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Monday, 28 June 2010

At a time when science, politics finance and sport dominate the headlines it was pleasing to see one of our graduates publicy extolling the value of an arts degree across the professions.

Journalist Athanae Lucev, in an opinion article published in The West Australian earlier this month, asserts that: ‘Some of our best leaders, performers and thinkers started out as arts students.' And she went on to highlight a number of UWA Arts graduates who have engaged in a wide range of careers.

There can be no question that the humanities are vital to our sense of community, family and selves, providing us with imaginative opportunities to address contemporary problems in ways that give us insight into these problems.

In recent weeks, staff from our own Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences have again demonstrated the strength of their calling.

For example, Chair in Australian Literature at UWA Winthrop Professor Philip Mead won the New South Wales Premier's Literary Prize for Literary Scholarship for his book, Networked Language: Culture and History in Australian Poetry.

The award enhances Professor Mead's role as a national and international leader in the study and appreciation of Australia's creative writers and their work, and in taking Australian literature to national and international audiences. More than that, according to the judges it ‘is insightful and constructive in its diagnosis of academic and public culture in Australia ... and locates the local and national very thoroughly in the global.'

About the time of Professor Mead's win we were celebrating the launch of Winthrop Professor Brenda Walker's new book, Reading by Moonlight: How Books Saved a Life, which affirms the role of literature in providing consolation, particularly in difficult times such as facing a diagnosis of cancer. You may remember that her novel The Wing of Night won the 2007 Asher Literary Award. This award was from Helen Asher, a post World War Two German refugee from fascism who was deeply committed to the artistic and cultural life of her adoptive country, Australia.

And we heard that Winthrop Professor R.S (Bob) White's biography of the Romantic poet Keats has just been published in the UK by Palgrave Macmillan. In his acknowledgements in John Keats: A Literary Life Professor White credits many colleagues at UWA for their intellectual support, including Chair in Philosophy Winthrop Professor Michael Levine who ‘profoundly fuses expertise in the history of ideas with an urgent moral and political concern for the present.'

A major theme in another of Professor White's books Pacifism in English Literature: Minstrels of Peace (Book of the Week in The Times Higher Education Supplement in 2008) is that imaginative writers over the centuries have suggested that armed conflict both historically and in our contemporary world is an ineffectual way of solving international problems.

With the right books - and paintings music, films, poetry, plays and sculpture - we come to understand what it is to be human.

- Vice-Chancellor Alan Robson

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