Marnie Hughes-Warrington

Professor Marnie Hughes-Warrington has a global profile as a philosopher and as an historian who seeks to explain why histories and historical thinking play an important role in making a good, fair and just world. The impact of her work has been broad: her writing has been translated into five languages, over 26,000 copies of her books have been sold, and her theories are taught across the world. She has led or been an investigator on a total of $18 million in grants. Her most recent book is History as Wonder (2018), and her current research investigates the connections between the scales of history and ethics, and the logic at play in machine-made histories. She serves on the editorial board for the Journal of Global History, which is published by Cambridge University Press. She was the first woman to be National Secretary for the Rhodes Scholarships Australia and she currently serves on the Rhodes Trust Scholarships Governance Committee, which looks after over 100 scholarships worldwide.

Moving Histories as Opening Ethics

The theme of Marnie’s paper will be the scales of moving histories and ethics. It encourages historians to shift from seeing ethics as being predominantly about the relation of historians to living subjects for the purpose of writing, to the equivalent of a population health standpoint, which sees the variety of field contributions as keeping open questions about the creation of a good, fair or just world.