A graduate of the Universities of Tasmania and Oxford, Marnie has a global profile as a philosopher and as an historian. Her current work looks at how AI makes histories, and how histories might be made in future which are efficient, safe, and ethical. Her writing has been translated into five languages, over 26,000 copies of her books have been sold, and her theories are taught across the world. She has led or been an investigator on a total of $18 million in grants. Her most recent books are History from Loss (edited with Daniel Woolf, 2023) and The Routledge Companion to History and the Moving Image (edited with Kim Nelson and Mia Treacey, 2023) and she is co-secretary general of the International Commission for the History and Theory of History. In 2022 she was made an Officer in the Order of Australia for her contribution to higher education governance, leadership, and mentoring.

This talk draws on recently conducted oral history interviews in the Murray Darling Basin to explore the kinds of stories people tell about environmental change and environmental justice; marginalised narratives of resistance and empowerment; and the ways experiences of the past and present shape imaginings of the future. And I ask: what are the stories historians might tell that can move us forward and frame our futures with imagination, compassion and hope?

Professor Katie Holmes is Professor of History and Director of the Centre for the Study of the Inland at La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia. She lives on unceded Wurundjeri country. Her work integrates environmental, gender, oral and cultural history and she has a particular interest in the interplay between an individual, their culture and environment. Her recent research is on the cultures of drought in regional Victoria, and water cultures and conflicts in Australia’s Murray Darling Basin. Her books include Spaces in Her Day: Women’s diaries of the 1920s-1930s (1995), Between the Leaves: Stories of women, writing and gardens (2011), and the co-authored Reading the Garden: the Settlement of Australia (2008), Mallee Country: land, people, history (2020) and Failed Ambitions: Kew Cottages and Changing Ideas of Intellectual Disability (2023). Katie is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Science Australia, and was the Gough Whitlam and Malcolm Fraser Visiting Chair in Australian Studies, Harvard, 2023-24.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwbLKU0CkVc