Dr Kirsten McKenzie

BA MA (Capetown) DPhil (Oxford)
Senior Lecturer
Room 815 Brennan Building

+61 2 9351 6668

Kirsten McKenzie began teaching Australian History in the Department in 2002. She has a BA (Hons) and an MA from the University of Cape Town and completed her DPhil at Magdalen College, Oxford in 1997. She moved to Australia in 1998, taking up a post-doctoral research fellowship at the University of Queensland. Since then she has also taught at the University of New South Wales.

• Social status and settler identity in the British empire, with particular reference to the Cape colony and New South Wales
• scandal and gender issues

• Status and Empire: Opportunists and Impostors in the British Imperial World, c. 1700 – 1850
• Changing models of social status and political power at the Cape of Good Hope: the cross-colonial connections of William Edwards/Alexander Lockaye

Scandal in the Colonies: Sydney and Cape Town, 1800-1850 (University of Melbourne Press, 2004; reprinted 2005)

• "Social mobilities at the Cape of Good Hope: Lady Anne Barnard, Samuel Hudson and the opportunities of empire, c. 1797-1824," in Tony Ballantyne and Antoinette Burton (eds) Moving Subjects: Gender, Mobility, and Intimacy in an Age of Global Empire (University of Illinois Press, Urbana, 2008)
• "'My voice is sold, & I must be a Slave': Abolition, Industrialisation and the Yorkshire Election of 1807," History Workshop Journal, 64 (2007), 48-73
• "Britain: Ruling the Waves," in Robert Aldrich (ed) The Age of Empires (Thames and Hudson, London, 2007)
• "Dogs and the Public Sphere: the ordering of social space in early nineteenth-century Cape Town," in Sandra Swart (ed) Canis Africanis: A Dog History of South Africa (Brill, Netherlands, 2007)
• "Performing the Peer: Status, Empire and Impersonation," History Australia 1, 2 (July 2004), 209-228

Kirsten teaches units of study in nineteenth and twentieth century Australian history as well as thematic units that situate Australia within broader British Imperial developments.

• HSTY2614 Australian Social History 1919-1998
• HSTY2619 Living in Colonial Australia
• HSTY2629 Sex And Scandal
• HSTY2678 Race Around the World

• Topics in Australian history generally, particularly social and cultural history, gender history, and colonial Australia

• In 2004 Kirsten McKenzie was awarded the Crawford Medal by the Australian Academy of the Humanities. The medal is awarded every two years to an Australian-based scholar in the early stages of their career whose work contributes towards an understanding of their discipline by the general public.