With the aim of raising the profile of humanist Latin in Australia, the Cassamarca Foundation created a Chair in Latin Humanism at The University of Western Australia in 2003. This position, with its emphasis on the role of Latin Humanism in the development of Western civilisation, truly captures the vision of the foundation’s president, Avvocato Onorevole Dino De Poli. For the incumbent, Yasmin Haskell, it is an unparalleled opportunity to broaden awareness of Latin writing in Europe and beyond, especially since the Renaissance, and of the values that lie at the heart of modern European culture.

Since coming to Perth in 2003, Professor Haskell has organized various conferences and postgraduate events in Australia with the aim of revealing the living continuity of the Latin tradition since antiquity through to the beginnings of modernity. These include ‘Latinity and Alterity in the Early Modern Period’ (Cassamarca conference, UWA, 2004), ‘Humanism and Medicine in the Early Modern Era’ (Perth, 2006, sponsored by the Cassamarca Foundation, the Australian Research Council’s ‘Network for Early European Research’ (NEER), and the Institute of Advanced Studies, UWA), and ‘Latin Identities: Representations of Self and Community from Antiquity to the Eighteenth Century’ (Sydney, 2009, following a postgraduate advanced training seminar on Latin for medievalists and early modernists; funded by NEER).

Professor Haskell’s own research explores the intersections between poetry and religion, science, medicine, and art. Her monograph on Latin scientific and cultural poetry by Jesuits, Loyola’s Bees, was published by Oxford University Press in 2003, and she has co-edited (with Christopher Allen and Frances Muecke) the influential seventeenth-century Latin poem on painting by Charles-Alphonse Dufresnoy (Geneva: Droz, 2005). She is currently leading an Australian Research Council Discovery Project on the uses of Latin in the European Enlightenment (with team members in Italy and the Netherlands) and writing a book on the eighteenth-century Dutch physician and Latin poet, Gerard Nicolaas Heerkens. Professor Haskell’s recent research into psychosomatic illness in early modern Italy was also funded by the Australian Research Council and has led to a collection of essays by Australian and international scholars, Diseases of the Imagination and Imaginary Disease in the Early Modern Period, forthcoming Brepols.

The Australian Research Council recently awarded nearly $25,000,000 to the University of Western Australia to establish a Centre of Excellence in the History of Emotion: Professor Haskell is one of the ten ‘Chief Investigators’ on that project and will of course give prominence in her work to the Latin humanist tradition.

ABC Radio National: What's so new about neo-Latin? Listen to the radio segment by clicking on the following link:

http://www.abc.net.au/rn/linguafranca/stories/2007/2062977.htm

Professor Haskell grew up in Sydney, but came to UWA from the University of Cambridge, where she was a Research Fellow at Newnham College and in the Faculties of Classics and Modern and Medieval Languages.