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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.

In 2008, I received a Dean's Teaching Award, the Vice-Chancellor's Award for Teaching Excellence and a Citation for Outstanding Contributions to Student Learning from the Australian Learning and Teaching Council for "sustained contributions to the imaginative teaching of history and to the transition, progress and welfare of students at his own and other universities". I was also elected as a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia.

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 has the working title Miss Culter and the Case of the Reincarnated Horse - focuses on how charity and social workers shaped and reshaped the story of poverty's origins and remedies in these different places during the 1920s and 1930s. With my colleague Christina Twomey, I am writing A History of Australia for Palgrave MacMilian, and with another colleague, Jude McCulloch, I am writing a history of community legal centres and the struggle to broaden the reach of justice in Victoria since the 1970s. My next research projects will involve a history of teeth, oral health, dentistry and smiling in Australia, Britain and the United States, the history of wartime destruction, social planning and resilience in London in 1944 and 1945, and a history of men who worked in domestic service in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

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
"New Worlds of Friendship: The First Half of the Twentieth Century" and (with Liz Reed and James Walter) "The Importance of Friends: The Last Half of the Twentieth Century", in Barbara Caine, et al., Friendship: A History, London: Equinox, 2008.
(with Carly Millar), "Vocational Ventures and Robust Independence: A Review of Honours and Postgraduate Programs in History", History Australia, vol. 4, no. 2, Monash University Press, 2007, pp. 45.1-45.12.
"Male social workers and the Anxieties of Women's Authority: Boston and Minneapolis, 1920-1940", Journal of Men's Studies, vol. 15, no. 3, Men's Studies Press LLC, USA, 2007, pp. 282-294.
'Masculinity, emotion and subjectivity: Introduction', The Journal of Men's Health, Men's Studies Press LLC, USA, 2007, pp. 247-250.
(with David Garrioch), "The Social History of Urban Meighbourhoods", The Journal of Urban History, vol. 32, no. 5, Sage Publications, California, 2006, pp. 663-676.
"'Feeling Your Position': Charity, Social Work and the Drama of Class in Melbourne, 1920-1940", History Australia, vol. 2, no. 3, 2005, pp. 83.1-83.15.
"Mothers Who Don't Want to Work and Fathers Who Do", in Patricia Grimshaw, John Murphy and Belinda Probert (eds), Double Shift: Working Mothers and Social Change in Australia. Melbourne: Circa Press, 2005.
(with Carly Millar), "Canons New and Old? The University Undergraduate History Curriculum in Australasia, 2004", History Australia, vol. 2, no. 1, 2004, pp. 14.1-14.13.
"The Imperfect Bodies of the Poor", Griffith Review, no. 4, 2004, pp. 83-93.
"The Ends of the Earth", in Tim Bonyhady and Tom Griffiths (eds), Words for Country: Landscape and Language in Australia. Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2002.
"Between the Houses: Neighbouring and Privacy", in Patrick Troy (ed.), A History of European Housing in Australia. Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
"Entitlement and Justice", Urban Policy and Research, vol. 18, no. 2, 2000, pp. 239-46.
"Trusting Disadvantaged Citizens", in Valerie Braithwaite and Margaret Levi (eds), Trust and Democratic Governance. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1998.
"A New Kind of Manhood: Remembering the 1950s", in John Murphy and Judith Smart (eds), The Forgotten Fifties, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1997.
"Fearing Los Angeles: Australia's Postmodern Urban Nightmare", Political Expressions, vol. 1, no. 2, 1996, pp. 1-20.
"The Rise and Fall of Social Mix in an Australian New Town", Journal of Urban History, vol. 22, no. 1, 1995, pp. 108-40.
"The Urban Debate: From 'Los Angeles' to the 'Urban Village'", in Patrick Troy (ed.), Australian Cities: Issues, Strategies and Policies for Urban Australia in the 1990s, Sydney: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
"City of the Future, City with a Past: Memories of Elizabeth", in Kate Darian-Smith and Paula Hamilton (eds), Memory and History in Twentieth Century Australia, Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1994.
"Making a Place: Women in the 'Workers' City'", Australian Historical Studies, vol. 26, no. 102, 1994, pp. 19-38.
"Who Speaks, Who Gets Heard? Women and Planning in Poor Suburbs", Urban Futures Journal, vol. 3, no. 3, 1993, pp. 27-30.

