Monash University - Faculty of Arts

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Personal History

After completing undergraduate and Masters degrees in American Studies at Flinders University, I completed a Masters in History at Johns Hopkins University and a PhD in History at Melbourne University. I have worked at Monash since 1995. As well as teaching and writing in American, Australian and comparative history, I have also made major contributions to the development of student welfare and school-university transition programs at Monash.

Current Research

I am currently completing a history of charity and social work in Melbourne, London and three American cities. Based on thousands of case files, the book - which as the working title Miss Culter and the Case of the Reincarnated Horse - focuses on the transition from 'detective' investigation to advocacy, and shows how immigration, the Depression and the war helped convince charity and social workers that the impoverished were telling the truth about poverty's origins and remedies. It is modeled on detective fiction and includes dramatised reconstructions of actual cases. I am also writing on a revised edition of A Little History of Australia for Melbourne University Publishing and a larger work, A History of Australia, for Palgrave MacMilian. My next research projects will involve a history of teeth, oral health, dentistry and smiling in Australia, Britain and the United States, and the history of urban destruction and reconstruction in the post-Civil War American South and after natural disasters in Canada and the United States.

Major Publications

I am the author of Good Times, Hard Times: The Past and the Future of Elizabeth (1995), A Little History of Australia (1997), and the Lowest Rung: Voices of Australian Poverty (2003), as well as chapters and articles in the areas of social justice, disadvantage, welfare, poverty, gender and class.

Refereed Journal Articles
With Professor David Garrioch, 'The social history of urban neighbourhoods', The Journal of Urban History, Sage Publications, California, 2006, pp. 663-676.

Areas of Research & Supervision

I am particularly keen to supervise projects in Australian history and American history, and comparative and transnational projects. My broad area of interest is social and cultural history, and I have specific interests in the history of poverty, welfare and charity; the history of the making and the experience of class, gender and sexuality, especially in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; the history of public policies, especially in the areas of health, education, welfare and social justice; oral history, memory and life stories; dramatisation, fiction and historical writing; on-line histories and new genres of historical writing; urban history, and especially the history of working-class and marginalised places; and the history of movements for civil, social and minority rights, especially in the United States. Beyond this, I also supervise projects across the range of Australian history, as well as the history of the American Civil War, modern American political history, colonial American history and histories of race in America. I received the Faculty of Arts Award for Excellence in Research Supervision in 2003.

Teaching

HSY2/3985 - Twentieth-Century America: race, rights and power
HSY2/3990 - The American Civil War
HSY2/3995 - Dissent, Revolution and Freedom: inventing America to 1850
HSY3200 - Advanced history workshop