Professor of History

Rm 2127, Coombs Building
Phone: 6125 2896
Fax: 6125 3969
Email: jill.matthews@anu.edu.au

Qualifications

BA (Hons) Adelaide
PhD Adelaide

Biography & Interests:

Jill came to the ANU in 1984, after teaching History at Flinders, Adelaide, Sydney and Wollongong universities. Appointed to the Women’s Studies Program, she became inaugural Director of the Centre for Women’s Studies in 1995. In 1997, she took up an appointment in the History Department. From 2008-10, she was Head of the School of Social Sciences in the Faculty of Arts.

In 1993, she was co-Convenor of one of the most popular theme programs at the Humanities Research Centre, ‘Sexualities and Culture’. She has been a Convenor of the Australian Network for Research in Women’s History, and is currently a Ministerial appointee to the Board of the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia. She has been awarded Research Fellowships at the State Library of NSW and the NFSA. Her book Dance Hall and Picture Palace won the inaugural award for best monograph from the Film and History Association of Australia and New Zealand, and was short-listed for the Queensland Premier’s Literary Award for History. She recently won an award for excellence in supervision from the College of Arts and Social Sciences.

Current Research Projects

Jill is currently working with a multi-university team on the ARC funded project, ‘Mapping the Movies: the changing nature of Australia’s cinema circuits and their audiences 1956-1984’.

She is also researching the history of distribution and exhibition of adult and pornographic movies in Australia, 1896-1984.

Jill’s field of research covers histories of: popular culture; modernity; sexuality; silent cinema; pornography. Australian and transnational cultural, social and gender history.

Courses Currently Taught:

Researching and Writing History
History on Film
History of Western Sexuality
Popular Culture, Gender and Modernity

Selected Publications:

Dance Hall and Picture Palace. Sydney’s Romance with Modernity, Sydney, Currency Press, 2005

Good and Mad Women. The Historical Construction of Femininity in Twentieth Century
AustraliaSydney, George Allen & Unwin, 6th impression 1993

Sex in Public. Australian Sexual Cultures Sydney, Allen & Unwin, 1997

Jane Gallop Seminar Papers. Proceedings of the Jane Gallop Seminar Canberra Humanities Research Centre, 1999

Media Information Australia No.72, Special Issue, 'Body's Image' (with Elizabeth Jacka), 1994

‘Erotic Modernities’ in Robert Dixon & Veronica Kelly (eds) Impact Of The Modern: Vernacular Modernities In Australia 1870S-1960s, Sydney, Sydney University Press, 2008, pp.5-17

‘Modern nomads and national film history: the multi-continental career of J D Williams’ in Ann Curthoys and Marilyn Lake (eds), Connected Worlds, Canberra, ANU ePress, 2006

‘New Challenges for Feminist History’, Lilith. A Feminist History Journal, 12, 2003

Curated Performance/Exhibitions

Black and White in Blue, Arc Theatre, National Film and Sound Archive, 25 October 2008