[csaa-forum] Professor Greg Dening

[Katrina Schlunke]

Dear All

Many of you will already be aware of the death of Professor Greg  
Dening last week. I wanted to write something particular about him  
for this forum because I believe he made a very particular space for  
those of us interested in culture and history and those of us in  
cultural studies who are interested in the idea of the past and what  
is done with it. Being exposed to his style of teaching and thinking  
as an undergraduate at Melbourne University in the 80s made me want  
to do Cultural Studies before I even understood such a thing existed.

Greg had an intense scholarly thoughtfulness that was obvious on the  
page and in his lectures and papers. And it was matched with a  
consideration that went beyond politeness to become a style of  
meeting that was often inspiring and always delightful. But he also  
took big personal and intellectual risks. Long before we accepted an  
idea of ‘speaking position’ and the habit of self-reflection Greg  
wrote autobiographically and auto-ethnographically and did so in a  
manner that wound its way about his text. Some of his written reasons  
for leaving the Jesuits was that it was an institution ‘stripped of  
everything feminine or soft’. And as he went on to say ‘the fact that  
‘no one would weep at my funeral’ was in the end a sacrifice too  
great’. That mixture of admission and reflection went everywhere he  
went as he studied anthropology and as he bought those insights into  
traditional history.

I also admired his way of doing academic life. Maybe it is easy to  
say of someone in their late 70s that they occupied and were formed  
by a university that many of us could not imagine. But Greg was  
always committed to the idea of ‘professing’; to community groups,  
historical societies and any others who asked him to speak in halls  
and community centres for he had an idea that it was our ideas that  
should travel. This generous modesty seems one of the hardest  
traditions to continue caught as we often are between a lack of  
clarity as to who might constitute our larger community of thinking  
people and the time to do such things. Greg would have been  
sympathetic to those restrictions but would ask us to try all the same.

If you haven’t read any of his work I would recommend his essays in  
‘Performances’ as a starter to catch something of his flavour but it  
is in ‘Mr Bligh’s Bad Language’ that we have what I think is a  
perfectly intense geneology.

His funeral is this Wednesday in Newman Chapel at Melbourne  
University and I hope Greg would not be surprised how many of us from  
the larger Cultural Studies community will weep.


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