Position: PhD Candidate
School and/or Centres: School of History
Email: Zoe.Smith1@anu.edu.au
Qualification: Bachelor of Arts (Honours), ANU<br />
Zoe Smith is a PhD candidate in the School of History at ANU. Her research explores cultural and social understandings of domestic violence in Australia’s eastern colonies between 1880-1914, centring on the fiction and non-fiction writings of Barbara Baynton, Ada Cambridge, Louisa Lawson, and Rosa Praed, and considering them alongside colonial women's divorce petitions, in order to illuminate gendered discourses and ideas surrounding femininity, masculinity, and domestic violence. Her honours thesis (2021) ‘Violation and Violence: The Hornet Bank massacre and interracial rape on the nineteenth century Queensland frontier’ utilised the 1857 Hornet Bank massacre as a case study in order to examine gendered and racialised ideals and discourses surrounding interracial rape in mid-nineteenth century Queensland.
She has published and presented on histories of sexual violence, domestic violence, Australian literature and film, colonial literature, masculinity, and gender and race in the context of nineteenth-century Britain and Australia.
She is an associate editor for the ANU Historical Journal II, and a member of the editorial collective, as well as the social media manager, for Lilith: A Feminist History Journal.
Gender history, feminist history, Australian colonial history, British and imperial history, histories of violence (especially sexual violence and domestic violence), Australian literature, literary histories.
Zoe Smith, “Unspeakable atrocities”: The 1857 Hornet Bank massacre, interracial rape, and white femininity on the Australian colonial frontier’, Lilith: A Feminist History Journal, Volume 29, 2023 (forthcoming late 2023).
Zoe Smith, ‘‘Manly’ Violence: Rape, Massacres, and White Masculinity on the mid-nineteenth-century Upper Dawson frontier’, ANU Historical Journal II, Number 4, 2023 (forthcoming late 2023).
Zoe Smith, ‘Book Review: My Body Keeps Your Secrets, By Lucia Osborne-Crowley, Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2021’, Lilith: A Feminist History Journal, Volume 28, 2022. https://press.anu.edu.au/publications/journals/lilith/lilith-feminist-history-journal-number-28
Zoe A Smith, ‘Marx’s ‘Men’: Conceptions of Proletarian Masculinity in the Writings of Karl Marx’, History in the Making, Volume 8, Autumn-Winter 2021. https://journal.historyitm.org/volume-8-number-1/
Zoe A Smith, ‘Sexual violence and colonial anxieties in Australian literature: A comparison of John Hillcoat’s The Proposition and Kim Scott’s Benang: From the Heart’, The ANU Undergraduate Research Journal, Volume 10, March 2020. http://studentjournals.anu.edu.au/index.php/aurj
Zoe Smith, ‘Coercive Control: not a new phenomenon’, BroadAgenda (University of Canberra), 30 August 2023.
https://www.broadagenda.com.au/2023/coercive-control-is-not-a-new-phenomenon/
Zoe Smith, ‘The Great Australian Silence: Sexual Violence in Australian History’, History Matters Blog (University of Sheffield), February 2020.
http://www.historymatters.group.shef.ac.uk/the-great-australian-silence-sexual-violence-australian-history/
HIST2227: Australian Political History