Sydney University Press

01/10/2026

"The Power of the Real: How MCA Australia became the world’s most visited contemporary art museum" is out now!

Drawing on her experiences bringing art to the wider public – driving a travelling gallery around Scotland and leading Birmingham’s acclaimed Ikon Gallery – Elizabeth Ann Macgregor relates what she encountered as an outsider on her way to becoming an insider. She reveals the bold strategies that revitalised the MCA: free access, team building and collaboration, community engagement and political negotiation – amid funding challenges and intense public scrutiny. Through it all, Macgregor demonstrates her unwavering belief in the power of art and artists to shape society.

🔗Learn more at https://bit.ly/4gmCJ7v

01/09/2026

"Buried" is out now! Deriving from a four-year project to find and record the camp sites of the Queensland NMP, this book combines archaeological evidence for the NMP’s activities – both violent and mundane – with historical evidence and oral histories from descendants of NMP troopers, officers and massacre survivors.

Presented as part-archaeological investigation and part-social history of a still poorly understood frontier policing force, "Buried" tackles some of the most complex issues surrounding frontier violence, and challenges us to think more broadly about both the colonial past and its historical legacies in the present.

🔗Learn more: https://bit.ly/3SzlhVH

21/08/2026

Coming soon! "The Power of the Real" chronicles Elizabeth Ann Macgregor’s transformation of the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia from near-bankruptcy into a world-class cultural institution.

Part memoir, part cultural blueprint, "The Power of the Real" offers vital and candid insights into leadership, resilience and the intersections of art, politics and public life.

Out October 2026.

Photo by Anna Kucera

🔗 Learn more: https://bit.ly/4gmCJ7v

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10/08/2026

Update: there has been a change to the speaker lineup for the author talk at Ashfield Library this Thursday.

Australian history has mostly been told in English. This talk flips that, drawing on letters, essays and travelogues written in Chinese from the 1850s gold rush through to the 1950s, now translated and collected for the first time.

Join historians Michael Williams and Kam Louie as they discuss what these sources reveal, and why so much of our history has been waiting in another language.

🔗 Find more information + RSVP here: https://tr.ee/jbYn7M

04/08/2026

Free on Thursday the 13th of August? Come along to the Sydney Conservatorium of Music for a panel discussion on First Nations perspectives on ecomusicological research, and a performance by Maatakitj, Noongar song-maker from the deep south of Western Australia. The panel event is part of the Music Climate Connections series, a research and knowledge-sharing initiative focused on the connections between music, environment, climate change and the move to net zero.

Photo by Fiona Walsh

📅 Thursday 13 August
🕠 5.30 – 7.30 pm
📍 The Music Café, Sydney Conservatorium of Music

🔗 Find more information + RSVP here: https://tr.ee/TCuPui

29/07/2026

Coming soon! "Epidemics in Australian Literature" traces the presence and operation of disease in Australian literature. British colonisation brought novel diseases to the Australian continent and literary practices of these diseases' representation. Analysing epidemic diseases such as smallpox, Hansen’s disease (leprosy), bubonic plague, influenza, HIV/AIDS and COVID-19, this book asks how Australian literature incorporates these disease events into narrative and examines the patterns of representation identifiable in a range of texts written from the 19th century to today. It asks what diseases mean in Australian culture; why some diseases, such as smallpox, HIV/AIDS and COVID-19, prompt vociferous debates about their existence and virulence; and how understandings of illness and health continue to be shaped by social perceptions that run deep in Australian society.

Out November 2026.

🔗 Learn more: https://tr.ee/Pb1lIP

27/07/2026

Join us for an author talk at Ashfield Library, with Craig A. Smith and Dr Sophie Loy-Wilson, as they discuss how "Sinophone Australia" brings together a rich collection of primary sources – letters, essays, travelogues – written in Chinese and now translated into English, spanning from the gold rush era of the 1850s to the postwar reflections of the 1950s.

🔗 Find more information + RSVP here: https://tr.ee/jbYn7M

13/07/2026

Eva Haifa Giraud argues that the 1995 film "Babe" is culturally significant as a text that disrupts the normalised narrative of pigs as food animals in "Animal Activism On and Off Screen": https://tinyurl.com/2s42tuz6

15/06/2026

Loredana Loy shows a demarcation between the way liberal and conservative television and radio show hosts engaged with Joaquin Phoenix's 2020 Oscars speech in "Animal Activism On and Off Screen": https://tinyurl.com/2s42tuz6

13/06/2026

History through Chinese-Australian voices: A great piece in China Daily covering the launch of "Sinophone Australia" on Friday 05 June. Read the article: https://tr.ee/CAiirm

Many people may have heard of Mei Quong Tart, a 19th century Chinese-Australian merchant, philanthropist and cultural ambassador.