Professor Ann Curthoys

Australian Research Council Professorial Fellow
Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences of Australia and the Australian Academy of the Humanities
Room 812 Brennan Building

+61 2 9114 0778

BA (Hons), University of Sydney 1967; Dip.Ed. (Sydney Teachers College) 1967; PhD (Macquarie University 1973)

Ann Curthoys researches and supervises graduate students in Australian history, set in a broad transnational and imperial history frame. She also writes about history and theory, and historical writing.

Current Projects

Professor Curthoys is currently working on several projects. Her major project, the topic of her ARC professorial fellowship, is entitled “The British Empire, Indigenous Peoples, and Self-government for the Australian Colonies”. She is planning two books from this project, one to be written jointly with her Research Associate, Dr Jessie Mitchell.

Ann is also working on a study of Paul Robeson’s visit to Australia in 1960, a spin-off from her earlier book on race relations in Australia in the 1960s, namely Freedom Ride: A Freedomrider Remembers (Allen and Unwin, 2002).

Ann is also writing a semi-autobiographical book about her experiences as an historian, tracing the changes in the ways history is thought about, researched, written, and debated since she was first a history student at the University of Sydney in the 1960s.

Selected publications

Books

Sole
Freedom Ride: A Freedomrider Remembers, Allen and Unwin, Sydney (2002)
– Awarded Stanner Prize, 2003, by the Australian Institute for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies
– ‘Highly Commended’ at Human Rights Awards, HREOC, Australia, December 2002
– shortlisted NSW Premier’s Literary Award for Non-fiction and the Center for Australian Cultural Studies Award for Non-Fiction, 2003.

For and Against Feminism: A Personal Journey into Feminist Theory and History, Allen and Unwin, Sydney (1988)

Joint
(with Ann McGrath) How to Write History that People Want to Read (UNSW Press, 2009)

(with Ann Genovese and Alexander Reilly), Rights and Redemption: History, Law, and Indigenous People (UNSW Press, 2008)

(with John Docker) Is History Fiction?, University of New South Wales Press and University of Michigan Press (2005)

Co-Edited
(with Marilyn Lake, Eds), Connected Worlds: History in Transnational Perspective, ANU E Press, 2006)

(with Mary Spongberg and Barbara Caine, eds), A Companion to Women’s Historical Writing, Palgrave, 2005.

(with Henry Chan and Nora Chiang, eds), The Overseas Chinese in Australasia: History, Settlement and Interactions, Monograph 3, Interdisciplinary Group for Australian Studies, National Taiwan University, 2001.

(with Ann McGrath, eds), Writing Histories: Imagination and Narration, Monash Publications in History, Melbourne, 2000. Republished by Monash University E Press, 2009

(with Julianne Schultz, eds), Journalism: Print, Politics, and Popular Culture, University of Queensland Press, 1999

Edited special issues of Journals
Editor of section entitled ‘Australian Studies in the United States’, Crossings, 9.2, 2004.
Co-editor, special section on ‘Genocide? Australian Aboriginal History in International Perspective’, for Aboriginal History vol. 25, 2001.
Co-editor, special issue entitled ‘The World Upside Down: Feminisms in the Antipodes’, Feminist Review, no 61, 1996.

Recent essays
‘Stanner and the Historians’, in Melinda Hinkson, ed., An Appreciation of Difference: WEH Stanner and Aboriginal Australia, Aboriginal Studies Press, 2008.

‘Genocide in Tasmania: The History of an Idea’, in Dirk Moses, editor, Empire, Colony, Genocide: Conquest, Occupation, and subaltern Resistance in World History, Berghahn Books, 2008

(with John Docker), ‘Defining Genocide’, in Dan Stone, ed., The Historiography of Genocide, Palgrave, 2008

‘Indigenous Subjects’, in Deryck Schreuder and Stuart Ward, eds, Australia’s Empire, in the series edited by Roger Louis, The Oxford History of the British Empire, 2008

‘An Historiographical Paradox: Brian Fitzpatrick, the British Empire, and Indigenous Histories’, in Stuart Macintyre and Sheila Fitzpatrick, eds, Brian Fitzpatrick and Manning Clark, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 2007

“Raphael Lemkin on Tasmania”, in Dirk Moses and Dan Stone, Eds, Colonialism and Genocide, Berghahn books, 2007.

Selected earlier essays
2005 ‘The History of Killing and the Killing of History’, in Antoinette Burton, ed., Archive Stories: Facts, Fictions, and the Writing of History, Duke University Press.

2004 ‘National narratives, war commemoration and racial exclusion in a settler society: the Australian case’, in T.G. Ashplant, Graham Dawson, and Michael Roper, The politics of war memory and commemoration, Routledge, 2001.

2003 “Liberalism and Exclusionism: A Prehistory of the White Australia Policy”, in Legacies of White Australia: Race Culture and Nation, Laksiri Jayasuriya, David Walker and Jan Gothard (eds) 1st Edition, University of Western Australia Press, Crawley, Western Australia, pp 8-33.

2003 “We’ve just started Making National Histories and You Want Us to Stop Already?” in After the Imperial Turn: Thinking with and through the Nation, Antoinette Burton (eds), Duke University Press, Durham, USA, pp.70-89.

2002 ‘Cultivating the arts of the female self: the micro politics of a re-fashioned feminism’, in Jane Bennett and Michael J. Shapiro (Eds), The Politics of Moralising, Routledge.

2002 ‘Does Australian History Have a Future?’, Australian Historical Studies, No 118, pp.140 -52.

2001 “Men of All Nations, Except Chinamen: Chinese on the New South Wales Goldfields”, in Iain McCalman, Alexander Cook, and Andrew Reeves, eds, Gold Forgotten Histories and Lost Objects of Australia, Cambridge University Press, pp.103 – 24.

2000 ‘An Uneasy Conversation: the Indigenous and the Multicultural’, in John Docker and Gerhard Fischer, Eds, Race Colour and Identity in Australia and New Zealand, UNSW Press.

1999 ‘Whose Home? Expulsion, Exodus, and Exile in White Australian Historical Mythology’, Journal of Australian Studies no 61, 1 - 18.

Areas of supervision

Ann is currently supervising four PhD students, whose topics include a biography of Aboriginal singer, Jimmy Little; a history of the Australian Institute for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies; representations of Australia in overseas exhibitions 1851 to 1939; and Chinese and the racial politics of health in nineteenth century Australia.

Areas of supervision include:

• Australian political, social, and cultural history
• Indigenous Australian history
• Australia in the British Empire; comparative settler colonial society history
• History and fiction

Other professional contributions

Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences of Australia
Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities
Member of the editorial board of the following journals:

• Australian Feminist Studies
• Labour History
• Journal of Australian Studies
• Hecate
• Borderlands E-Journal