Clare Corbould
Position
Australian Research Council Future Fellow
Phone
+61 3 99024684
Address
School of Philosophical, Historical and International Studies
Building 11
Monash University
Victoria, 3800
Australia
Location
S608, Menzies Building
Personal History
Clare Corbould joined the School in 2011 as a Larkins Fellow. She has a PhD from the University of Sydney (2005), where she worked as an Associate Lecturer, Lecturer and Senior Lecturer from 2003-2010. From 2012-2015 she is an Australian Research Council Future Fellow.
Clare's area of expertise is African American history. In 2009 she published Becoming African Americans: Black Public Life in Harlem, 1919-1939 (Harvard University Press). The book won the 2010 Victorian Premier's Literary Award for First Book of History, was shortlisted for two other prizes and named a 2009 Outstanding Academic Title by the American Library Association's magazine, Choice. Her research has been supported by fellowships from the American Philosophical Society, Beinecke Library at Yale University, the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History and the Australian Academy of the Humanities. Clare received a 2005 award for Teaching Excellence from the Faculty of Arts at the University of Sydney.
Current Research
Talking Slavery in the New Deal: The Origins and History of American Social Science
Among the most valuable materials we have for understanding antebellum America are thousands of interviews conducted with former slaves. Some 5000 interviews were funded by the Federal and state governments between 1935 and 1943. In the decade prior to this, several hundred interviews were initiated by researchers in Southern universities. Despite the extensive use scholars have made of these sources, there is scant research on the men and women who conducted the interviews. We know very little about most of them beyond their names, often printed on the transcripts. This project will unearth the process by which interviewers were employed, what sort of training they had, and the kind of assumptions that guided their work. It begins with detailed studies of interviewers Ophelia Settle Egypt, whose work centred in Nashville, Tennessee, and Roscoe E. Lewis, who worked in Virginia.
James Weldon Johnson: Life and Times of an American Polymath
James Weldon Johnson was one of the most intriguing American figures of the early twentieth century. Over a career spanning four decades he was a teacher, school principal, lawyer, diplomat, songwriter, newspaper editor, novelist, poet, and a hugely important campaigner for civil rights. This will be the first major biography of Johnson published since the 1970s.
The Revolution in American Life: Memory, History and Nation-Making in the United States from 1776 to Today
A collaborative project with Dr Michael McDonnell (Sydney) and Professor Fitz Brundage (UNC) to uncover the various ways the American Revolution has been remembered, memorialized, used and abused in the public sphere. A collection of essays titled Memory, History, and Nation-Making in the United States from the Revolution to the Civil War, edited with McDonnell, Brundage and Dr Frances Clarke (Sydney), is under contract in the "Public History in Historical Perspective" series of the University of Massachusetts Press.
Major Publications
Books
Becoming African Americans: Black Public Life in Harlem, 1919-1939 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009), xiv + 278 pages.
Book Chapters
"At the Feet of Dessalines: Performing Haiti's Revolution during the New Negro Renaissance," in Beyond Blackface: African Americans and the Creation of American Popular Culture, ed. W. Fitzhugh Brundage (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011).
"Fighting Terror with Words: African American Women Playwrights, Lynching and Rape in the Jim Crow American South," in Feminism and the Body: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, ed. Catherine Kevin (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009), 99-115.
Edited collections
Memory, History, and Nation-Making in the United States from the Revolution to the Civil War, edited with Frances M. Clarke, Michael A. McDonnell and W. Fitzhugh Brundage, University of Massachusetts Press, forthcoming.
Selected journal articles
"Streets, Sounds and Identity in Interwar Harlem," Journal of Social History 40, no. 4 (July 2007): 859-894.
"US Imperialism in the Twentieth Century?" Australasian Journal of American Studies 24, no. 2 (Dec. 2005): 128-141.
Select Essays
"Race, Identity, Census: Introduction," in Colonial Crucible: Empire in the Making of a Modern American State, ed. Alfred W. McCoy and Francisco Scarano (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009), 193-198.
Areas of Research & Supervision
United States, especially twentieth century; urban history; sound and senses; performance; biography; race.