This blog post details two public artworks at the Camden Civic Centre that won awards at the Camden Art Prize.
The artworks are ‘Crossroads’ by Diego Latella (1977) and ‘Space’ by Irene Carroll (1994)

This blog post tells the story behind the Camden Teamsters Memorial in John Street, Camden, NSW.
The memorial is a tribute to the teamsters, bullockies and carriage drivers who travelled the Yerranderie Road between the mining town of Yerranderie and Camden through the Burragorang Valley.
The memorial has a rear wheel from a flat-top wagon, a…[Read more]

This text consists of the ‘lectio praecursoria’ given at the defense of my doctoral dissertation “The Good Noblemen Who Conquered the Kingdom: Islam, Historiography, and Aristocratic Legitimation in Late-Medieval Portugal”. This dissertation deals with aristocratic historiography and political legitimation in late-medieval Portugal (late…[Read more]

This article investigates several discussions of “chemistry,” understood as an analysts’ category referring to theories and practices dealing with the structure and transformation of matter. By reading these texts (a treatise defending kīmiyāʾ by al-Fārābī, the famous passage from Ibn Sīnā’s Shifāʾ on transmutation, Ibn Taymiyyah’s fatwā…[Read more]

Details the usages of “gnomes” in L. Frank Baum and J.R.R. Tolkien

Although Marxist critics, including Frederic Jameson, have found little to admire about fantasy literature in general or J. R. R. Tolkien specifically, one of the prime qualities of Tolkien’s The Hobbit (1937) is its instantiation of depth—the serious treatment of the conflict between the ancient world and modern. As such, works such as The Hob…[Read more]

This blog post gives an overview of the Camden Material and Colour Guide. The guide provides property owners of heritage buildings in the Camden Heritage Conservation Area with tips and hints on restoration and conservation of their houses. The guide provides colour schemes on building exteriors and interiors by housing styles between 1840 and…[Read more]

As educators, we are all familiar with Bloom’s Taxonomy and the way it progressively maps the cognitive activities involved in learning and constructing knowledge. Too often, however, we educators who work in writing-focused curricula ask our students to work in the higher-order cognitive domains of analysis and creation without necessarily giving…[Read more]

In courses that end in summative final exams or capstone projects, it can be challenging to get students to pull back and identify the learning that they’ve done across an entire unit or semester rather than only focus on the learning they’ve undertaken most recently. As part of our larger sequence of active-learning-based lesson plans designed to…[Read more]

In courses that end in summative final exams or capstone projects, it can be challenging to get students to pull back and identify the learning that they’ve done across an entire unit or semester rather than only focus on the learning they’ve undertaken most recently. As part of our larger sequence of active-learning-based lesson plans designed to…[Read more]

Colonial predicament made the life and its understanding complex in the Subcontinent. To represent this complexity, Urdu writers found the polyphonic genre, i.e. the novel helpful. They used different techniques of characterization to narrate the social hierarchy of characters. The novel also provided the space for them to attract the people with…[Read more]

The term “alchemy,” born out of early modern professional polemics among chemists, is problematic as a historical category. The present article shifts away from asking what pre-modern alchemy “really” was, to asking how medieval scholars writing in Greek and Arabic thought about the practice of treating and combining naturally occurring substan…[Read more]

This article explores the connection between the development of new literary genres in Urdu and colonial authority. British Colonial authorities tried to develop a system of scrutiny for local literatures. To limit the ‘vernacular’ literatures within the ‘suggested’ traits, colonial administration used its local subordinates in disseminating the…[Read more]

This blog post is about a spring festival in Camden, NSW, called Celebrate Camden.
The brainchild of Vicki Sutherland from the Camden Chamber of Commerce, it aimed to promote Camden as a viable tourist and shopping destination.
The festival had mixed success and was held in 1994 and 1995, to be replaced by the Cowpastures Bicentennial.