About

I am a professor of history at Australian Catholic University, fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, and editor of the Australian Historical Association’s journal, History Australia. I specialize in the history of the eighteenth-century world, particularly the British Empire and the many Indigenous societies it encountered. My interest in comparative Indigenous history focuses on the eastern Pacific (Polynesia), the American southeast (esp. Cherokee), and the Darug-speakers of today’s Sydney.  I have an interest, too, in visual history, anthropological history, and experimental uses of biography for history.

Raised in Canberra, Australia, I graduated from the Australian National University with a honours degree in History in 1997. I studied for my MA (2001) and PhD (2005) at the University of California at Berkeley, under Thomas Laqueur, James Vernon, David Lieberman, and others. In between times, I worked freelance for OUP, and the journal Representations, and still wonder what a career in publishing would have been like.

In Australia, I have held academic positions at the University of Sydney (2007-10), Macquarie University (2010-20), and the Australian Catholic University (2020–).

I am the author of The Savage Visit: New World People and Imperial Popular Culture (Univ. of California Press, 2012) and the award-winning The Warrior, the Voyager, and the Artist: Three Lives in an Age of Empire (Yale University Press, 2020). I am the editor of The Atlantic World in the Antipodes: Effects and Transformations since the Eighteenth Century (CSP, 2012), and co-editor with Michael McDonnell of Facing Empire: Indigenous Experiences in a Revolutionary Age (Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2018). In 2023, I made my first book-length foray into Australian history with Bennelong & Phillip (Simon & Schuster, 2023).

I have held visiting fellowships at the University of York (as a British Academy Fellow); Duke University (at the John Hope Franklin Center for the Humanities); Yale University (as a Lewis Walpole Library Travelling Fellow); and Princeton (as a Humanities Council Fellow). I have also spoken frequently in art galleries, on radio and podcasts, and for the History School Teachers’ Association.

Extra random information: I am a proud member of the Canberra Bilby’s Triathlon Club (strictly swimming only); I am Lead Chief Investigator of an ARC Linkage Project with the NPG; my agent is David Godwin Associates UK; I live on Ngunnawal and Ngambri land (aka Canberra) with partner Iain McCalman, son Rohan, and shoodle Bonnie.

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