Whose history? Reflections on history and heritage

Professor Keir Reeves

While history and heritage are often grouped together, they are intellectually, politically and bureaucratically competing disciplines in terms of determining how the past is understood in the present day. It is only by unpacking these loaded terms, along with the nature of the dynamic relationships between history and heritage, that the past can be fully understood. Using global concrete historical and heritage case studies, this talk discusses key themes in a structured way, including the methodological fault lines, the often-fraught constituent relationships between history and heritage, the politics-history-heritage-memory studies nexus and the impact of the critical heritage discourse in the past decade.

Professor Keir Reeves is professor of history at Federation University Australia and a visiting professor to the Centre for History, University of the Highlands and Islands. His publications include Deeper Leads: New Approaches to Victorian Goldfields History (co-edited with David Nicholls) and The Great War: Aftermath and Commemoration (co-edited with Carolyn Holbrook). Keir also contributed to Anzac Journeys: Walking the battlefields of the Second World War edited by Bruce Scates (Cambridge University Press, 2013).

This talk took place on Thursday, 27 May 2021 at 9.30am - 10.30am. You can view a recording of the talk and related discussion below. 

The image below shows the historical plan of 1930s land settlement in West Harris (left) and artist Will Maclean's 1995 memorial to the land raiders of Aignish, Lewis (right).