Position: Research Editor
School and/or Centres: National Centre of Biography
Email: emily.gallagher@anu.edu.au
Location: Level 5, RSSS Building, 146 Ellery Cres
Qualification: Bachelor of Education (Secondary)/Bachelor of Arts (History and Mathematics), University of Notre Dame (2015); Bachelor of Arts (Hons I), ANU (2016); Doctor of Philosophy, ANU (2023)
Emily Gallagher is a historian at the National Centre of Biography. She began her career as a teacher in Sydney before completing her PhD in Australian History in the School of History at the ANU, where she now works as a research editor for the Australian Dictionary of Biography. Her first book Playtime: A History of Australian Childhood (La Trobe, 2025) won the Australian Historical Association's W.K. Hancock Prize and was shortlisted in the Prime Minister's Literary Awards. It was also highly commended in the NSW Premier’s History Awards and the ACT Literary Awards. Emily is also a research fellow on an ARC-funded project writing the first history of grandparenting in Australia (DP250100728).
history of childhood and youth; history of play; folklore studies; Australian history; biography; history of age and grandparenting.
Books
Playtime: A History of Australian Childhood (La Trobe University Press, 2025).
Peer-reviewed publications
‘Hawkins, Sheila (1905-1999)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography (2025), https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/hawkins-sheila-margaret-34296
‘Hidden in Plain Sight: Child-authored Material in Australian Museums and Archives’, Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth, vol. 16, no. 3 (2023), pp. 384-419, 0.1353/hcy.2023.a909987
‘McFadyen, Ella May (1887-1976)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography (2023), https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/mcfadyen-ella-may-27619
Emily Gallagher, Jessica Urwin & Madalyn Grant (eds.), ANU Historical Journal II, no. 1 (2019), 10.22459/ANUHJII.2019
‘Digging deep: playing at war in Australia, 1914-1939’, History Australia, vol.16, no. 1 (2019), pp. 169-189, 10.1080/14490854.2018.1558071
Reviews
[Exhibition Review] Michelle Staff and Emily Gallagher, ‘Picturing Modern Australia’, Review of Fit to Print: Defining Moments from the Fairfax Photo Archive selected by Mike Bowers, National Library of Australia, History Australia (2025), 10.1080/14490854.2025.2523504
[Exhibition Review] Emily Gallagher and Michelle Staff, ‘Feared and Revered: Feminine Power through the Ages, National Museum of Australia, Canberra’, Australian Historical Studies (2024), 10.1080/1031461X.2024.2292190
[Book Review], ‘The Shelf Life of Zora Cross’, Journal of History and Biography, no. 5 (2021), pp. 259-64.
[Book Review], ‘Representing Agency in Popular Culture: Children and Youth on Page, Screen, and In Between’, Journal of Contemporary History, vol. 55, no. 4 (2020), pp. 109-11.
[Exhibition Review] Emily Gallagher & Bruce Scates ‘“Ardent for Some Desperate Glory”: Quick March: the children of World War One, exhibition hosted by the State Library of NSW, 16 March – 13 October 2019’, Australian Historical Studies, vol. 50, no. 4 (2019), 10.1080/1031461X.2019.1666697
[Book Review] Emily Gallagher and Camille Mahé, ‘Children Born of War in the Twentieth Century’, Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth, vol. 12, no. 1 (2019), pp. 153-155, 10.1353/hcy.2019.0014
[Book Review] Emily Gallagher, ‘“The Right Thing to Read”: A History of Australian Girl-Readers, 1910–1960’, History of Education Review, vol. 47, no. 2 (2018), pp. 233-235, 10.1108/HER-10-2018-064
Selected other
Frank Bongiorno and Emily Gallagher, ‘The kids aren’t alright: Have children been silenced and forgotten in Australia’s Covid response?’, Inside Story, 22 August 2021, https://insidestory.org.au/the-kids-arent-alright/
‘Singing with the wind: Sydney writer and naturalist Ella McFadyen combined a love of nature, folklore and poetry’, State Library of New South Wales Magazine (Spring 2020), pp. 38-41, https://www.sl.nsw.gov.au/sites/default/files/5570_slmagspring20_web_new.pdf
‘What the folk? Whatever happened to the national folklife centre?’, The Conversation, 20 December 2018, http://theconversation.com/what-the-folk-whatever-happened-to-australias-national-folklife-centre-108678
Grandparenting in Australia: a history (1945-2025) (ARC Discovery Project 2025-28)
W.K. Hancock Prize (2026), a biennial prize awarded by the Australian Historical Association.
Minoru Hokari Memorial Scholarship (2025)
Lyndall Ryan Thesis Prize, a biennial prize awarded by the International Australian Studies Association for the best postgraduate thesis in Australian Studies (2025)
Serle Award, a biennial prize awarded by the Australian Historical Association for the best postgraduate thesis in Australian history (2024)
PhD Mobility Scholarship, awarded by the European Commission to undertake research at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Italy (2018)
Children’s History Society
Society for the History of Childhood and Youth
Australian Folklore Network
Australian Historical Association
Gender Institute, ANU
HIST8011: Biography & History
HIST4011/8024: Advanced Historiography
HIST2110: Approaches to History
ECHI1006: The Australian Economy: Past and Present
EURO1004: Europe in the Modern Era
HIST2243: Vikings, Crusades, Mongols