Australian History*

Naomi Wolfe is an Aboriginal academic at Australian Catholic University and NAIITS: An Indigenous Learning Community. She is an historian and theologian with previous experience as a primary and secondary school teacher.

American Revolution

Patrick McGrath teaches US history at the University of Melbourne. A New York City native, he received his PhD in 2017 from Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, and has taught US history at the university level in the United States and Hong Kong.

Dr Patrick McGrath's session will provide an overview of recent scholarship on the American Revolution, with an emphasis on how the political tumult of the past decade — including the rise of Trumpism — have reshaped ideas about nationalism, mass politics, and elite rule in the Revolutionary era.

Chinese Revolution

Xiaoping Fang is an Associate Professor of Chinese Studies at Monash University. His research interests focus on the history of medicine, health, and epidemics in twentieth-century China and the socio-political history of Mao’s China after 1949. He is the author of Barefoot Doctors and Western Medicine in China (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2012) and China and the Cholera Pandemic: Restructuring Society under Mao (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021) 

Dr Xiaoping Fang's session will analyze Chinese revolutions in the historical contexts of nation-building progress and the party-state system in China since the late nineteenth century. 

French Revolution

Peter McPhee is Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Melbourne. He is Chair of the History Council of Victoria and Patron of the History Teachers Association of Victoria. He is the author of several histories of the French Revolution and a biography of Maximilien Robespierre.

Emeritus Professor Peter McPhee's session will ask the question of whether the French Revolution of 1789 was inevitable, before going on to discuss the consequences of the Revolution. What changed? Who were the winners and losers?

Russian Revolution

Oleg Beyda is the Hansen Lecturer in Russian History at the University of Melbourne. He is a multi-lingual historian focusing on diaspora studies (the first and second waves of migration from Russia after 1917) and the Second World War in Europe.

Dr Oleg Beyda's session will explore how historians remain divided over the reasons of the Russian Revolution(s), considering the many schools of thought formed around the pivotal events and linking them with the contemporary context of the 21 century. 

Ancient History*

Frederik J Vervaet is Professor of Ancient History at the University of Melbourne, where he specializes in Roman sociopolitical and institutional history, and Roman collective mentalities.

Professor Frederik J Vervaet's session will be casting a fresh new light on the epochal and timelessly relevant fall of the Roman Republic, holding the events of its turbulent final century (133-27 BCE) against the light of recent best-selling political science studies into How Democracies Die (Steven Levitsky & Daniel Ziblatt, 2018) and How Civil Wars Start (Barbara Walter, 2023).