2026 Greg Dening Memorial Lecture: Professing as performance

In Beach Crossings, his hybrid memoir-cum-scholarly testament, Greg Dening described the ‘deepest pleasures of his life’ as ‘learning and professing what one learns’. Since 2009, when the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies established an annual lecture in Professor Dening’s memory, speakers have typically engaged with the first of these concerns, engaging with the rich and enduring themes of his research: ethnohistory, Pacific History, colonial exploration, and the multifaceted nature of the colonial encounter.

Less attention has been paid to the second of his passions, ‘professing’, although the plethora of obituaries and encomiums that marked Prof. Dening’s passing unfailingly detailed his inspirational, innovative and adventurous teaching, spanning his engaging lectures, innovations in the teaching of honours curricula at both La Trobe University and the University of Melbourne in the early 1970s and his much lauded late career post-graduate workshops—‘Challenges to Perform’—held with his wife, Dr Donna Merwick, at the ANU and across the world in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

In this year’s Greg Dening Memorial Lecture, held as a roundtable discussion, Emeritus Professor Tom Griffiths (Environmental History, ANU), Professor Katerina Teaiwa (Pacific Studies, ANU), Professor Tony Birch (Australian Literature, University of Melbourne), and Associate Professor Maria Tumarkin (Creative Writing, University of Melbourne), will reflect on Prof. Dening’s teaching practices, his notion of teaching as performance, as well as comment upon the challenges and possibilities for inspiring and research-led teaching in the current university context. Professor David Goodman (History, University of Melbourne) will introduce and chair the discussion.

Emeritus Professor Greg Dening (1931–2008) occupies an important place in the history of the History program at the University of Melbourne. As Tom Griffiths put it: “Greg was not only a wonderful historian but also a gifted teacher, and he believed that immersion scholarship could be transformative — of oneself, and also of the world … In his hands, history was no mere subject at university; it became a form of consciousness, a definition of humanity, a way of seeing — and changing — the world” (History Workshop Journal 67:1 (Spring 2009)). Since 2009 we have remembered Greg Dening through an annual memorial lecture either engaging with the themes in his research and teaching but also new work by scholars engaged in innovative historical research.

Enquiries
Please contact Dr James Keating, Lecturer, History at james.keating@unimelb.edu.au or Dr Charlotte Millar, Senior Lecturer, History at charlotte.millar@unimelb.edu.au