Professor M. Nazif Shahrani, Professor of Anthropology, Central Asian & Middle Eastern Studies, Indiana University
Shifting resources from Iraq to the so called ‘war of necessity' in Afghanistan by President Obama, while significant, is unlikely to be effective. This is largely because the fundamental assumptions…
Richard Woolcott AC , Prime Minister’s Special Envoy for the Asia Pacific Community
In June 2008, the Australian Prime Minister, the Hon. Kevin Rudd, spoke of the need to begin a "regional debate about where we want to be in 2020". In particular, he outlined the need for an Asia Pacific…
Professor Stanley Ulijaszek, Professor of Human Ecology & Director, Unit for Biocultural Variation & Obesity, University of Oxford
Obesity has increased dramatically across the world, and there is currently no solution to its control. While obesity is easily understood as the positive imbalance of energy intake and…
David Malouf , Author
This lecture was give at the official launch of the new ANU Bachelor of Classical Studies and the Classics Endowment.
Professor Graeme Davison, Sir John Monash Distinguished Professor, Monash University
Fifty years after its publication Russel Ward's book The Australian Legend remains the classic account of our national origins. In tracing Australia's national ethos to the folksongs…
Bruce Haigh, Political Commentator and Former Diplomat
Bruce Haigh argues that Australian foreign policy has been, and remains, inept in advancing Australia's national interest. Given the limited independence of Australia's Foreign Minister,…
Host: Dr Richard Denniss, Executive Director
Indigenous Australians residing in communities in regional and remote Australia are among Australia's most disadvantaged partly because of limited formal economic opportunity. In these…
Professor Peter Rowley-Conwy, Department of Archaeology, University of Durham, UK
Aspects of Australian archaeology have had widespread repercussions upon archaeology beyond the Antipodes. In this talk Professor Peter Rowley-Conwy explored a series of ways in which Antipodean…
Professor Geoffrey Sayre-McCord, Morehead Alumni Distinguished Professor and Department Chair, Department of Philosophy, University of North Carolina
Adam Smith offers a wonderfully lucid argument for thinking that people can legitimately be praised or blamed only on the basis of the agent's "intention or affection of the heart" and not on the actual…
-75pxx50.JPG "Professor Amin Saikal")
Professor Amin Saikal, Professor of Political Science and Director of the Centre for Arab and Islamic Studies
The Islamic government of oil-rich Iran is faced with its worst legitimacy crisis since the Iranian revolution that toppled the Shah's pro-Western monarchy and replaced it with an Islamic regime thirty…
Virginia Haussegger, Julie Posetti and Dr Shakira Hussein
A public debate hosted by The Australian National University and The Canberra Times.
Muslim women's dress codes have come into the political spotlight in both Muslim-majority…
Professor Ned Block, Silver Professor of Philosophy, Psychology and Neural Science, Department of Philosophy, New York University
There are good reasons for thinking that the physical basis of cognition can be reasonably taken to extend outside the brain to the body and the world. But not so for consciousness. This…
His Royal Highness Prince Turki AlFaisal, Chairman of the Board, The King Faisal Centre for Research and Islamic Studies Riyadh
HRH Prince Turki AlFaisal is Chairman of the Board of the King Faisal Centre for Research and Islamic Studies in Riyadh. He is one of Saudi Arabia's leading intellectuals, with a very rich record…
Professor Mark R. Rosenzweig, Frank Altschul Professor of International Economics and Director of the Economic Growth Center, Yale University
This lecture examined the growing phenomenon of international skilled migration with particular attention to its impact on developing countries. A framework was developed for understanding the…
Dr David Kilcullen, Counterterrorism Strategist
In the first few years of the post-9/11 era, the established models for fighting ‘small wars' proved distressingly ineffective against resilient insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan.…
Dr Andrew Glikson, ANU School of Archaeology and Anthropology and Research School of Earth Science
The evolution of Australopithecines and subsequently the Genus Homo from about 4.5 million years ago was intimately related to an overall cooling trend associated with orbital forcing…
Dr Tony Ballantyne, University of Otago, New Zealand
A large body of scholarship has suggested that the production and circulation of knowledge was fundamental to British empire building. Rather than exploring colonial knowledge as a body of texts…
