In this fireside chat with Associate Professor Tamson Pietsch, a historian and expert on the history of universities, Inger asks lots of questions about the future of the university. Recently, Tamson produced an award winning podcast about the impact of Covid on Australian universities called 'The new social contract'.
Tamson's deep knowledge of how higher education took the shape it has now sheds new insights on what the future might be. This is a wide ranging chat about all aspects of university funding, research, mission and, of course, collegiality.
Tamson Pietsch is Associate Professor in Social and Political Sciences and Director of the Australian Centre for Public History at UTS. Her research focuses on the history of ideas and the global politics of knowledge, with a particular focus on universities and other institutions of knowledge. Tamson is the author of "Empire of Scholars: universities networks and the British academic world, 1850-1939" (Manchester, 2013) and the co-editor of "The Transnational Politics of Higher Education" (Routledge, 2016).
She is currently leading an ARC project on expertise in interwar Australia and writing a book about international education and American empire in the 1920s. Tamson received her DPhil from the University of Oxford, where she studied as a Rhodes Scholar and then held a Junior Research Fellowship at New College and lectureship at Corpus Christi College. Prior to coming to UTS, Tamson was ARC DECRA Fellow at the University of Sydney and Lecturer in Imperial and Colonial History at Brunel University, London.
You can find out more about Tamson on her UTS profile, her Cap and Gown blog or follow her on Twitter @cap_and_gown.