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.