AAPHN

A network for public historians and enthusiasts across Australasia to connect, communicate and collaborate. Join the network by contacting us at [email protected] or sign up to our newsletter below.

If you would like to list your own event with the AAPHN, please get in touch with [email protected]

Newsletter and Communications

In addition to general membership communications and updates, we send out a newsletter bi-annually which records any upcoming events concerning public history in Australasia. If you would like to make a post about an upcoming event or would like for it to be included in our next newsletter, please contact the AAPHN team at [email protected]. Also, keep updated on our social media, where we post and share information concerning many upcoming events. Twitter: @aaphnetwork.

Upcoming Events

Seminar Series, Panels and Talks

Auckland Libraries: Heritage Talks / Waha Pū-Taonga
Event Description: These talks are presented fortnightly on a Wednesday at 12 noon NZT from February to November, and topics cover a wide range of subjects relation to history. Social, local and family history, New Zealand, Australian and world history. Sometimes if something special is offered, we also schedule talks on the “off” Wednesday. Speakers are a mix of amateur and professional historians, archivists, librarians, museum specialists, authors and academics.
Our talks are held in-person (subject to the COVID restrictions), and also held live via Zoom. We have been streaming our talks via Zoom since the first lockdown in March 2020, and they have been very successful. This means that our talks can still go-ahead even if we have a lockdown. Also we are really fortunate that this also means that our guest speakers don’t have to be in Auckland, nor even in New Zealand! Our audience is also much more geographically diverse.
When: Contact [email protected]
YouTube: Auckland Libraries YouTube
More Information: Auckland Libraries website
Contact: [email protected]
Explorers by the IFPH / FIHP
Event Description: Series of monthly talks and events ran by the IFPH / FIHP. This is a space devoted to promoting research and building bridges between public historians around the world. Our goal is to encourage communication and open pathways to advance the field. To achieve this goal we do monthly events with academics, intellectuals, artists, and activists interested in the public history field. Attached you will find a brief summary of the project and the events we have done so far.
Registration: Contact us or [email protected] for the Zoom link.
Contact: [email protected]

Call For Papers

Call for Papers: Culturally Specific Museums and Archives
Event Description: Special issue seeking contributions about culturally-specific museums and archives in Australia, the social roles they have played for migrant and diasporic communities in Australia and beyond, the multilayered identities they promote, their relationship to multiculturalism (as a prescriptive policy framework and as a descriptor of the social milieu), as well as the opportunities and the challenges they represent for the communities that operate them. We are also interested in contributions that examine their relations to local government, state and national museums, libraries and archives dedicated to social history in Australia, exploring differences and similarities in terms of curatorial practices (collecting, preserving and exhibiting), community engagement and institutional features. Interested participants, please read the full CFP given below. Once fully informed, please submit your abstract by 20 December to Dr. Virginie Rey at [email protected]; cc Dr Alexandra Dellios [email protected] and Dr Karen Schamberger at [email protected].
CPF flyer: CFP Flyer with full information and brief.
CFP Deadline: 20th December 2023
Contact: [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]

