For our final History Matters, we will discuss the creative applications of history and oral testimonies in digital and multimedia projects. Referring to recent examples, we look at the innovative ability of these contemporary approaches in presenting, highlighting, and connecting history, memory, and experiences to the past, present, and well into the future.
Register for free online, hosted by the State Library of NSW
Chair: Dr Alana Piper
Dr Alana Piper is a Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Australian Centre for Public history at the University of Technology Sydney. Her research interests draw together the social and cultural history of crime with criminological, legal and digital humanities approaches. Her current project, Criminal Characters, uses digital history to chart the lives and criminal careers of Australian offenders across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She has authored over 40 academic publications, and is currently an investigator on the ARC Discovery project ‘Sex and the Australian Military, 1914–2020’ (2021–23) and the ARC LIEF project ‘Time-Layered Cultural Map of Australia’ (2019–21).
Stephanie Arnold
Melbourne-based cellist Stephanie Arnold creates musical memoryscapes, combining edited interview material and oral history recordings with music performance and audio art. Tracing voices and histories through this form of musical storytelling, her work focuses on the role of performance as a way to share stories, while mindful of the ethics of interviewing, editing and collecting recorded stories.
Noëlle Janaczewska
Noëlle Janaczewska is a playwright, poet, essayist, and the author of The Book of Thistles (UWA Publishing). The recipient of multiple awards, including the 2020 NSW Premier’s Digital History Prize for her work Experiment Street, and a Windham-Campbell Prize from Yale, her collection, Scratchland (UWA Publishing Poetry Series), came out in 2020.
History Matters is a monthly seminar series co-presented by Oral History NSW and the Professional Historians Association NSW & ACT. Generously hosted by the State Library of NSW.