Senior Research Fellow

Rm 3126, Coombs Building
Phone: 6125 3052
Fax: Co6125 3644
Email: nicholas.brown@anu.edu.au

Qualifications BA (Hons) ANU

PhD ANU

Biography and interests:

My PhD is in Australian History from the ANU, where I also worked as a research fellow in the Urban Research Program. After a period in the Australain Public Service as Professor of Australian History, University College Dublin (2002-4), I returned to the ANU to join the Australian Dictionary of Biography and, in 2007, commence a split appointment to the Centre for Historical Research at the National Museum of Australia. My research interest encompass a good deal of Australian history, with a particular focus on twentieth century social, environmental and bioigraphical history. I am partly keen to work across disciplines, and am closely involved in several intensive workshops that support postgraduate research in biography and environemtnal history.

Current Research Projects

Ten Years is Enough: a biography study of Rick Farley (1953-2006), dealing with his association with the political activism in primary industries, the establishment of Landcare, the Council for Indigenous Reconciliation, the Native Title Tribunal, and the negotiation of native title and land use agreements throughout Australia.

Testing Ourselves: a history of Australian international engagement, and the role of the concept of ‘the international’, in Australian political culture through the twentieth century.

Down There: a social and environmental history of the south coast of New South Wales since 1920.

Selected Publications:

Governing Prosperity: Social Analysis and Social Change in Australia in the 1950s, Cambridge University Press, 1995.

Richard Downing: Economics, advocacy and social reform in Australia, Melbourne University Press, 2001

Nicholas Brown and Linda Cardinal (eds.), Managing Diversity : Practices of Citizenship in national and post-national contexts - Ireland, Canada, Australia, University of Ottawa Press, 2007.

'A Sense of Number and Reality': economics and government in Australia, 1920­1950', Economy and Society, vol. 26, no. 2,1997, pp. 233-56.

'One the Margins of the Littoral Society: The New South Wales South Coast since 1945', Environment and History, vol. 4, no. 2, 1998, pp. 210-38

'Making Oneself Comfortable, or More Rooms Than People' in Patrick Troy (ed.), A History of European Housing in Australia, Cambridge University Press, 2000, pp.107-24

'Born Modern: antipodean variations on a theme', The Historical Journal, vol. 48, no. 4, 2005, pp. 1139-54.

‘Enacting the international: Raymond Watt and the League of Nations Union’ in Desley Deacon, Penny Russell and Angela Woollacott (eds), Transnational Ties: Australian Lives in the World, ANU e-Press, 1999, pp 75-96.

‘History and Policy-Making’ in Gretchen Poiner (ed). Cultural Conflict in a Democracy, Independent Scholars Association of Australia, ISAA, 2011.

‘Using Lives: the revolution in biography’ in Tony Gibbons and Emily Sutherland (eds), Integrity and Historical Research, Routledge, 2011.

‘Student, Expert, Peacekeeper: Three Versions of International Engagement’, Australian Journal of Politics and History, vol. 57, no. 1, 2011, pp. 34-52.