Past Events

AAPHN ‘21 Social Meet and Greet
Event Description We are happy to announce our first network event! We will be hosting an AAPHN Zoom social gathering. The Zoom will provide an opportunity for our members (and any individuals considering signing up) to learn more about the network and each other. We hope to provide an opportunity for members to share ideas and get to know one another and their projects.
When Wednesday the 20th of October 5-6pm
History Week (NSW) 2022
Event Description: History Week is the annual, state-wide celebration of History organised by the History Council of New South Wales. Initiated by the HCNSW in 1997, History Week is a fantastic opportunity for member organisations, large and small, throughout NSW to engage and educate the community about the vitality, diversity and meaning of History and its practice. The HCNSW has chosen to go with the theme ‘Hands-on History’ which was suggested by Dr Kiera Lindsey for our History Week 2022 Theme Suggestion Competition. For History Week 2022 we invite you to roll up your sleeves and get your hands dirty! History doesn’t only happen in archives, libraries and books. Very often we need to go out in the field and get hands-on to connect with different sources, stories and audiences. Hands-on History invites you to explore histories by or about people who do things with their hands, whether that is for work or play. You may also like to creatively consider how you use your hands to do history; be that digging up artefacts, uncovering archives, restoring precious and everyday objects, curating exhibitions, writing and drawing, sewing, painting, even making music or a film or podcast! We want you to re-think Hands-on History and present your ideas in History Week 2022.
When: 3–-11 September 2022
6th World Conference of the International Federation for Public History
Event Description: From 16 to 20 August 2022 the 6th World Conference of the International Federation for Public History (IFPH) will take place in Berlin. The German capital, which has been called the “Rome of contemporary history”, is an ideal location for a major meeting of public historians from across the globe. Like few other cities in the world it offers many different layers of history, that not only still matter and are controversial locally or regionally, but nationally and even internationally. The conference will be hosted at the Freie Universität Berlin, where the first German MA program in Public History was established. It is located in the Southwestern part of the city. Our partners are the National Council on Public History, the world’s largest public history organization, the German Historical Association (VHD) and its working group on applied / public history (AGPH), the American Historical Association and the Leibniz Centre for Contemporary History in Potsdam (ZZF). The full call for papers is available here.
30th anniversary of Professional Historians Assoc. (Vic & Tas)
Join PHA (Vic & Tas) members at Graduate House to celebrate three decades of this Association. The celebrations present a social networking opportunity with a special panel featuring foundational, intermediate and new members reflecting on their experiences over 30 years of the PHA (Vic & Tas).
Public and applied history in the classroom: Australian contexts
Event Description: Hosted as a collaboration between the Centre for Applied History (Macquarie University) and the Tertiary History Educators Association (THEA, University of Newcastle), you are invited to attend a symposium for history education academics, public historians, historians, and other interested researchers at Macquarie University Sydney City Campus, Friday, 24 June 2022. The focus of the symposium is public and applied history in the classroom. The aim is to investigate those pedagogies, practices, ideas and theories that are effective in teaching history in the classroom. Here, the definition of classrooms includes tertiary, secondary, and primary schools as well as classrooms that exist outside of the formal or traditional ‘four walls’ of an educational institution. The symposium will provide tertiary-based academics including history teaching educators, historians, public historians and others interested in the study and application of history the opportunity to meet, to discuss current issues, share research interests, and to discuss opportunities for collaboration into the future. Symposium presentations will be 20 minutes with 5 minutes for questions. Presenters will also be invited to submit an expression of interest to publish their presentation as a Public History Weekly (PHW) piece.
The New Historians Conference 2022
Event Description: In the context of the pandemic and the immediate period that follows, there is a requirement to take a pause and understand the change, recalibrate, and prepare for what comes next. At the same time there are some things that remain constant, continuities that run strong through the before and after. The New Historians Conference 2022 is focused on the idea of change and continuity. We encourage contributions that concern any region of the world and speak to the conference theme from interdisciplinary perspectives. The invitation extends to researchers grounded in a variety of fields – history, anthropology, geography, international relations, linguistics, literature, philosophy, political science, sociology, Māori studies, and other social sciences. We are interested in papers that address: 1. the idea of change and continuity in cultural, social, political, or linguistic systems; 2. the agents, catalysts, or barriers to change and the struggle to control the direction of change; 3. the reception and impact of change across different time periods; 4. any parts of your larger research project where questions of change and continuity are explored. Proposals that delve into conversations about the impact of COVID-19 on various aspects of life across diverse spaces in the globe will be a valuable addition to the discussion.
Mothering in Crisis: Family, Disaster and Climate Change
Join us to hear the initial findings of “Mothering in Crisis”, a Melbourne Climate Futures CRX Project headed by Dr Carla Pascoe Leahy and Dr Julia Hurst. Climate change is sparking more frequent and more intense environmental disasters, with worse forecast across this century. As a population group with a heightened care burden during disasters, as well as an explicit investment in the future in the form of their children, mothers are particularly impacted by worsening environmental crises. Yet we know very little about how Australian mothers are experiencing the climate-fuelled disasters of the twenty-first century, how their experiences compare to other time periods, and what kinds of support would benefit families in an era of radical environmental change.
This free seminar will present the findings from the first stage of “Mothering in Crisis”, a project led by Dr Carla Pascoe Leahy and Dr Julia Hurst. Funded by Melbourne Climate Futures CRX (Climate Research Accelerator) at the University of Melbourne, the project fills a critical research gap into mothers’ experiences in a period of rapid environmental change. Presentation of project findings and discussion time will be followed by lunch. Both in-person* and online participation is available.