Professor Robert Aldrich

Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities
Room 843 Brennan Building

+61 2 9036 5479

BA, Emory University; MA, PhD, Brandeis University

Robert Aldrich, Professor of European History, teaches and carries out research in modern European and colonial history, especially the history of France since the Revolution and of France's overseas empire, the history of 'sites of memory' and the history of gender and sexuality.

Professor Aldrich is currently working on two projects. One is a book tentatively titled Province, Nation, Empire: Regionalism, Nationalism and Colonialism in Third Republic France. He did research for this volume during a sabbatical in Semester 1, 2008, when he was a Fellow of the Columbia University Institute of Scholars in Paris. His research is also supported by a Discovery Grant from the Australian Research Council.

In early 2008, Aldrich also signed a contract with Thames & Hudson in London to write a book on Gay Lives in World History.

Robert Aldrich’s most recent publications are several edited volumes. Gay Life and Culture: A World History was published by Thames & Hudson in the UK in 2006 and has been translated into seven languages. In 2007, again for Thames & Hudson, he edited The Age of Empires, which has also been published in Spanish and German, and will soon appear in Estonian, Rumanian and Turkish. In 2006, he was the guest editor for a special issue of the French journal Outre-Mers on ‘sites of memory’ in the French overseas empire.

Aldrich is the author of several books on colonial history: The French Presence in the South Pacific, 1842-1940 (1990), France and the South Pacific since 1940 (1993) and Greater France: A History of French Overseas Expansion (1996) and Vestiges of the Colonial Empire in France: Monuments, Museums and Colonial Memories (2005). With John Connell, he is the author of France's Overseas Frontier: Départements et Territoires d'Outre-Mer (1992) and The Last Colonies (1998).

In gay history, Aldrich is the author of The Seduction of the Mediterranean: Writing, Art and Homosexual Fantasy (1993). With Garry Wotherspoon, he edited a two-volume Who's Who in gay and lesbian history, published in 2001, that contains entries on almost a thousand figures of importance in the history of homosexuality in the Western world since Antiquity. Aldrich and Wotherspoon also edited several collections of chapters on Australian gay history, which appeared between 1992 and 1998. Colonialism and Homosexuality (2003) brought together two of Aldrich’s fields of research, looking at the phenomenon of male homosexuality, primarily in the British and French empires, from the mid-1800s to the mid-1900s.

Teaching

• HSTY1045 Modern European History 1750-1914 (Semester 1, 2009))
• HSTY2659 Nationalism
• HSTY2304 Imperialism, 1815-2000
• HSTY2658 French Politics and Culture
• HSTY26XX Colonialism in Modern Asia (New in Semester 2, 2009)
• HSTY6942 Historical Constructions of Sexuality
• HSTY6992 Monuments and History (Semester 2, 2008)

Supervision

• political, social and cultural history of modern Europe, including nationalism, social change and historical memory
• French history, particularly in the period since the Revolution of 1789, and the history of the French overseas empire
• history of European colonialism and decolonisation in the nineteenth and twentieth-century, especially the case of France;
• history of homosexuality, especially in the late modern period

Professor Aldrich is Chair of the Department of History from 2006 through 2009 (except when on leave in Semester 1, 2008).

He is Co-Director, with Associate Professor Alison Bashford, of the ‘Nation, Empire, Globe’ Research Cluster at the University of Sydney.

He is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia.

He is a member of the advisory board of Outre-Mers, the French colonial history journal.

The French government in 2002 decorated Aldrich with the Ordre des Palmes Académiques in recognition of 'services to French culture'