Professor Stuart Harris, Dr Robert F. Miller and Dr Kirill Nourzhanov, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies and Centre for Arab and Islamic Studies
Speaking shortly after his election as President of the Russian Federation in 2008, Dmitry Medvedev highlighted his priorities in office: to maintain economic stability, to strengthen freedoms, to promote…
Dr Peter Dowling, Heritage Officer, ACT National Trust, Canberra
During several visits to the Anzac Battlefield at Gallipoli, Turkey, since 2003, Dr Peter Dowling has located human remains exposed in areas of high tourist activity laying on road banks and verges…
H.E. Dr Seyed Mohammad Khatami, Former President of the Islamic Republic of Iran
Our interdependent world creates both new opportunities and new challenges. The gravest danger today is insecurity, which has taken on global proportions. In order to deal with the threat…
Professor Jeffrey Williamson, Harvard University and the University of Wisconsin
A secular decline in emigration rates from the Third World since the 1990s has gone unnoticed. The recent rise in unemployment in high-wage countries has accelerated the secular decline. These trends…
Professor Steven T. Katz, Director Elie Wiesel Center for Judaic Studies, Boston University and Alvin & Shirley Slater Chair in Jewish & Holocaust Studies
This lecture covered the essential features of medieval Christian antisemitism and the very different features of modern racial antisemitism, culminating in Nazi antisemitism. It concluded with…
Professor Ian Chubb AC, Dr Henry Reece and Dr Bruce Moore
Speaking Our Language: The Story of Australian English was launched at ANU on 9 October 2008. The book is the first of its kind to trace the development of the Australian accent and the Australian…
Dr Maggie Brady and Professor Robin Room, The Australian National university and The University of Melbourne
This public lecture challenges some of the common beliefs that surround Indigenous Australians and the history of 'grog', by discussing the findings of the newly released publication First Taste:…
Andaleeb Akhand, Amanda Alford, Hae-Young (Connie) Chong, Kirill Talanine, Tamie Balaga, Thomas Conyers, Contestants in the 2008 Lions Oratory Competition
The 14th Annual Lions Oratory Competition saw selected ANU students from across the University present eight minute orations to convince the judges and the audience that they deserved to win the ANU…
Michael Piggott, University Archivist at the University of Melbourne
Are archivists complicit in helping the victors write history, privileging some voices and silencing others? Are they alchemists transforming ‘turds and sticks' into the gold of societal heritage?…
Allan Behm
Australian security policy is increasingly irrelevant to the looming realities of the 21st century. A lack of strategic direction, a mish-mash of unconnected policies, and policy institutions…
Major General Jim Molan
The war in Iraq is as awful as any war, but that is never an excuse to wage it illegally or immorally. The only thing that will make the Iraq war worse than it is will be to ‘lose’. Major…
Dr Norman Abjorensen, School of Social Sciences, ANU
Was the federation of the six Australian colonies into a Commonwealth of Australia really such a good idea? What were the alternatives? Might there have been a better way of doing things? The hard and…
Professor Mauricio Tenorio-Trillo, University of Chicago and, Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económica, Mexico City
Mexico furnished the era of social and cultural change that started ‘right around 1910’ with its first popular revolution. By 1919 Mexico City had become a refuge for the world’s radicals.…
Professor Michael Wesley, Professor of International Relations and Director of the Griffith Asia Institute, Griffith University
Officially we are still fighting a "War on Terror", but few people in Australia would say we are still living in an "Age of Terror". Oil prices have quadrupled, but we have not seen the same panicked…
Professor Hugh White, Head, Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, ANU College of Asia and the Pacific
In this lecture, Professor White discusses the morality and ethical challenges of war, as examined by Professor Coady in his new book, Morality & Political Violence. Political violence,…
Professor R.G. Gregory
The talk looks back over the period of the Hawke, Keating and Howard governments and discusses what has been learned and what has been forgotten. It offers conjectures on likely economic outcomes…
Various speakers
In delivering an apology to the Stolen Generations the Prime Minister set a concrete target to halve the gap in infant mortality rates between Indigenous and non-Indigenous children within a decade.…
Marian Sawer and Roslyn Dundas
Lecture One
Recipes For Revolt: What Made the Women's Movement Move?
