The Past Has a Big Future

Professor Cryle at the Centre for the History of European Discourses

It has been a busy first year for the Centre for the History of European Discourses, hosting its first major conference and building links with institutions and researchers around the world.

THE most significant of the many links formed by The University of Queensland's Centre for the History of European Discourses in its first year was a formal relationship with the prestigious Paris 8 University.

This relationship could see UQ PhD students given the opportunity to do part of their studies in France.

"This is a collaboration with key people in the humanities that will further strengthen UQ's credibility in this field of study," Centre Director Professor Peter Cryle said.

Professor Cryle said the Centre's first conference Histories of Heresy in Medieval and Modern Europe, was held in July and was labelled a great success with most of the leading scholars in the field from around the world attending.

From relations developed around the conference we are building links to collaborate with universities in North America and Western Europe," Professor Cryle said.

He said the Centre was already building on that success with another two conferences planned for 2004 and 2005.

Among topics covered will be the persona of the philosopher and sexuality to the end of the 19th century.

While the study of where ideas come from, specifically in Europe in the last 500 years, may seem to have little bearing on our modern day lives, Professor Cryle believes a great deal can be learned from this distinctive way of looking at our history.

"One of our aims is to connect what we are doing with what is going on today in the world," he said.

"One of the hot issues around at the moment is religious fanaticism. We can go back and look at the history of how people dealt with religious fundamentalism."

"In the past we have tended to study history by movements of ideas to give us a pretty standard map."

"But here we are studying history through the shifting ways of talking and thinking and making it more specific looking carefully at just what processes went on as things shifted."

"What we think we can show is that rather than history being a steady progression from ignorance to knowledge it is much more accidental and circumstantial."

On this site