Pacifism

Nicholas Birns is a literary scholar specializing in postcolonial and Australian literature. He authored Theory After Theory (2010), Contemporary Australian Literature (2015), and The Hyperlocal in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Literary Space (2019). Co-editor of The Cambridge Conpanion to the Australian Novel (2023) and Teaching Australian and New Zealand Literature (2016), he has published widely on writers ranging from Roberto Bolaño to Agatha Christie. He teaches at NYU.John Kinsella, world-renowned Australian poet, novelist, critic, and ecological activist, holds a fellowship at Churchill College, Cambridge. His recent works include three collected poetry volumes: The Ascension of Sheep (2022), Harsh Hakea (2023), and Spirals (2024); the critical work Legibility: An Anti-Fascist Poetics (2022); the verse novel Cellnight (2023); the novel The Mahler Erasures (2024);The Darkest Pastoral: Selected Poems (2025) and a collection of new poetry, Aporia (2025). He has written over 70 books and is Emeritus Professor of Literature and Environment at Curtin University, Australia.

• Introduction 1. Reintroducing Jonathan Dymond (1796-1818): A Quaker Pacifist Powerhouse 2. Pacifist Historiography: Anabaptist Historiography Between Normativity and Description and Beyond Neutralization and Polarization 3. Bethinking Ourselves: Tolstoy, Pacifism, and Critiques of Eurocentrism 4. Anarcho-Pacifism: The General Strike and its Aftermath in Arnold Roller’s The Social General Strike 5. Making Time for Peace: Virginia Woolf, Pat Barker, and “Peace Time” 6. Portrait Of a Pacifist as a Young Man 7. Feminist Voices of Dissent: Counternarratives of Pacifism from The Arab Spring 8. San’Si’In-Ship? Towards A Meditational Ethics of Custodianship