In this lecture, Marian Sawer draws on her forthcoming history of Women's Electoral Lobby to explore…
Professor Michael Pusey, Australia & New Zealand School of Government
Has economic reform run its course? What potential remains for the resumption of nation building progress? Contrary to expectations Canberra emerges from 20 years of neo-liberalism with…
Professor Ross Garnaut, Professor of Economics, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, College of Asia and the Pacific
In the inaugural S.T. Lee Lecture on Asia and the Pacific Professor Garnaut asks: How the risks of climate change will interact with the 'Platinum Age' of global economic growth? What are the limits…
Professor Larry May, Professor of Philosophy, Washington University
For several thousand years, philosophers, lawyers, and theologians have developed a theory of the just war, where rules are set for deciding when a war should be fought and what tactics can be employed…
Hugh MacKay
Fifteen years ago social researcher Hugh Mackay wrote the bestseller Reinventing Australia , which analysed with forensic skill what was happening within Australian society. In this public…
Professor Ann Curthoys, Manning Clarke Professor of History, ANU
In recent debates over truth and fiction in history, the Holocaust has loomed large. It is often seen to be a litmus test for historians, in terms of historical method, truth, questions of moral judgement…
Lieutenant General John Sanderson AC, Special Advisor on Indigenous Affairs to the Government of Western Australia
In this lecture, Lieutenant General John Sanderson argues that the national approach to Indigenous issues can broadly be described as ‘assimilationist’ – the belief that the only hope…
Professor Philip Kitcher, John Dewey Professor of Philosophy, Columbia University
Having informed citizens is important to the health of any democracy. Scholars and journalists frequently suppose that affluent countries have systems of public knowledge on which their citizens can…
Moderated by Professor Will Steffen, Director, ANU Fenner School of Enfionment and Society; Convener, ANU Institute for Environment
Will emissions trading harm or benefit the economy? Can emissions trading get Australia to a low emissions future? What is the right way toward an effective post-Kyoto international scheme? This…
Professor Michael Coper
On Tuesday 12 June 2007, His Holiness the Dalai Lama and representatives of the Christian, Islamic and Jewish faiths met in a symposium exploring the role of religion in war and conflict. Rabbi Jonathan…
Venerable Alex Bruce, Rabbi Jonathan Keren-Black, Most Reverend Bishop Christopher Prowse, Professor Abdullah Saeed
On Tuesday 12 June 2007, His Holiness the Dalai Lama and representatives of the Christian, Islamic and Jewish faiths met in a symposium exploring the role of religion in war and conflict. Rabbi Jonathan…
His Holiness the Dalai Lama and Guest Speakers
On Tuesday 12 June 2007, His Holiness the Dalai Lama and representatives of the Christian, Islamic and Jewish faiths met in a symposium exploring the role of religion in war and conflict. Rabbi Jonathan…
Michel Onfray
If Nietzsche proclaimed the death of God, French philosopher Michel Onfray starts from the premise that not only is God still very much alive but increasingly controlled by fundamentalists who pose…
Professor Ken Inglis
Allan Martin's two principal subjects as a historian, Sir Henry Parkes and Sir Robert Menzies, were both great orators. Among questions asked in this lecture (the Allan Martin Memorial Lecture…
Clive Hamilton, Executive Director, Australia Institute
2007 may be the year in which climate change has hit the headlines and the environment has become the political issue, but how much do we know really know about the backroom deals, lobbying and power…
Rt Hon Malcolm Fraser, Former Prime Minister of Australia
What does it mean to be Australian in 2007? How do we as Australians see ourselves? How are we as a nation, culture and society, perceived by others? How have recent actions and policies affected attitudes…
Vanessa Woods, Writer, researcher, freelance journalist
Taking off to mend a broken heart, Vanessa Woods left safe, suburban Canberra and headed for the remote, wild and distinctly unsafe jungles of Costa Rica. She was stung so often by killer bees she developed…
