Ann Curthoys

Ann Curthoys is an ARC Professorial Fellow in the History Department at the University of Sydney. She has written on a wide variety of topics in Australian history, including Indigenous history, Chinese immigration, women and work, television and journalism. She also writes on questions of historical theory and method. In addition to the two edited collections she has published with ANU Press (with Marilyn Lake, Connected Worlds, 2006), and (with Frances Peters-Little and John Docker, Passionate Histories, 2010), she is the author of Freedom Ride: A Freedom Rider Remembers (2002); (with John Docker) Is History Fiction? 2005, rev. ed. 2010); (with Ann Genovese and Alexander Reilly, Rights and Redemption: History, Law, and Indigenous People, 2008); and (with Ann McGrath), How to Write History that People Want to Read (2009). Her current project, entitled Taking Liberty, is a study of the relationship between the granting of responsible government on the one hand, and Indigenous governance and resistance on the other, in the Australian colonies.

Passionate Histories »

Myth, memory and Indigenous Australia

Edited by: Frances Peters-Little, Ann Curthoys, John Docker

Publication date: September 2010

This book examines the emotional engagements of both Indigenous and Non-Indigenous people with Indigenous history. The contributors are a mix of Indigenous and Non-Indigenous scholars, who in different ways examine how the past lives on in the present, as myth, memory, and history. Each chapter throws fresh light on an aspect of history-making by or about Indigenous people, such as the extent of massacres on the frontier, the myth of Aboriginal male idleness, the controversy over Flynn of the Inland, the meaning of the Referendum of 1967, and the policy and practice of Indigenous child removal. For more information on Aboriginal History Inc. please visit aboriginalhistory.org.au.

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Connected Worlds »

History in Transnational Perspective

Edited by: Ann Curthoys, Marilyn Lake

Publication date: March 2006

This volume brings together historians of imperialism and race, travel and modernity, Islam and India, the Pacific and the Atlantic to show how a ‘transnational’ approach to history offers fresh insights into the past. Transnational history is a form of scholarship that has been revolutionising our understanding of history in the last decade. With a focus on interconnectedness across national borders of ideas, events, technologies and individual lives, it moves beyond the national frames of analysis that so often blinker and restrict our understanding of the past. Many of the essays also show how expertise in ‘Australian history’ can contribute to and benefit from new transnational approaches to history. Through an examination of such diverse subjects as film, modernity, immigration, politics and romance, Connected Worlds weaves an historical matrix which transports the reader beyond the local into a realm which re-defines the meaning of humanity in all its complexity. Contributors include Tony Ballantyne, Desley Deacon, John Fitzgerald, Patrick Wolfe and Angela Woollacott. At the XIII Biennial Conference of The Film and History Association of Australia and New Zealand, Jill Julius Matthews was presented with an award for Best Book Chapter: ‘Modern nomads and national film history: the multi-continental career of J. D. Williams’ in Ann Curthoys and Marilyn Lake (eds), Connected Worlds: History in Transnational Perspective, Canberra: ANU E Press, 2006, pp. 157-169

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