The Herbert & Valmae Freilich Foundation at the ANU presents the 2015 Alice Tay Lecture in Law and Human Rights:

Magna Carta: How Relevant to Australia and Human Rights?, Professor Gillian Triggs (Australian Human Rights Commission)

Date: Monday June 15, 2015
Time: 12.30 – 1.30pm
Venue: Museum of Australian Democracy, Member’s Dining Room, Old Parliament House (Entry via rear of the building—Queen Victoria Terrace, Parkes)
RSVP: Registration is not required. This lecture is free and open to the public.

To commemorate the sealing of Magna Carta 800 years ago, Professor Gillian Triggs, President of the Australian Human Rights Commission, will address the state of human rights in Australia. This lecture will be chaired by Dr Helen Watchirs OAM, ACT Public Advocate and ACT Human Rights and Discrimination Commissioner.

This lecture is hosted by the Museum of Australian Democracy at Old Parliament House and is part of their events for the 800th anniversary of the sealing of Magna Carta. For further information see www.moadoph.gov.au.

UNSW: The Richard Madelaine Memorial Lecture
“The Shakespearean inheritance”, (Professor Jonathan Bate, Oxford University)

Date: Tuesday 26 May
Time: 6:00pm–7:30pm
Venue: Tyree Room,John Niland Scientia Building, UNSW Kensington (map ref G19)
RSVP: http://www.arts.unsw.edu.au/othersites/?path=othersites/fass/form/index.php&i=546

As we approach the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death, this lecture will explore various aspects of the Shakespearean inheritance today in theatre, film, text and his wider cultural influence.

It will also look at Shakespeare’s own cultural inheritance from classical antiquity, and will argue that Shakespeare does for us today what the Classics did for him.

This So What? Lecture is dedicated to the memory of Richard Madelaine, who worked at UNSW from 1973 until his death in 2012.

Richard was a dedicated teacher who passed on his critical enthusiasm for Shakespeare to generations of UNSW students. He earned an international reputation for his scholarship: for his engaging account of the staging history of Antony and Cleopatra in the Shakespeare in Production series (Cambridge University Press, 1998); for editing ‘O Brave New World’: Two Centuries of Shakespeare on the Australian Stage (Currency Press, 2001) with John Golder; and for his editorial work on the Bell Shakespeare Series (Halstead Press).

Richard was a member of the Executive Committee of the English Association for over twenty years and its President for more than ten of these years. He contributed significantly to the success of the Association’s publications through his consistently witty, incisive, wide-ranging, carefully targeted and finely crafted pieces on Shakespeare.

It is fitting to honour Richard Madelaine’s life and career by presenting this lecture by another renowned Shakespeare scholar, Professor Jonathan Bate.

Biographer, critic, broadcaster and scholar Jonathan Bate is Provost of Worcester College and Professor of English Literature at Oxford. His many books include acclaimed works on Shakespeare, The Genius of Shakespeare and Soul of the Age, and a biography of the poet John Clare that won Britain’s two oldest literary awards, the Hawthornden Prize and the James Tait Black Prize. In the 2015 New Years Honours list, he was knighted for his services to literature. His new book, Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life, will be published globally by HarperCollins in October.

University of Melbourne: S. Ernest Sprott Fellowship Address
“A veray patronesse”: Margaret Beaufort and the Early English Printers, Dr Patricia Pender (University of Newcastle)

Date: Wed. 27 May, 2015
Time: 12:00pm
Venue: 4th Floor Linkway, John Medley Building
Enquiries: Clara Tuite, English and Theatre Studies: clarat@unimelb.edu.au

Margaret Beaufort’s patronage of arts and learning was extensive, concentrated, and in certain respects unique in late medieval England, and her promotion of textual production provided a model of royal patronage from which later Tudor women, from both sides of the Reformation religious divide, could draw inspiration and authority. My primary purpose in this talk is to consider Margaret Beaufort’s role as patron to the early English printers, focusing on her relationship with arguably the first and foremost of these, William Caxton. In doing so, I want to present Beaufort’s patronage program as an important if hitherto neglected precedent in the history of early modern women’s textual production. While she has long been a prominent figure in late medieval literary studies and book history, Beaufort’s significance for early modern scholarship in these fields has been largely overlooked. In the larger project from which this talk stems, I plan to feed back Beaufort’s recognised activities in the production of early English books into our emerging awareness of her position in the women’s literary tradition of the long early modern period. While several recent studies have begun to consider Beaufort’s translations as part of this canon, my aim here is to show how the terrain of women’s cultural production in the period expands dramatically when we consider their contributions to literary culture beyond single authorship outputs – what I call “extra-authorial literary labour.”

Dr Patricia Pender is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Newcastle. She has published Early Modern Women’s Writing and the Rhetoric of Modesty (Palgrave 2012) and coedited, with Rosalind Smith, Material Cultures of Early Modern Women’s Writing (Palgrave 2014). She is currently the sole investigator on an ARC Discovery Project, Early Modern Women’s Writing and the Institutions of Authorship.

The S. Ernest Sprott Fellowship, administered by the Faculty of Arts, enables promising young scholars of early modern literature to travel outside of Australia to undertake research towards a book-length work. As a condition of the Fellowship, the successful applicant makes a public presentation of their work. The late Samuel Ernest Sprott, born in Hobart, Tasmania, was a member of the department of English at Dalhousie University, Canada, from 1958 to 1985. He was best known for his work on John Milton, notably Milton’s Art of Prosody, his first book, which appeared in nine editions between 1953 and 1978, and John Milton, A Maske: the Earlier Versions. His book Suicide: The English Debate from Donne to Hume was published in 1961. He also published a collection of poems in 1955.