School of Humanities International Activities: January - March 2025

The School of Humanities has been involved in many international activities since the beginning of the year - including student performances at the Adelaide Fringe, guest lectures, research collaboration, and more!

Film Studies Group:
The Film Studies group recently held a welcome for 3 new HDR students.

National Taiwan Normal University Students at the Adelaide Fringe:
The JM Coetzee Centre for Creative Practice is hosting a large group of Masters degree students over the next three weeks as the visitors perform in three separate shows at the Adelaide Fringe. The student performers are based at the National Taiwan Normal University Graduate Institute of Performing Arts in Taiwan. The shows include an original musical entitled Journey to Little Happiness, a production that blends magic, mime, dance and music called Diary of a Magician: Year One and another production that offers magic, mime and martial arts entitled Duel and Dual. This is the first year that the students have presented more than one production at the Fringe. In 2023 a small group came to Adelaide to experience the Fringe. In 2024 those students presented a show and in 2025 students associated with the Institute are presenting three productions. 

Research:

• Peter C. Pugsley published, with former PhD student Hongyan Zou, ‘River Road as Eco-Cinema: Framing China’s Yugur Ethnic Minority through Religion, Identity and the Environment’. 
• Film Studies PhD Candidate Yanyan Hong recently won the Best Postgraduate Paper at the Screen Studies Association (Australia & Aotearoa NZ) conference in December (from a field of 50), and has since been interviewed or written for a number of outlets, including ABC Asia (Australia), and The Conversation.

Advanced Studies in the Humanities (ASH) Fellow Guest Lecture:
On Tuesday 25 February, Prof. Peter D. McDonald (Oxford), the School's first Visiting ASH (Advanced Studies in the Humanities) Fellow for 2025, gave a public lecture entitled “The Two Georges: Boolean AND anti-Boolean”. This offered a fascinating alternative history of the future by returning to an intellectual debate about language and representation in the mid-1850s, one that startlingly prefigured current framings of Large Language Models and prompts us to ask questions about what it means to read in the age of machine learning in suggestive new ways.