Dr Sarah Maddison, University of New South Wales
To what extent have Australian feminist struggles achieved a substantive and lasting gender equality? The gender report for the Democratic Audit of Australia considered this question, investigating…
Her Excellency, Ms Tarja Halonen, President of the Republic of Finland
The European Union (EU) has huge potential to enhance its influence in the world with its 27 Member States and almost 500 million citizens. Europe is also increasingly connected to the Asia-Pacific…
The Hon. John Brumby MP, Victorian Treasurer
Relations between the Commonwealth and state governments have been a continual source of tension in our federal system. The relationship can wax and wane, from confrontation and friction to cooperation…
Professor Francis Fukuyama, Professor of International Political Economy, Johns Hopkins University
While Professor Francis Fukuyama’s changing evaluation of the arguments of his one-time Neocon colleagues has illuminated major issues about American policy and the war in Iraq, his general thinking…
Steve Larkin, Principal, Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS)
Steve Larkin, Principal, Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS), explores the unique role of AIATSIS in promoting scholarship that has been relevant and…
Professor Jane Mansbridge, Adams Professor, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University
Advocates of reform want to subject their representatives to constant scrutiny, allowing voters to judge every word spoken, coalition joined, and compromise approved. Professor Jane Mansbridge…
Professor Kenneth Mayer, Fulbright-ANU Distinguished Professor of Political Science & Professor of Political Science, University of Wisconsin-Madison
On the eve of the 2006 U.S. elections, Professor Mayer, this year’s holder of the Fulbright-ANU Distinguished Professorship in Political Science, reviews the state of the electoral process…
Phil Fontaine, National Chief of Canada's Assembly of First Nations
Like Australia, Canada faces challenges in resolving the grievances of First Nation peoples harmed by past policies. Phil Fontaine, the National Chief of Canada's Assembly of First Nations, has been…
Dr Jose Ramos-Horta, Prime Minister, Timor-Leste
In his first visit to Australia as Prime Minister of Timor-Leste, Dr Jose Ramos-Horta discusses the current political…
Dr Eusebio Dizon
For more than 20 years, the National Museum of the Philippines has been conducting underwater archaeology in Philippine waters with international collaborators. In this lecture, Dr Eusebio Dizon discusses the…
Professor Peter Glasner
Ever since Dolly the sheep was cloned, there has been much debate in the media and public spheres about the ethics and morality of genetic…
Emeritus Professor Ken Inglis
As controversy continues to swirl around Australia’s national broadcaster, a long-awaited history of its last 20 years provides much-needed…
Dr Valerio Massimo Manfredi, Professor of Classical Archaeology, University of Milan
Dr Valerio Massimo Manfredi traces out the interlinked lineage of 'story' and 'history', arguing that the latter became important when societies needed to reinforce collective identities through an…
Dr Tim Wetherell , Science Communicator, ANU College of Science
Science and art might sound like vastly different disciplines, but Dr Tim Wetherell from ANU believes they are both…
Professor Quentin Skinner, University of Cambridge
What is freedom? The philosopher Thomas Hobbes attempted to pin the concept down in his seminal work Leviathan, defining freedom as the absence of opposition, particularly…
Emeritus Professor Peter Russell, University of Toronto
A judicial revolution occurred in 1992 when the High Court discarded the doctrine of terra nullius in the Mabo case. The ruling had repercussions for Indigenous peoples within Australia and around the…
Professor Hilary Charlesworth, Research School of Social Sciences and ANU College of Law
Pamela Denoon Lecture 2006 in association with International Women's Day Issues of sex and gender are rarely considered relevant to invasions, conflict or state-building. …
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