Melanie Nolan is an historian of both Australia and New Zealand ; her MA was in New Zealand history while her PhD was in Australian history. She has worked in the public service in industrial relations and as an historian in what is now the Ministry of Culture and Heritage. She spent 16 years in the History Department, Victoria University of Wellington, including a period as Head of Programme, and she joined the History Program, RSSS, in June 2008 as Professor of History, Director of the National Centre for Biography and General Editor of the Australian Dictionary of Biography. She is an editorial board member of Australia 's Labour History and Britain 's Labour History Review.

As a labour historian Nolan's research centres on the transformation of work and workers and the politics that has engendered since industrialization. Her work is concerned with disaggregation and aggregation, studying diversity as well as uniformity. While ranging widely, it has been motivated by three more particular research questions.

The first question concerns gender and work. For much of the twentieth century, women in Australia and New Zealand were arguably some of the most domesticated in the world. Even if a woman worked outside the home for money before marriage, once wedded, she would probably spend the rest of her life within the domestic sphere, making a home and raising children. By 2000, however, if the United Nations is to be believed, Australian and New Zealand women were among those closest to achieving gender equality. Nolan's book , Breadwinning. New Zealand Women and the State (2000) considered how change for women occurred and, in particular, the role of the state in the process of the rise and fall of the male breadwinner society. Nolan's current project on this question is about gender, generation and the rise of professional society in Australasia . Having considered the white-blouse revolution, the dilution of skilled labour, and the rise of professional society, Nolan's next project will be a more ambitious history of work in the twentieth century. The ANU with its Noel Butlin Archives of Business and Labour is an ideal location for a labour historian with this research agenda.

A related second puzzle in Nolan's work concerns egalitarianism. Egalitarianism is said to have been central to the Australians' and New Zealanders' sense of themselves. The concept has proved no less influential upon historians. Yet the worker's paradise, the ‘social laboratory', sought out by many white settlers and social commentators in the nineteenth and early twentieth century society, was also a place of evolving class hierarchies and of significant gender, racial and ethnic divisions. The problem to some extent is the loose use of the term egalitarianism. Few of those arguing about egalitarianism, and few of the historians who have tracked those arguments, took it to mean that everyone was equal or level in every regard at all times. Nolan is concentrating upon the distinctions between equal opportunity, regard and outcome and how the relationship between these three aspects of egalitarianism were, at times, contradictory and certainly changed over time.

The third problem Nolan's work addresses is the conundrum of biography and representation. How does one design a biography to be more balanced and representative when the very act of most biography is to pick an exceptional unrepresentative person? This issue of typicality informed Nolan's book Kin. The Collective Biography of a New Zealand Working-class Family (2005) which concentrated on biography, gender, religion and labour history. It was awarded the Archives and Records Association of NZ (ARANZ) Ian Wards Prize in 2006 and was shortlisted for the prestigious Ernest Scott Prize in 2007.