'Creative Histories: A Conversation'

Shauna Bostock, Andre Dao, Katerina Teaiwa, Sophie Loy-Wilson

Wednesday, August 27 | 5:30pm doors for a 5:45pm start

In this Wood Memorial Lecture/History Now event, Dr. Sophie Loy-Wilson from the discipline of History at the University of Sydney will sit down with three extraordinary scholars who have drawn on lived experiences and different methodologies to produce creative histories that have made an impact on how we think about and do history. Shauna Bostock, André Dao, and Katerina Teaiwa will discuss their past and future projects, and challenge us to imagine new ways of approaching, practicing and presenting history in Australia today.

The Wood Memorial Lecture is funded by a generous endowment to the discipline of History in the School of Humanities to facilitate a public Lecture in Australian History.

Please join us for a reception following the lecture.

This event is in the 2025 History Now series. History Now is presented by the History Council of NSW in conjunction with the Chau Chak Wing Museum and the Vere Gordon Childe Centre. History Now 2025 is supported by Create NSW.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS:

Shauna Bostock is currently the Indigenous Australian Research Editor at the National Centre of Biography at ANU. A former primary school teacher, Shauna Bostock's curiosity about her ancestors took her all the way to a PhD in Aboriginal history, which turned into a book entitled Reaching Through Time: Finding my family’s stories(Allen & Unwin). The book was awarded the NSW Community and Regional History Prize in 2024, and praised as a 'compelling blend of Indigenous history, community history and the history of colonial settlement.'

André Dao is an author and researcher from Naarm/Melbourne, Australia. His debut novel, Anam, won the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Fiction, the NSW Premier’s Literary Award for New Writing, and was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award and the Voss Literary Award. In 2024, he was named a Sydney Morning Herald Best Young Australian Novelist. André was awarded the 2024 Pascall Prize for Cultural Criticism for essays published in The Saturday Paper, Meanjin and Liminal. He is a postdoctoral fellow with the ARC Laureate Program in Global Corporations and International Law at Melbourne Law School, where is working on a history of how the computing company, IBM, travelled to the Global South.

Katerina Teaiwa is Professor of Pacific Studies in the School of Culture, History and Language at the Australian National University. She is a scholar, artist, activist and nationally award-winning teacher of Banaban, I-Kiribati (Tabiteuean) and African American heritage born and raised in Fiji. Her exhibition "Dance Protest" is currently showing at the Chau Chak Wing Museum at the University of Sydney.

Sophie Loy-Wilson is a Senior Lecturer in Australian History at the University of Sydney and a Historian of Chinese Australian communities.

Images: courtesy of Katerina Teaiwa

Contact the host of 2025 Wood Memorial History Lecture