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Personal History

Kat Ellinghaus holds a five year Monash Fellowship in the School of Historical Studies. She has a PhD in history from the University of Melbourne, and was an Australian Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Melbourne from 2002 to 2006. Kat is the author of Taking Assimilation to Heart: Marriages of White Women and Indigenous Men in the United States and Australia, 1887-1937 (University of Nebraska Press, 2006).

Current Research

A Modest Investment in Civilisation: The Contradictions of Indigenous Assimilation in Australia and the United States, 1880s-1960s
This project uses a comparative methodology to investigate Native American and Aboriginal people's role as consumer citizens in capitalist economies. It examines the limited financial opportunities offered by assimilation policies in the United States and Australia and explores both indigenous people's experiences and white Australians' and Americans' hesitancy to fully imagine indigenous people as consumers, entrepreneurs, and self-sufficient workers, farmers and domestic servants.

Blood Will Tell: Interracial Relationships and Native American Assimilation Policy, 1887-1934
This project explores an aspect of assimilation in the United States that has received little scholarly attention-the idea that at the same time that Native Americans were taught to "act white," interracial sexual relationships, or miscegenation, could "biologically absorb" indigenous identity into the white population. I investigate the extent to which interracial marriage and sexual relationships between Native Americans, African Americans and white Americans were imagined as part of assimilation policy. The project examines the 'strategies of elimination' embedded in the processes of allotment, enrolment and the awarding of competency or 'fee patents' which followed the Dawes Act of 1887.

Major Publications

Katherine Ellinghaus, "Intimate Assimilation: White/Indigenous Intermarriage in the United States and Australia," in Moving Subjects: Gender, Mobility and Intimacy in an Age of Empire, ed. Tony Ballantyne and Antoinette Burton, (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009) pp. 211-228.
Leigh Boucher, Jane Carey and Katherine Ellinghaus (eds), Re-orienting Whiteness: Transnational Perspectives on the History of an Identity (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).
Katherine Ellinghaus, 'Biological Absorption and Genocide: A Comparison of Indigenous Assimilation Policies in the United States adn Australia,' Genocide Studies and Prevention 4, no. 2 (April 2009): pp. 59-79.
Katherine Ellinghaus, Taking Assimilation to Heart: Marriages of White Women and Indigenous Men in Australia and the United States, 1887-1937 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006).
Katherine Ellinghaus, "Indigenous Assimilation and Absorption in the United States and Australia," Pacific Historical Review 75, no. 4 (2006): 563-585.
Katherine Ellinghaus, "Absorbing the Aboriginal Problem: Controlling Marriage in Australia in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century,"Aboriginal History 27 (2003): 185-209.
Katherine Ellinghaus, "Margins of Acceptability: Class, Education and Interracial Marriage in Australia and America," Frontiers 3, no. 3 (2002): 55-75.
Patricia Grimshaw and Katherine Ellinghaus, "'A Higher Step for the Race': Caroline Nichols Churchill, the Queen Bee and Woman's Suffrage in Colorado, 1879-1883," Australasian Journal of American Studies 20, no. 2 (December 2001): 29-46.
Katherine Ellinghaus, "Regulating Koori Marriages: The 1886 Victorian 'Aborigines Protection Act,'" Journal of Australian Studies 67 (2001): 22-29.
Katherine Ellinghaus, "Interracial Marriage and the Ideology of Assimilation: Hampton Institute, 1878-1923," Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 108, no. 3 (Autumn 2000): 279-303.

Refereed Journal Articles
'The Benefits of Being Indian: Blood Quanta, Intermarriage, and Allotment Policy on the White Earth Reservation, 1889-1920', Frontiers, 2008.

Conference Papers
'Historicising whiteness: Towards a new research agenda', Historicising whiteness: Transnational perspective on the construction of an identity, RMIT Publishing, 2007, pp. vi-xxiii.
'Whiteness as bureaucracy: Assimilation policies and people of white/indigenous descent in Australia and the United States', Historicising Whiteness: Transnational perspectives on the construction of an identity, RMIT Publishing, 2007, pp. 375-383.

Areas of Research & Supervision

Colonial history; Transnational and Comparative History; Interracial relationships; Indigenous assimilation policies; Social and cultural history of the United States and Australia and Gender history.

Teaching

HSY2/3955 - Searching for the American Dream