University of Sydney / Faculty of Arts / Department of History / Staff / Academic staff

Dr Stephen Robertson

BA (Hons) (Otago); PhD (Rutgers)
Senior Lecturer
Room 818 MacCallum Building

+61 2 9351 3782

Stephen Robertson joined the History Department in 2000. Prior to that he was a post-doctoral fellow at the American Bar Foundation in Chicago (1997-98), and the JNG Finley Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of History at George Mason University (1998-99). He also taught for a semester at Massey University in New Zealand. Stephen has won a number of teaching awards, including a Carrick Australian Award for University Teaching Citation for Outstanding Contributions to Student Learning in 2006 and a Faculty of Arts Excellence in Teaching Award in 2008.

Research areas

  • The twentieth-century United States
  • The history of sexuality
  • Law and society
  • New York City
  • Digital history

Current projects

Selected publications

Books

Crimes Against Children: Sexual Violence and Legal Culture in New York City, 1880-1960, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005

Articles

"Shifting the Scene of the Crime: Sodomy and the History of Sexual Violence," Journal of the History of Sexuality 19, 2 (forthcoming May 2010)

"Harlem Undercover: Vice Investigators, Race and Prostitution in the 1920s," Journal of Urban History 35, 4 (May 2009): 486-504

"Showing Its Age," Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 2,1 (Winter 2009): 103-9.

“Teaching Module: Age of Consent Laws,” Childhood and Youth in History (Center for History and New Media, George Mason University)

(with Shane White, Stephen Garton and Graham White) "The Envelope, Please," in The Cultural Turn in U.S. History: Past, Present & Future, eds James Cook, Lawrence Glickman and Michael O'Malley (University of Chicago Press, 2008), 121-52

""Boys, of course, cannot be raped": Age, Homosexuality and the Redefinition of Sexual Violence in New York City, 1880-1955," Gender and History 18, 2 (August 2006): 389-416.

“What’s Wrong with Online Readings? Text, Hypertext, and the History Web,” The History Teacher 39, 4 (August 2006): 441-54.

"Seduction, Sexual Violence and Marriage in New York City, 1886-1955," Law and History Review 24, 2 (Summer 2006): 331-74.

"Teaching Students to Read Online Sources," Australasian Journal of American Studies 24, 1 (July 2005): 112-124.

"What's Law Got to Do with it? Legal Records and Sexual Histories," Journal of the History of Sexuality 14, 1/2 (January/April 2005): 161-185.

"Doing History in Hypertext," Journal of the Association for History and Computing 7, 2(August 2004)

"Making Right a Girl's Ruin: Working-Class Legal Culture and Forced Marriage in New York City, 1890-1950," Journal of American Studies (August 2002).

"Age of Consent Law and the Making of Modern Childhood in New York City, 1886-1921," Journal of Social History 35, 4 (Summer 2002): 781-798.

"Separating the Men from the Boys: Masculinity, Psycho-Sexual Development and Sex Crime in the United States, 1930s-1960s," Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 56, 1 (January 2001): 3-35.

"Signs, Marks and Private Parts: Doctors, Legal Discourse and Evidence of Rape in the United States, 1823-1930," Journal of the History of Sexuality 8, 3 (January 1998): 345-388.

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Areas of teaching and research supervision

Teaching

On teaching relief and study leave, semester 2, 2009 – semester 2, 2010

Supervision

Topics in twentieth-century American history, the history of sexuality, law and society, and the history of childhood.

I am currently supervising PhDs on early-twentieth-century Christian internationalism, the transnational movement against the Vietnam War, the memorialization of Martin Luther King, art activism in NYC in the 1960s and 1970s, and, in 2009, Honours theses on Irish gangsters, the politics of fear in 1970s mayoral elections in LA, Chicago & NYC, the spectacle of the Great Depression in NYC, and Harlem in the 1920s.

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Conference activity

2009: "Digital History and Digital Harlem," presented at "Writing American History," University of Melbourne (June 5)

2008: "Disorderly Houses? Sexuality and Privacy in the Apartments of 1920s Harlem," presented at ‘Let’s Talk About Sex: Histories of Sexuality in Australia and New Zealand,' Macquarie University (October 2)

2008: "Mapping Harlem: Everyday Life in a Digital Neighborhood," presented at the Organization of American Historians Conference, New York City (March 28)

2007: "Race, Religion and The West Wing: New Tensions in Who Americans Are and What They Believe – a Response to Prof. Bill Chafe," presented at the United States Studies Centre National Summit 2007 (December 12)

2007: "Shifting the Scene of the Crime: Sodomy and the History of Sexual Violence," presented at the Yale Research Initiative on the History of Sexualities, Yale University (September 24).

2006 "Watching Harlem," presented at the Australian and New Zealand American Studies Association Conference, Launceston, (July 12).

2006: "Shifting the Scene of the Crime: Sodomy and the History of Rape," presented at the Organization of American Historians Conference, Washington, D.C., (March 21).

2005: "Weaving a History Web," presented at the "American Studies with an Australian Accent" symposium, Australian National University, Canberra, (July 15).

2003: “Seduction, Sexual Violence, and Marriage in New York City, 1886-1955,” invited presentation at the Social Science Research Council’s Sexual Worlds, Political Cultures Conference, Washington, D. C., (October 2-4).

2002: "Seduction and Sexual Violence Against Adult Women in New York City, 1886-1955," presented at the Australia and New Zealand Law and History Society Conference, Katoomba, (July 12).

2002: "Seduction and Sexual Violence Against Adult Women in New York City, 1886-1955," presented at the Australian and New Zealand American Studies Association Conference, Geelong, (July 7).

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Other professional activities

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