARC funded project

This collaborative study examines massacre and colonization in a critical period in modern history
(1780-1820) in four different parts of the world - Australia, South Africa, North America and Europe. It will yield new conclusions about the massacre in history, and reverse accepted norms surrounding the interactions between conquerors and subaltern peoples. It is particularly important for understanding how societies identify with their past and especially in understanding contemporary race relations. Expected outcomes include a significant conceptual advance in the study of the history of massacre.

Women, Stalinism and the Soviet Home Front, 1941-45

Prof Roger Markwick, and Prof Dr Beate Fieseler (Düsseldorf) (ARC funded project)

Women have long been hidden players in warfare; nowhere more so than on the Eastern Front during the Second World War, where they played a crucial role in the defeat of Nazism by Stalin's Red Army. This international collaborative project is bringing to light the hitherto hidden wartime experiences of Soviet women who bore the brunt of maintaining life on the home front. The overarching objective of the project is to determine exactly what it was about Soviet state, society and culture that enabled the draconian Stalinist regime, confronted with catastrophic defeat, to mobilise millions of women on the home front.