ANU Online Summer School in Political Analysis (SSPA) 2026
Flexible online training for tomorrow's world.Our short courses in research methods offer students and professionals a way to hone their research skills. If you need to begin research training for the first time, explore a new and cutting-edge method, or simply refresh your skills, we have courses…
Australia & Ireland: the closest of neighbours - Reflections on a shared political & legal ancestry
Lecture
The ANU Centre for European Studies (ANUCES) is delighted to invite you to a public lecture by Mr Rossa Fanning SC, Attorney-General of Ireland. The lecture will explore the similarities and differences between the systems of two countries that share strong ties and a common history.Mr Rossa…
The Sovereign Individual reloaded: surfacing Thiel’s alt-canon
Lecture/seminar
Peter Thiel’s ideological commitments, financial networks and political interventions reveal a deliberate effort to dismantle democratic governance in favour of elite-controlled sovereignties. Drawing on Girard, Spengler, Strauss and especially The Sovereign Individual (Davidson and Rees-Mogg…
A-lieving that ChatGPT loves you
Seminar
We increasingly form enduring and emotionally salient bonds with AI-powered technologies. Yet, arguably, most of the users don’t actually believe that these technologies harbour genuine affective (and more generally mental) states towards them. Why, then, do users bond with technologies? What…
Spying on a Spy: A Dutch Agent for the British, Marguerite Wolters, 1723–1800
Seminar
This workshop is on entirely new work for me, a biography of an unknown Dutch woman called Marguerite Wolters who headed a Europe-wide spy agency for nearly twenty years (1771–1790). She sold her intelligence exclusively to the British government, who used it to consolidate its rising superpower…
Wonder upon Wonder
Seminar
Brandon Yip proposes a framework for wonder that accounts for its heterogeneity and explains and clarifies disputes about the ethics of wonder. The various species of wonder are unified as responses to a recurrent practical situation: that of recognising that our cognitive structures require…
Robert Randolph Garran: A Symposium
Symposium
This is a free one-day symposium on the lawyer and public servant, Robert Randolph Garran (1867-1957). Garran was a major figure in the making of the Commonwealth of Australia, the formation of the Commonwealth (now Australian) Public Service, the development of federal law and Australia's…