Our people

Director

Professor Tanya Evans

Associate Professor Tanya Evans specialises in family history, motherhood, poverty and sexuality. She is passionate about researching ordinary people and places, incorporating them in her research, and the construction of historical knowledge.

Deputy Co-Directors

Associate Professor Matthew Bailey

Associate Professor Matthew Bailey is the most widely published historian of retailing in Australia. His research interests encompass business, urban and retail history as well as histories of consumer culture. He uses oral history to explore organisational culture, innovation and business strategy, as well as people’s experiences of space and place. He has presented research to a range of industry groups, businesses and public authorities.

Associate Professor Shawn Ross

Associate Professor Shawn Ross is an expert in digital research methods, including archaeology, oral history, and archival history. He leads a major e-research infrastructure project funded by NeCTAR (NCRIS), ARC LIEF, and NSW Research Attraction and Acceleration Program (RAAP) awards.

How do Centre Members work with Applied History?

Associate Professor Matthew Bailey

Associate Professor Matthew Bailey researches urban landscapes, the spaces that people occupy within them, and how history can be applied to better understand them. Oral history is a core methodology utilised in these studies, offering opportunities to engage with organisations and individuals in a two-way dialogue. Interviews generate co-produced sources, revealing subjective and personal understandings of space and place, bringing new voices to the historical record. Matt is currently engaged with three projects adopting this approach. The first is an ARC funded project seeking to write a history of department stores from within and below by interviewing employees and shoppers. The second explores the ways that suburban and regional town centres have evolved in Australia in response to broader historical forces. It examines the ways that these public spaces have been used and understood across a 150-year time span and will include interviews with council planners, small business operators, community groups and local residents. The third is a history of local community sporting organisations, with an initial focus on the evolution of basketball at a grass roots level in Australia. It will involve close engagement with community sporting clubs, surveys with members of these clubs, and local history research.

Professor Ray Laurence

Professor Ray Laurence has pioneered the creation of short, animated films to present history in an accessible format to the public. His films A Glimpse of Teenage Life in Ancient Rome and Four Sisters in Ancient Rome have been viewed more than 20 million times. He is the founder of Ancient Rome in Motion, which will be making films that are a Big Minute to support the core unit in the Ancient History HSC (in NSW) focused on Pompeii. All films draw on Ray’s research and make that research available to a much wider public and he seeks to engage, in particular, with those students who find reading difficult.

Associate Professor Alison Holland

Associate Professor Alison Holland researches in the fields of Indigenous-settler relations, settler colonialism and race. She is particularly interested in histories of rights making and claiming, governance and citizenship on which she has contributed pieces to The Conversation. She has also worked on an exhibition at Macquarie University Art Gallery on the history of the 1967 referendum and her research has featured in the Stolen Generations and Stolen Wages government inquiries. Currently, along with four Indigenous colleagues, she is working on an ARC project on Indigenous self-determination in policy and history. She is writing a history of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC 1990-2005). Capturing Indigenous and non-Indigenous memory and knowledges via oral history is a key part of this project, as well as the development of a searchable digital archive of ATSIC documents and oral histories, materials, and profiles of key people. She hopes to make a podcast on ATSIC. She is also interested in historical memory and the uses to which it is put both in and outside the Academy, including in teaching and learning. One of her ongoing research interests is in a 1950s tablecloth in the Macquarie University History Museum collection that depicts frontier violence. She is interested in using this object of material culture to explore public understandings of Australian history and Indigeneity in the mid twentieth century.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FvCd02ec91I

Dr Josephine Touma

Dr Josephine Touma is Manager of the Macquarie University History Museum, where she oversees all aspects of museum operations, including museum learning and engagement with diverse audiences. With 16+ years' experience in the public and academic sectors, Josephine is an art historian and museum engagement specialist, whose research interests lie in the intersection between the object (or artwork) and its beholder. Her 2018 project "What does it mean? Interpretation in the art museum" explored innovative interpretive practices in select US art museums, funded by an Art Gallery of NSW Staff Scholarship. In 2022, she furthered this research as a Summer Fellow at the Clark Art Institute (Williamstown, Massachusetts), where she also met with educators and curators at university museums that empower students to lead interpretive, curatorial and audience engagement projects. Her current interest is in how university museums can cultivate strong learning and wellbeing outcomes—in both formal and informal learning settings, and across disciplines—through multi-sensory engagement with objects and spaces.

