Academy Fellow Professor Bruce Scates has been awarded the Fulbright 70th Anniversary Scholar Award, in Honour of Norman Harper.
The Fulbright Program is the flagship foreign exchange scholarship program between the United States and Australia, and is aimed at increasing research collaboration, cultural understanding and the exchange of ideas.
Bruce is a Professor of History in the Research School of Social Sciences at the Australian National University. His work explores the politics and practice of commemoration and asks what we forget when we remember war. He will use his Fulbright 70th Anniversary Scholar Award to consider ways the Centenary of the First World War was marked across America. The First World War has long been considered the nation’s ‘forgotten war’, overshadowed by the Second and displaced by competing narratives centred on the Civil War and Vietnam. How did the U.S. Centennial Commission set about recovering the ‘lost’ memory of 1914-1918, what form did the commemorative project take in galleries, archives, libraries and museums and, most importantly, how did the American public respond to the call to remember? Bruce will compare America’s centenary with Anzac Commemoration in Australia where WWI is seen by many as signalling ‘the birth of the nation’.
For more information on the program, including the full list of 2020 scholars, visit https://www.fulbright.org.au/current-scholars/.