Desley Deacon is Professor of Gender History in the Research School of Social Sciences, The Australian National University and Immediate Past President of the Australian Historical Association. She is author of Elsie Clews Parsons: Inventing Modern Life (University of Chicago Press, 1997) and a number of articles on ‘transnationals at home’ based on the career of Australian-born actor Judith Anderson, about whom she is writing a biography under an ARC Discovery grant.
Penny Russell is Associate Professor of History at the University of Sydney, where she teaches Australian and gender history. She is the author of A Wish of Distinction (1994) and This Errant Lady (2002) and co-editor, with Richard White, of History Australia. Her research includes the study of gender and gentility, manners and power in colonial Australia, and a biographical study of Jane Franklin and the romance of Arctic exploration in mid-nineteenth century Britain.
Angela Woollacott is Professor of Modern History at Macquarie University. Her teaching areas include Australian history, British Empire history and feminist and postcolonial history. Her most recent book, Gender and Empire, was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2006. Current research projects include a study of three iconic ‘Australian’ women performers, race and modernity in the early twentieth century and an ARC-funded project on cultural understandings of the political and gender changes in mid-nineteenth century Australia in imperial context.