Professor Malcolm Choat

Professor Malcolm Choat researches discourses of authenticity, debates over cultural heritage, and the reception of the ancient world. He is interested in the way the ancient world is experienced today, and our interactions with the nations and peoples whose pasts we study. His current research centres on fake papyri and related manuscripts, the antiquities trade, and the ethics of studying the past. He addresses these issues in the Forging Antiquity project and blogs about them occasionally at https://markersofauthenticity.com/.

Professor Michelle Arrow

Professor Michelle Arrow researches the history of feminism, with a particular focus on their activism and the forms of written, oral and cultural expression that feminists used to communicate their ideas. She also researches the history of popular culture, and the ways that popular culture is used to communicate ideas about history. Michelle is a frequent media commentator on a wide range of historical subjects (from the history of feminism to the historical significance of the television series Kath and Kim), bringing a cultural history perspective to popular historical narratives, and she acts as an advocate for historians in contemporary debates about access to archives, public understandings of history and funding for Australia’s cultural institutions. Her current research projects include an ARC-funded, co-authored history of citizenship, sexuality and gender in contemporary Australia, and an ARC-funded biography of the journalist, feminist and advocate Anne Deveson.

Associate Professor Emily O'Gorman

Associate Professor Emily O'Gorman's research is situated within environmental history and the interdisciplinary environmental humanities and is primarily concerned with contested knowledges within broader cultural framings of authority and expertise. A key area of her research aims to add temporal depth to current understandings of river and wetlands using oral histories and archives so as to better address pressing contemporary issues of management, access, and climate change. She is currently working on three projects in this area. The first is an ARC Future Fellowship to develop an environmental history of international wetlands conservation from 1945 to today. This project aims to gain a deeper understanding of why wetlands became a focus on international conservation efforts and what the consequences of these efforts have been. The second is a NSW Environmental Trust-funded project led by Gomeroi/Kamilaroi custodians and in collaboration with an interdisciplinary team of academic and government environmental managers. It aims to enable healthier Gomeroi/Kamilaroi Country -- including the internationally recognised Gwydir Wetlands -- through On Country Classrooms. The third is an ARC Discover project collaboration with an interdisciplinary team of humanities scholars that aims to examine the issues of power and diverse values that underpin disparate views over the ongoing proposals to raise the Warragamba Dam wall.

Dr Peter Edwell

Dr Peter Edwell researches primarily in the field of ancient world studies but also works on the history of the Archibald Prize. In ancient world studies he takes a particular interest in crises of leadership via an ARC-funded project and applies research in this area to better understand the rhetorical deployment of crisis/crises by Roman/Byzantine military, political and religious leaders to strengthen leadership claims. The outcomes of this research are communicated to the broader public via podcasts and a regular slot with David Astle on ABC Radio Melbourne as an important component in applying ancient historical research to modern concepts and ideas about leadership. In relation to the history of the Archibald Prize, Peter has undertaken ground-breaking research on disputes over the award of the prize as a reflection of Australian cultural, political and legal developments across the Twentieth century. He communicates results of this research via public lectures, gallery talks, radio broadcasts and newspaper interviews and applies research in this area to better understand the history and culture of Sydney and Australia more broadly.

Dr Rowan Tulloch

Dr Rowan Tulloch lectures in digital media and video gaming. His research considers how technological and cultural logics are embodied within practices of interactivity.

Dr Daozhi Xu

Dr Daozhi Xu is a Macquarie University Research Fellow in the Department of Media, Communication, Creative Arts, Literature, and Language. She focuses on Indigenous and Asian interrelations in contemporary Australian literature published by Indigenous and Asian Australian authors. She is particularly interested in the ongoing history of Indigenous-Chinese relationships. Her monograph Indigenous Cultural Capital: Postcolonial Narratives in Australian Children’s Literature (2018) won the Biennial Australian Studies in China Book Prize, awarded by Australia–China Council in 2018. It was also shortlisted for the Association for the Study of Australian Literature “Alvie Egan Award” in 2019.

Centre Assistant

Ewan Coopey

Ewan Coopey is a PhD candidate and Centre Assistant. His research explores the interplay between identities, communities, and objects, with particular focus on Southeastern European Roman archaeology and epigraphy. He is also passionate about public engagement, promoting Open Access and the application of digital tools (both basic and complex) in history and archaeology.