Dr James Curran

Senior Lecturer
Room 855 Brennan Building

+61 2 9351 2988

Dr Curran teaches Australian political, intellectual, cultural and diplomatic history. His current research interests include the problem of Australian nationalism in the wake of the British empire and twentieth century Australian political culture. He is also working on a history of the Australia/US Alliance from Nixon's Guam Doctrine to the present, with a particular focus on how the two countries have approached Asia in that period.

Dr Curran joined the Department in June 2007. He is a graduate of the University of Sydney, being awarded his PhD in History in 2001. Dr Curran's doctoral thesis aimed to discover how, after the collapse of the Federation certainties, Prime Ministers Whitlam, Fraser, Hawke and Keating attempted through their rhetoric to remake the image of the Australian community, and how they reconstructed Australia's relations with the world. The thesis was published by Melbourne University Press in 2004 under the title The Power of Speech: Australian Prime Ministers Defining the National Image. The book was short-listed for the 2005 NSW Premiers History Awards - Australian History Prize, and also for the Victorian Premier's 2004 Literary Award for a First Book in History. In 2004, Dr Curran was also the John Curtin Prime Ministerial Library Visiting Scholar.

After graduating from the university, Dr Curran lectured in Australian History at the Australian Catholic University.

Dr Curran has also served in various roles in the Commonwealth Public Service. From 2002 to 2005 he worked as a Policy Adviser in the Department of The Prime Minister and Cabinet, serving in both its Social Policy and International Divisions. From 2005 to 2007, he was an Analyst in the Americas and Europe Branch of the Office of National Assessments. In 2008 he was invited by the Prime Minister to participate in the National Security panel at the 2020 Summit in Canberra.

With Stuart Ward, The Unknown Nation: Remaking Australia in the Wake of Empire (To be published by Melbourne University Press)

Books

The Power of Speech: Australian Prime Ministers Defining the National Image (Melbourne University Press, April 2004)

Academic Journals/Collections

'"An Organic Part of the Whole Structure": John Curtin’s Empire', Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History (Forthcoming, March 2009)

'"Australia Should be There": Expo 67 and the Search for a New National Image', Australian Historical Studies 131 (March 2008)

Entry on 'Australia-Britain', Oxford Companion to Australian Politics 2007.

'"The Thin Dividing Line": Prime Ministers and the problem of Australian nationalism, 1972-1996'. Australian Journal of Politics and History, vol. 48, no. 4 (December 2002)

'Bonjoor Paree: The First AIF in Paris, 1916-19'
Journal of Australian Studies, No.1, 1999.

• 2006:
  ‘The Fourth Empire’: John Curtin’s proposals for closer imperial cooperation, May 1944, British World Conference, Bristol, 11-14 July 2007.
• 2004:
  ‘The End of Identity?: Reflections on political leadership and the national self-image in post 1960s Australia’, Address to National Archives of Australia History Week, 12 September 2004
• ‘A crisis of national meaning: Prime Ministers and the dilemma of Australian nationalism’; John Curtin Prime Ministerial Library Visiting Scholar Lecture, Curtin University of Technology, Perth, 19 April 2004.
• 2002:
  ‘Prime Ministers and the problem of Australian nationalism, 1941-1996’, ANU History Seminar Series, October 2002.
• ‘Prime Ministerial rhetoric and Australian nationalism’: An Address to the Australian Academy of the Humanities, Australian National University, November 2002
• The ‘kind of nationalism that every country needs’?: EG Whitlam and the ‘new nationalism’; Thirty Years Later: The Whitlam Government as Modernist Politics, Monash University – National Key Centre for Australian Studies, Parliamentary Studies Unit, Canberra, 2-3 December 2002
• 2001:
  ‘Challenge and Response: Malcolm Fraser and Australian Foreign policy’; The Liberals and Australian Foreign Policy, Menzies Centre, School of Australian and International Studies and the Menzies Centre for Australian Studies, London, Melbourne September 25-27, 2001.
• ‘The Prime Ministerial Persona: aspects of the intellectual history of R. J. L. Hawke’; Someone Special: The Bob Hawke Prime Ministerial Library Inaugural conference, Adelaide,
  19-20 October 2001.
• 2000:
  ‘Visiting Rites’: Britishness in Australian Prime Ministerial Speeches: From Mansion House to Ballarat, 1972-1996; ‘Comings and Goings: Britain and Australia, Past and Future, BASA Conference, Menzies Centre for Australian Studies, London,
  12-14 September 2000.
• 1999:
  ‘Australian Prime Ministers and the British Myth in a changing world’, Panel series: Sentiment and Self Interest in Anglo-Australian Relations, AHA Regional Conference, Hobart,
  29 September – 1 October 1999.

• Joint review of Sally Warhaft, The Speeches that Made Australia (Melbourne, Black Inc, 2004) and Rod Kemp & Marion Stanton (eds) Speaking for Australia (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2004), in The Australian Book Review, November 2004.
• Review of Geoffrey Bolton, Edmund Barton – The One Man for the Job (Sydney, Allen & Unwin, 2001) The Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society, vol. 87, pt. 2 (December 2001)
• A response to David Malouf’s ‘Made In England’
  Quarterly Essay 13, April 2004

Teaching
Second Semester 2007:
HSTY 1088: An Introduction to Australian History

First Semester 2008:
Australia and the World

Second Semester 2008:
Politics and Nation.