Dr Ross L Jones

Australian Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow 2009-2012


Ross Jones completed his PhD in the Education Faculty at Monash University in 2001. He also has a Masters in Educational Studies from Monash and a BA (Hons) and Dip Ed from the University of Melbourne. For twenty years he taught in schools across Australia and in the United Kingdom. More recently he has taught graduate and post-graduate courses at the University of Melbourne in the history of medicine and biology. He has published in the areas of the history of anatomy, eugenics, and education.

Research areas

• History of Anatomy
• History of Eugenics
• History of Anthropology
• Medical biography

Current Projects

• ARC project: ‘Anatomies of Empire: Race, Evolution and Scientific Networks in the Twentieth-Century British World’. Dr Jones, in association with Professor Warwick H. Anderson, intends to demonstrate how Australian scientists, Australian field experiences, and Australian materials were central to comparative anatomy, evolutionary theory and race science in the twentieth century. This study examines for the first time the powerful imperial network of racial biologists and physical anthropologists whose influential studies of human nature and racial classification derived from Australian work. The research project focuses on Grafton Elliot Smith, Arthur Keith, Frederick Wood Jones, and their students and collaborators, including Raymond Dart, Colin Mackenzie, Davidson Black, Joseph Shellshear, and Wilfred Le Gros Clark. The eventual book will reveal a powerful British imperial network of comparative anatomists, evolutionary theorists and racial biologists, linked by education, example, mentorship, collegiality, public debate and private correspondence.
• Dr Jones is also in the process of analysing an extensive cadaver archive with the purpose of understanding the way in which social class was a determining factor in the development of medicalization in Western societies

Selected publications

Books
Humanity’s Mirror: 150 Years of Anatomy in Melbourne, Haddington Press, Melbourne, 2007

‘as good with the juicy bits as … with the more conventionally historical’ Melbourne Age

‘compelling’ Melbourne Herald Sun

‘well researched and variously stimulating’ Australian Historical Studies

‘will deservedly attract a wide readership’ Metascience

‘I found myself completely engrossed in the telling of the tale’ American Association of Anatomists News

Book Chapters and Articles
‘Removing Some of the Dust from the Wheels of Civilization: William Ernest Jones and the 1928 Commonwealth Survey of Mental Deficiency’, Australian Historical Studies, 40: 1 (March 2009), 62-77

‘Cadavers, Medicalization and the Social Dimension of Dissection at the University of Melbourne in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries’ in Sarah Ferber and Helen MacDonald (eds), The Body Divided: Human Beings and Human Materials in the History of Medical Science, Ashgate, Aldershot, 2009 (forthcoming)

‘Sir Geoffrey Newman-Morris’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, forthcoming

‘Unpeeling Another Curate’s Egg’, Metascience, 18:1 (March 2009).

‘The Master Potter and the Rejected Pots: Eugenic Legislation in Victoria 1918-1939’, Australian Historical Studies, 30: 113 (October 1999) 319-342, reprinted in Janice Giltrow, ed., Academic Reading, 2nd edition, Broadview Press, Peterborough, Canada, 2002

‘The Rogers-Templeton and Pearson Royal Commissions: Contemporary Views of the 1872 Education Act’, History of Education Review, 27: 2 (1998), 50-66

Professional Activities

• Senior Fellow, Department of Anatomy and Cell Biology, Faculty of Medicine, Dentistry and Health Sciences, University of Melbourne since 2007.
• Member of the Council of the Australian and New Zealand Society for the History of Medicine since 2003.
• Member of the Committee of the Medical History Society of Victoria, 2003–2005.
• Fellow, Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Melbourne, 2003-2006
• Fellow, Centre for Health and Society, University of Melbourne, 2003-2006.