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.

Current Supervisions (main supervisor)
Richard Allsop, 'Geoffrey Blainey's History' (PhD)
John Cantwell, 'George Washington and the Western Lands' (PhD)
Lorraine Proctor, 'British Post-war Immigration to the Latrobe Valley' (PhD)
Kathy Shaw, "The Boy Soldiers of the American Civil War: A Social Case Study" (MA)

Current Supervisions (joint supervisor)
Ashley Carr, 'Courts and justice in colonial Victoria' (PhD)
Bridget Harris, 'Community Legal Centres and Youth' (PhD)
Jo Hook, 'Catholic Religious and Welfare Activism' (PhD)
Maria John, 'Humanitarianism and the Tasmanian Aboriginals' (MA)
Ana Kailis, 'Making Non-Citizens: David Hicks and Mahmoud Habib' (PhD)
Meighen Katz, 'The Depression in the Museum: Exhibiting the 1930s in and the United States' (PhD)
Rachel Stevens, 'Migration, Settlement and Language Policies in Australia and the United States, 1950-1975' (PhD)
Mia Treacey, 'History and Film' (PhD)

Completed Theses
Megan Blair, 'The American Civil War in Cyberspace' (2008, main supervisor)
Henry Gordon-Clark, 'The Last Gun in Defence of the South: The Story of CSS Shenandoah' (2008, main supervisor)
Jo Aitken, "Representations of Wife-Beating in Australia, 1880-1914" (2005, main supervisor)
Bree Carlton, 'Imprisoning Histories: State Power and Prisoner Resistance in the Jika Jika High-Security Unit, 1980-1987' (2005, joint supervisor, winner of the 2006 Vice-Chancellor's Commendation for Excellence in Postgraduate Research, thesis published as Imprisoning Resistance: Life and Death in an Australian SuperMax, Federation Press, Sydney, 2007)
Meighen Katz, "History Under Construction: Curators and the Experience of Creating Accessible Public History" (2005, MA, joint supervisor)
Bob Mason, 'Magic Circles: Another Side of the Beatles' (2003, joint supervisor, thesis published as Magic Circles: Another Side of the Beatles by Duffy & Snellgrove, 2004)
Jeremy Sammut, 'The Quest for Civic Virtue: Citizenship and Politics in Federal Australia' (2003, main supervisor)
Paul Sendziuk, 'Learning to Trust: Australian Responses to Aids' (2002, main supervisor, winner of the 2002 Postgraduate Publication Prize and the 2003 Mollie Holman Award, thesis published as Learning to Trust: Australian Responses to AIDS by University of New South Wales Press, 2003)
Tony Duras, '"Parade of the Old New": Trade Unions and New Social Movements in Australia, 1965-1985' (2002, MA, main supervisor)
Sheryl Burgess, 'Imagined Womanhood: The Possibilities and Insecurities of the Heroines of the Interwar Years’ (2002, MA, main supervisor)
Nick Fischer, 'The Savage Within: Anti-Communism, Anti-Democracy and Authoritarianism in the United States and Australia, 1917-1935' (2002, PhD, main supervisor)
Stephen Powell, 'Mothering, Husbandry and the State: Conservation in the United States and Australia, 1912-1945' (2001, PhD, main supervisor)
Masha Gold, 'The Crown Heights Riots and their Effect on Jewish-Black Relations in New York City' (2000, PhD, joint supervisor)
Meredith Fletcher, 'Digging Up People for Coal: A History of Yallourn' (1999, PhD, main supervisor, thesis published as Digging People Up for Coal by Melbourne University Press, 2002)

Teaching

HSY2/3050 - Fears and Fantasies: deviance and criminality in the modern world
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
INT2/3055 - Global Diasters: impact and change