James Cook University and Central Queensland University are proud to be hosting the annual conference of the Australian Historical Association in 2025, to be held from 30 June to 4 July.

The local organising committee of historians from JCU’s College of Arts, Society and Education, and CQU’s School of Education and the Arts are excited to welcome historians from around Australia and the world to Townsville on Bindal and Wulgurukaba Country to share their new research and engage one another on the pressing questions facing our discipline and our communities.

The theme for this year’s conference is ‘Looking Up’. Historians engage in many forms of looking up. The popular image of a historian is a person with their head down in the depths of an archive or library looking up books and documents. However, historians are at their most impactful when they also look up at the world around them and connect their work to contemporary issues. The first historians and custodians of what is now Australia literally looked up to the stars that served as calendars and markers of the passage of time. From ancient times to the present, historians have looked up at the power structures that shape society.

In Australia, the phrase ‘looking up’ also has a significant geographical dimension. Most of Australia’s population (and most of its historians) work in the southeast corner of the continent, even while nearly half the continent lies in the tropics. Periodically policy makers have looked up to northern Australia and the nations of the ‘near north’ and seen both threats and opportunities. In 2025 the AHA offers historians an opportunity to engage with the scale and place of the Australian continent and its history.

The organising committee are now accepting abstract submissions, the deadline for which has been extended to Friday 7 March 2025.

Early bird registration for the conference is available until 21 March 2025.

For more information, or to submit an abstract for the conference, see here.