We are pleased to announce the Australasian Association for European History conference will be held from 28 to 30 June 2023.

The Australasian Association for European History is the premier conference in modern European historical studies in the southern hemisphere. This biennial event brings together scholars of European history from Australia, New Zealand, and all around the world.

The 2023 conference will host the following keynotes:

Professor Victoria de Grazia (Columbia University): 'How Fascism Shook the Global Liberal Order, 1925-1940.'

Professor Jennifer V. Evans (Carleton University): 'Queer Kinship After Fascism.'

Professor Joan H. Neuberger (University of Texas at Austin): 'Sergei Eisenstein’s Wars: Alexander Nevsky (1938) and the Forgeries of Memory.'

Professor Jennifer N. Heuer (University of Massachusetts Amherst): 'A Husband and a Soldier? Competing Masculinities in the age of the French Revolution and Napoleon.'

Special event during the Australasian Association for European History (AAEH) 28th Biennial Conference, 28 Jun 2023, 4pm 

This panel presentation will analyse Ukraine in contemporary history and memory with a particular focus on the Holodomor and the Second World War. The last decade has brought qualitative changes in the understanding of the causes and consequences of the famine of 1932-1933 in the Soviet Union and Ukraine. The first presentation by Professor Yuri Shapoval, ‘Memory of the Holodomor: What Sources Help to Construct It’, will analyse the construction of the collective memory of the Holodomor. The second presentation, ‘Transforming Historical Narratives of the Second War and Memory Policy in Ukraine’ by Dr Nadia Honcharenko, will analyse changes in historical narrative and memory policy of the Second World War in contemporary Ukraine, highlighting the deconstruction of Soviet mythology of the ’Great Patriotic War’, the gradual transformation of ideas regarding the causes, course, and consequences of the war, and formation of its Ukrainian dimension.

Guest Speakers 

Yuri Shapoval is Professor and, since 1998, Head of the Centre for Historical Political Studies, Institute of Political and Ethnic Studies, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, Kyiv. His research interests are Political history and the history of political thought in Ukraine in the XIX-XXI centuries; the politics of memory and the process of decommunization in modern Ukraine; the history of the Communist Totalitarian system in Ukraine; the Holodomor in Ukraine; historical biography; mechanism and methods of the activity of the Communist Special Services in Ukraine; biographies of Chekists; Polish-Ukrainian relations in 1930–1940 of the 20th century; the Communist repressive and punitive system and the Ukrainian nationalist movement; analysis of school history textbooks. 

Nadiia Honcharenko is Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Cultural Research of the National Academy of Arts of Ukraine and Research Fellow at the IU Non-Residential Research Program at Indiana University (USA). She is the editor of publishing series Crimean Tatars Prose in Ukrainian. Her areas of interest are Cultural Studies; History Education; Memory Policy. Among her latest publications are Preserving a Monument and Redefining Symbols in the National Museum of the History of Ukraine in the Second World War (2023); Different Memories of a Shared Past (2022); Crimean Tatars biographies in Ukrainian history textbooks: personalities, priorities, tendencies (2021) – all in Ukrainian. From the ‘Great Patriotic War’ to the ‘Ukrainian dimension’ of the Second World War: a change in the narrative in school history textbooks (2020).

Organising Committee of the AAEH Conference

Dr Alexander Cook
Dr Kasia Williams
Dr Ben Mercer (President)

The event is presented with the support of the ANUCES Jean Monnet project Remembering Across Continents, the ANU School of History, the Research School of Social Sciences and the Humanities Research Centre.

Find the latest program here: AAEH 2023 Conference Program

And all the information regarding Abstracts and Presenters, here