RESEARCH THEMES – 2009

The History Program welcomes enquiries from prospective graduate students. 
The Program's  research strengths and areas of supervision are:

Biography	Indigenous History	Australian Public Policy History	Environmental History	Old age, ill-health and death	The construction of gender	The histories of other settler societies	The electronic archive

Biography: The Program is the outstanding national centre for biographical studies, especially of Australia, but also including the analysis of transnational lives. We work closely with historians across the College in developing this research strength of the ANU. The launching of the ADB Online in 2006 introduced a sophisticated electronic research database that will be a tool of unprecedented value for prosopography, thus expanding the practice of biography and bringing that practice closer to other social science disciplines that combine case studies in systematic data sets. Networked data sets are the way of the future and the ADB Online is pioneering this innovation in Australia.

 Indigenous History: The Program has Australia's only Centre for Indigenous History, and hosts the premier journal in the field, Aboriginal History, now in its thirtieth year. The Centre's focus is on Indigenous modes of historical practice in international comparative context and therefore includes the investigation of history-making in museums, visual and performative arts, tourism, the courts, film, television and multi-media.

 Australian public policy history: Due to strategic planning five to seven years ago, the Program further strengthened its scholarship in Australian public policy history, an important contribution to the interests of the School as a whole. In recent years the Program's work has included a commissioned paper on the history of Commonwealth Arbitration, a paper on the economic policies of the Whitlam government, a biography of an influential public servant economist and a book and several papers on the historical roots of contemporary Indigenous public policy. An ARC-funded research project just launched in this field concerns The comparative history of Indigenous statistics in Australia, Canada and New Zealand, a joint initiative of History and Demography, RSSS.

 Environmental History: The ANU has the best concentration of expertise in environmental studies, certainly in Australia and arguably in the world.  The History Program and the Centre for Resource and Environmental Studies (ANU) have the nation's foremost scholars in environmental history, landscape change and the ecological humanities. Current projects include a detailed and innovative study of food history in Jamaica, explicitly relating culture to natural resources and providing a critique of patterns of exploitation; an historical analysis of the dynamics of environmental consciousness and regulation on the south coast of NSW; and a history of environmental ideas in twentieth-century Australia.

Old age, ill-health and death: A further example of the relationship we are building between fine-grained historical scholarship and contemporary social and economic policy is the Program's sustained research strength in studying the human life cycle through histories of health and ill-health, old age and death. This work is demographic, attitudinal, cross-cultural and multi-disciplinary, and draws on medicine, psychology and sociology as well as history. Our work is relevant to the consideration of policy on an ageing population, euthanasia, cancer and palliative care.

 The construction of gender: This comparative enquiry includes Australia, Britain and the United States, has a sociological as well as biographical approach, and links feminist historiography with debates about modernity. Always interested in the relationship between large-scale social, economic and political movements and individual agency, research has focused on the lives of feminist innovators during the twentieth century. An ARC-funded project is exploring three important but neglected themes in the history of gender and modernity through the life of Judith Anderson (1897-1992) in Australia, the US and Great Britain: the role of the speaking voice in the development of a new, international, sensory culture; the development of modern emotional repertoires; and the inter-related roles of theatre and film as carriers of these new ideas and practices across borders, creating a ‘global sensory vernacular' in which voice as well as vision played an important part.

 The histories of other settler societies and of countries comparable to, or historically linked with, Australia:  This research focuses especially on Britain, the United States, the Caribbean and the Antarctic, and includes enquiries into the history of Australian engagement with matters deemed to be of ‘international' significance as well as into Australia's diplomatic, social and scientific influence in international territories such as Antarctica.

 The electronic archive: With the Australian Social Science Data Archive and the ANU's Supercomputing Facility, the Program is collaborating in the digitisation of the Historic Census Microfiche. Considered alongside the ADB Online, this initiative demonstrates the Program's eager exploration of the potential of e-research in the Humanities and Social Sciences.

For Staff Research interests and areas of supervision please go to academic staff page.