This year’s issue of Humanities Australia once again features essays, poems and reflections by our Fellows alongside edited versions of several of our key lectures including the annual Academy Lecture, the A.D. Trendall Lecture and the Sir Keith Hancock Lecture.
The articles in this year’s edition span a number of disciplines, including history, linguistics, classical studies, English literature, Islamic studies and archaeology and they all refer, in different ways, to the theme of the Academy’s 50th anniversary celebrations: ‘Humanising the Past, Present and Future’. Whether through charting the history of the idea of ‘civilisation’, or examining how we communicate with our international counterparts, or exploring how we can look to the past to find new categories of interpretation, the articles in this edition look forward explicitly to how the humanities can play their role in fostering a truly human future despite the challenges which both the humanities in particular and the world in general will face in the next 50 years.
