The Australian Centre for Public History is home to leading historians and cross-disciplinary researchers with an interest in public history. As well as Centre Members and Associates, our community includes postgraduate students, collaborating partners and visiting scholars.
Our people
Associate Prof. Tamson Pietsch (FASS), Director
Tamson’s research looks at the history of ideas and the global politics of knowledge, with a particular focus on universities and other institutions of knowledge. She is currently leading an ARC project on expertise in interwar Australia and writing a book about international education and American empire in the 1920s, titled The Floating University.
Catherine Freyne, Centre Manager
Catherine is an award-winning historian and producer of multimedia history content. She has worked as Features Producer at ABC Radio National, Historian at the City of Sydney and Creative Producer at the State Library of NSW. She recently completed her PhD at UTS under the supervision of Professor Anna Clark at ACPH. Her thesis, The Family as Closet: ‘Gay married men’, their wives and their children in Sydney, 1970-2000, combined history, sexuality studies and family memoir. As well as working for ACPH, Catherine makes podcasts at Impact Studios UTS.
Prof. Anna Clark (FASS), Member
Anna’s research interests range across Australian history and historiography, including contests over the past, oral history, history education, memory studies, and public history. Her latest book, Making Australian History, explores the history of Australian History and was longlisted for a Walkley Award in 2022.
Dr Treena Clark (DAB), Member
Treena is an Aboriginal Kokatha and Wirangu woman, born and raised in Adelaide/Kaurna Country. She is an emerging researcher in the areas of Indigenous Australian public relations, activism, feminism, and fashion. Her current position of Chancellor's Postdoctoral Indigenous Research Fellow involves a four year research project that explores Indigenous fashion and clothing.
Dr Meg Foster (FASS), Member
Meg is an award-winning historian of banditry, settler colonial and public history. Her first book, Boundary Crossers: The Hidden History of Australia's Other Bushrangers (NewSouth, 2022), examined the lives of bushrangers who were people of colour. Meg's current research project explores the impact of the colonial past on current attitudes to crime and policing. Meg has a breadth of experience engaging academic and public audiences, and a passion for making connections between history and the contemporary world.
Dr Anna Funder (FASS), Member
Anna is one of Australia's most acclaimed and awarded writers, with work spanning history, fiction (and historical fiction). Her books Stasiland and All That I Am are prize-winning international bestsellers, translated into many languages and published around the world.
Dr Monica Galassi (Jumbunna), Member
Monica is an Italian anthropologist who has worked on several projects and initiatives to support Aboriginal self-determination and sovereignty in collecting institutions. Monica’s work and research interests focus on the importance of people having the right to access and manage their cultural heritage materials as a key driver for social justice.
Dr Liz Giuffre (FASS), Member
Liz is a Senior Lecturer in Communication for the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. She teaches into Music and Sound Design and the Communications Core, and her research explores popular music and popular cultures, including audience studies, genre studies and (post) broadcast radio and television. Liz's work covers media histories (particularly Australian programs and artists in global contexts), as well as contemporary works including podcasts, streaming and online-only content.
Dr Elizabeth Humphrys (FASS), Member
Elizabeth is a political economist interested in the impact of economic crisis and climate change on workers, and how workplaces can be made safer and more equitable. She takes a multidisciplinary approach, also drawing on sociology and history, to develop policy and strategies for social change. Elizabeth’s book, How labour Built Neoliberalism, was published in 2019, and her current research projects focusses on work health and safety and questions of control over the labour process.
Associate Prof. Andrew Hurley (FASS), Member
Andrew is a cultural historian with a special interest in music and the acoustic. In this context he has written widely on interculturalities and intermediality. He is the author of The Return of Jazz: Joachim-Ernst Berendt and West German Cultural Change (Berghahn Books, 2009, 2011), and Into The Groove: Popular Music and Contemporary German Fiction (Camden House, 2015).
Prof. Rachel Landers (MAP), Member
Rachel is a renowned documentary filmmaker and writer with a PhD in history. Her award-winning films have screened at numerous international festivals and been broadcast globally, and she has produced and researched in the space of creative histories and hybrid documentary production.
Distinguished Prof. Peter McNeil (DAB), Member
Peter is an award-winning design historian internationally known for his work on the visual culture of fashion. His inter-disciplinary research examines the past, present and future of critical fashion as well as many other aspects of design with a focus on identities and material culture from the eighteenth century to the present day.
Dr Isabel Rousset (DAB), Member
Isabel is an architectural historian and a 2023 Chancellor’s Research Fellow in the UTS Faculty of Design, Architecture and Building. She is an interdisciplinary scholar specialising in historical cross-sections between art, architecture, and social politics. Her first book, The Architecture of Social Reform: Housing, Tradition and German Modernism (Manchester University Press, 2022), explores the diverse cultures of conservatism that shaped debates on housing design in modern Germany. She has published research in Journal of Architecture, Journal of Urban History, and Architectural Theory Review. As part of her four-year fellowship at UTS, she is currently writing a book that explores the experiences of émigré architects in Australia and assesses their influence on the growth of modernism. Isabel is currently serving as Co-editor of Fabrications: Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand.
Dr Jesse Adams Stein (DAB), Member
Jesse is an interdisciplinary design researcher specialising in the relationship between technology, work and material culture. Her research shifts between historical and contemporary contexts and focuses on the quieter and less fashionable aspects of design: industrial craft, manufacturing, repair, skill loss and the human experience of economic restructuring and deindustrialisation.
A/Prof Ilaria Vanni Accarigi (FASS), Member
Jesse is an interdisciplinary design researcher specialising in the relationship between technology, work and material culture. Her research shifts between historical and contemporary contexts and focuses on the quieter and less fashionable aspects of design: industrial craft, manufacturing, repair, skill loss and the human experience of economic restructuring and deindustrialisation.
Dr Will Visconti, (FASS) Member
Will's research focuses on sexuality, transgression, and representation, primarily during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but is equally interested in the enduring influence of historical figures or texts in contemporary society. His first book, Beyond the Moulin Rouge: The Life and Legacy of La Goulue (University of Virginia Press, 2022) melds his research interests in modern languages, history, and visual culture. He is currently working on a four-volume publication entitled Comedy, Humour, and Laughter: A Documentary History, 1800-1920 (Routledge) that incorporates material from Australia to Japan, France, and the United States.
