Manning Clark Professor of History

Rm 2131
Phone: 6125 2715
Email: angela.woollacott@anu.edu.au

Qualifications

BA, Political Science and History, ANU
BA (Hons), History, University of Adelaide
MA, History, University of California, Santa Barbara
PhD, History, University of California, Santa Barbara

Biography and interests

Angela Woollacott is the Manning Clark Professor of History and Head of the School of History. From 2004 to 2009 she was Professor of Modern History at Macquarie University. Prior to that she was a Professor of History at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio.

Her areas of research, research supervision and teaching include white settler colonialism; Australian history; British Empire and postcolonial history; women’s and gender history; modernity and transnational histories.

Professor Woollacott is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia, and serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Women’s History, the Journal of British Studies, and the London Journal. She has been a visiting professor at Oberlin College; a visiting scholar at Dartmouth College, the University of Melbourne, the University of Adelaide, and the University of California, Berkeley; and in 2002 she was a Visiting Fellow at the Humanities Research Centre at ANU.

Current research projects

  1. Settler Society in the Australian Colonies: Self-Government and Imperial Culture

  I currently hold an Australian Research Council Discovery Project grant for this project on the fundamental shifts in Australian politics and culture from the 1830s to the 1860s. The cultural, social and political changes which ended convict transportation and brought Responsible Government, occurred not in isolation but in a rapidly changing world. As elsewhere, in the Australian colonies ideas about self-government were tied to evolving ideas of political citizenship and gender. We know little about how Australian settlers and residents viewed developments here in imperial context.

This project will analyze changing ideas of politics and gender and significantly enhance our understanding of the mid-19th century, not least the constant traffic between the Australian colonies, other British colonies, and other global points. Some essays from the project have been published; others are planned, culminating in a major monograph.

Monograph under contract to Oxford University Press, UK.

2. History for the Australian Curriculum

Series editor, Years 7, 8, 9 and 10 high school textbooks for the National Curriculum in History: Woollacott et al., History for the Australian Curriculum (Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2012).

Courses taught

HIST1208 Women and Men in Australian History

HIST2128 Convicts and Settlers: Australian History 1770s to 1870s

HIST2224 Colonialism, Sex and Gender: Historical Episodes.

Selected publications

Monographs

Race and the Modern Exotic: Three 'Australian' Women on Global Display (Clayton, Vic.: Monash University Publishing, 2011).

Gender and Empire (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).

To Try Her Fortune in London: Australian Women, Colonialism, and Modernity  (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).

On Her Their Lives Depend: Munitions Workers in the Great War (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).

Coedited books

Desley Deacon, Penny Russell and Angela Woollacott (editors), Transnational Lives: Biographies of Global Modernity, 1700-present (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010 in their series on Transnational History).

Desley Deacon, Penny Russell and Angela Woollacott (eds.), Transnational Ties: Australian Lives in the World (Canberra: ANU E-Press, 2008).

Mrinalini Sinha, Donna J. Guy and Angela Woollacott (eds.), Feminisms and Internationalism (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1999). First published as a special issue of Gender & History Vol. 10, No. 3 (November 1998).

Miriam Cooke and Angela Woollacott (eds.), Gendering War Talk (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993).

Selected articles and book chapters

'South Australia and the Imperial World: Connections to India and Beyond, 1830s to 1860s', forthcoming Journal of the Historical Society of South Australia No. 39 (2011): 1-10.

'Political Manhood, Nonwhite Labour and Settler Colonialism on the 1830s-1840s Australian Frontier', chapter in Barbara Brookes and Alison Holland (eds.), Rethinking the Racial Moment: essays on the Colonial Encounter (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars publishing, 2011).

‘Whiteness and “the Imperial Turn”’, chapter in Leigh Boucher, Jane Carey and Katherine Ellinghaus (eds.), Re-Orienting Whiteness: Transnational Perspectives on the History of an Identity (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009) pp. 17-30.

‘Frontier Violence and Settler Manhood’, published keynote address from the 2007 Australian Historical Association regional conference, History Australia Vol. 6, No. 1 (April 2009): 09.1-09.15.

‘The Colonial Actress: Empire, Modernity and the Exotic in Twentieth-Century London’, chapter in Philippa Levine and Susan Grayzel (eds.), Gender, Labour, War and Empire: Essays on Modern Britain (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), pp. 72-89.

‘Australian Women in London: Surveying the Twentieth Century’, chapter in Carl Bridge, Robert Crawford and David Dunstan (eds.), Australians in Britain: The Twentieth-Century Experience (Clayton, Vic.: Monash University ePress, 2009), pp. 03.1-03.12.

‘Gender and Sexuality’, Ch. 13 in Australia’s Empire (eds. Deryck Schreuder and Stuart Ward) companion volume in the Oxford History of the British Empire series (general editor Wm. Roger Louis; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 312-335.

‘Rose Quong Becomes Chinese: An Australian in London and New York’, Australian Historical Studies (No. 129, April 2007), pp. 16-31.

‘Postcolonial histories and Catherine Hall’s Civilising Subjects’, Ch. 4 in Ann Curthoys and Marilyn Lake (eds.), Connected Worlds: History in Trans-National Perspective  (Canberra: ANU E-Press, 2006), pp. 57-68.

‘Modernity’, in Mary Spongberg, Ann Curthoys and Barbara Caine (eds.), Companion to Women’s Historical Writing  (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), pp. 349-360.

‘Creating the White Colonial Woman: Mary Gaunt’s Imperial Adventuring and Australian Cultural History’, in Hsu-Ming Teo and Richard White (eds.), Cultural History in Australia (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2003), pp. 186-200.

“The Colonial Flaneuse: Australian Women Negotiating Turn-of-the-Century London,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society Vol. 25 No. 3 (Spring 2000): 761-87.

“Inventing Commonwealth and Pan-Pacific Feminisms: Australian Women’s Internationalist Activism in the 1920s-30s,” Gender & History Vol. 10 No. 3 (November 1998): 425-448.

“From Moral to Professional Authority: Secularism, Social Work and Middle-Class Women’s Self-Construction in World War I Britain,” Journal of Women’s History Vol. 10 No. 2 (Summer 1998): 85-111.

“‘All this is the Empire, I told myself’: Australian Women’s Voyages ‘Home’ and the Articulation of Colonial Whiteness,” The American Historical Review Vol. 102 No. 4 (October 1997): 1003-1029.

"`Khaki Fever' and Its Control: Gender, Class, Age and Sexual Morality on the British Homefront in World War I," Journal of Contemporary History 29 (April 1994): 325-347.

"Maternalism, Professionalism and Industrial Welfare Supervisors in World War I Britain," Women's History Review 3 (March 1994): 29-56.