This essay focuses on territorial conflicts between European masonic bodies outside Europe, and on the impact of these conflicts on inner-European masonic relations. The period between c. 1870 and c. 1930 marks the height of the European expansion respectively the age of ‘high imperialism’. It also marks the first wave of decolonization. The tid…[Read more]

How did (Western) European freemasonries on a transnational level came to terms with the idea of a closer union of the European peoples? Concepts of “Europe” and “Europeanness” were the background music of the formation of masonic pan-European networks, building on transnational encounters either by individual freemasons (in the Universala Framaso…[Read more]

Abstract of presentation at 2023 MLA Convention session “193 – Poetics, Poiesis, Poeticity”

Any memorials, monuments, historic sites, and other public facilities commemorate, celebrate and generally remind us about the landscape of the Cowpastures. In recent decades there has been a nostalgia turn in recovering the memory of the Cowpastures landscape. This is cast in terms of the pioneers and the legacy of the European settlement.
Some…[Read more]

One of the first directors of the Sydney Railway Company was colonial identity Thomas Barker who established Maryland at Bringelly in the 1850s. He developed the farm Maryland as a Sydney gentleman’s retreat and starting building his hilltop homestead in 1854. Barker was a successful Sydney businessman and philanthropist who was one of the…[Read more]