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The 2026 Greg Dening Memorial Lecture, entitled Professing as Performance, will comprise a reflection on Prof. Dening’s passion for teaching and the notion of teaching as performance.It will take the form of a roundtable discussion between Emeritus Professor Tom Griffiths (Environmental History, ANU), Professor Katerina Teaiwa (Pacific Studies, ANU), Professor Tony Birch (Australian Literature, University of Melbourne), and Associate Professor Maria Tumarkin (Creative Writing, University of Melbourne), who will reflect on Prof. Dening’s teaching practices, his notion of teaching as performance, and comment upon the challenges and possibilities for inspiring and research-led teaching in the current university context. Professor David Goodman (History, University of Melbourne) will host the event and chair the discussion.
In Beach Crossings, his hybrid memoir-cum-scholarly testament, Greg Dening described the ‘deepest pleasures of his life’ as ‘learning and professing what one learns’. Since 2009, when the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies established an annual lecture in Professor Dening’s memory, speakers have typically engaged with the first of these concerns, engaging with the rich and enduring themes of his research: ethnohistory, Pacific History, colonial exploration, and the multifaceted nature of the colonial encounter.
Less attention has been paid to the second of his passions, ‘professing’, although the plethora of obituaries and encomiums that marked Prof. Dening’s passing unfailingly detailed his inspirational, innovative and adventurous teaching, spanning his engaging lectures, innovations in the teaching of honours curricula at both La Trobe University and the University of Melbourne in the early 1970s and his much lauded late career post-graduate workshops—‘Challenges to Perform’—held with his wife, Dr Donna Merwick, at the ANU and across the world in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
Tickets are free, but reservations are essential:
https://events.humanitix.com/2026-greg-dening-memorial-lecture-professing-as-performance
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Event venue
Forum Theatre, Arts West, University of Melbourne, Library-University of Melbourne, Medical Rd, Parkville VIC 3052, Australia, Melbourne
Tickets
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