Margaret Allen is Associate Professor in Gender Studies at the University of Adelaide. Her research interests are focused within fields of feminist and postcolonial histories. She is working on a biographical study of the Australian writer Catherine Martin (1848–1937), on whom she has published many articles. She co-edited Fresh Evidence, New Witnesses, Finding Women’s History (South Australian Government Printer, 1989), and has edited many journal special issues including Gender in the ‘Contact Zone’, Australian Feminist Studies, vol. 16, no. 34, 2001. She is interested in locating Australians within the racialised hierarchies of Empire, publishing ‘White Already to Harvest’: South Australian Women Missionaries in India’, Feminist Review, vol. 65, no. 1, 2000. Currently she holds an ARC grant to investigate links between India and Australia 1880–c.1930 within a broader imperial focus.

Tony Ballantyne. Before assuming his current position as Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Otago, Tony Ballantyne taught at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and the National University of Ireland, Galway. His research focuses on the production of colonial knowledge in South Asia and the Pacific as well as the institutional and discursive ‘webs’ that underpinned the British empire. His publications include Orientalism and Race: Aryanism in the British Empire (Basingstoke: Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series, Palgrave-Macmillan, 2002) and Bodies in Contact: Rethinking Colonial Encounters in World History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), which he co-edited with Antoinette Burton. In 2006 Duke University Press will also publish his study of the intersections between religion, empire and migration, Between Colonialism and Diaspora: Sikh Cultural Formations in an Imperial World.

Emma Christopher is a postdoctoral fellow in the School of Historical Studies at Monash University, Melbourne. Originally a scholar of the transatlantic slave trade, she gained her PhD at University College, London in 2002 and subsequently taught for a year at the University of Toronto. Her book Slave Trade Sailors and their Captive Cargoes is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press, New York in 2006. Having more recently turned her attention to convict transportation, she is currently working on a book about the British felons who were sent to West Africa in the years prior to the settlement of Australia. She has published several articles on both the slave trade and convict transportation, and is also the co-editor (with Marcus Rediker and Cassandra Pybus) of Other Middle Passages , a collection exploring the global exportation of non-free persons, which will be published by the University of California Press in 2006.

Ann Curthoys is Manning Clark Professor of History at the Australian National University. She writes about many aspects of Australian history, including Aboriginal-European relations, the development of the White Australia Policy, journalism, television and feminism, as well as more generally about the past and future of historical writing. Her book, Freedom Ride: A Freedomrider Remembers (Crows Nest, NSW: Allen and Unwin, 2002) was awarded the Stanner Prize by the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies. Written jointly with John Docker, her most recent book is Is History Fiction? (Sydney and Ann Arbor, MI: University of New South Wales Press and University of Michigan Press, 2005). She is currently working with Ann Genovese, Larissa Behrendt, and Alex Reilly on a study of the ways historical expertise is used by the law in cases involving Indigenous litigants.

Desley Deacon is Professor of Gender History in the History Program of the Research School of Social Sciences at the Australian National University. She is author of Elsie Clews Parsons: Inventing Modern Life (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1997) and the forthcoming Mary McCarthy: Four Husbands and a Friend (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press) (the friend is Hannah Arendt). The lives of these women, and teaching for many years in the American Studies Department at the University of Texas in Austin, stimulated her longstanding interest in internationalism and transnational history. Her interest in the history of film was stimulated by her research on McCarthy’s first husband, Harold Johnsrud, who worked for MGM in the early 1930s, and will be continued in her new project ‘Judith Anderson 1897–1992: Voice and Emotion in the Making of an International Star’.

John Fitzgerald worked at the Australian National University, in the Australian Federal Parliament, and in the History Department of the University of Melbourne before moving to La Trobe University in 1992 and taking up the Chair in Asian Studies there in 1995. In 1998, his book Awakening China: Politics, Culture and Class in the Nationalist Revolution (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press) was awarded the Joseph Levenson Prize for Twentieth Century China by the US Association for Asian Studies. His recent books include John Fitzgerald, R. Jeffrey, and Tessa Morris-Suzuki, Maximizing Australia’s Asia Knowledge: Repositioning and Renewal of a National Asset (Bundoora, Vic: Asian Studies Association of Australia, 2002); K. L. Billy, John Fitzgerald, Huang Jianli and James K. Chin (eds) Power and Identity in the Chinese World Order: Festschrift in Honour of Professor Wang Gungwu (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2003); and Rethinking China’s Provinces (editor, New York, NY: Routledge, 2002). He has recently taken up the position of Director of the International Centre of Excellence in Asia-Pacific Studies at the ANU.

James Hammerton, before his recent retirement, was Associate Professor of History and Head of the School of Historical and European Studies at La Trobe University. His publications include: Emigrant Gentlewomen: Genteel Poverty and Female Emigration, 1830-1914 (London: Croom Helm, 1979), Cruelty and Companionship: Conflict in Nineteenth Century Married Life (London: Routledge,1992), and [with Eric Richards], Speaking to Immigrants: Oral Testimony and the History of Australian Immigration (Canberra, ACT : History Program and Centre for Immigration and Multicultural Studies, Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University, 2002). His current research focuses on the emigration of the British since World War II; the first volume to flow from this research, ‘Ten Pound Poms’: Australia’s Invisible Migrants, co-authored with Alistair Thomson, was published in 2005 by Manchester University Press.

Marilyn Lake has an Australian Professorial Fellowship, based at La Trobe University, and is also an Adjunct Professor in the Humanities Research Centre, Australian National University. Between 2001 and 2002, she held the Chair in Australian Studies at Harvard University. Her most recent book is Faith: Faith Bandler, Gentle Activist (Crows Nest, NSW: Allen and Unwin, 2002), winner of the 2002 Human Rights award for non-fiction. Her research interests include Australian history; nation and nationalism; gender, war and citizenship; femininity and masculinity; history of feminism; race, gender and imperialism; global and transnational history. She is currently working on a study of the emergence of the idea of the white man’s country in a transnational context, that looks at intellectual and political developments linking Africa, America, Asia and Australasia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She has recently edited Memory, Monuments and Museums, to be published by Melbourne University Press in 2006.

Jill Julius Matthews is a Reader in History at the Australian National University. She has written extensively in Australian social and cultural history, and in the fields of feminist history, history of popular culture, and history of sexuality. Her publications include Good and Mad Women. The Historical Construction of Femininity in Twentieth-Century Australia (Sydney: George Allen & Unwin, 1984), Sex in Public: Australian Sexual Cultures (editor, St Leonards, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 1997), and Dance Hall and Picture Palace. Sydney’s Romance with Modernity (Sydney: Currency Press, 2005).

Michael A. McDonnell has recently been appointed to a new post in Atlantic History at the University of Sydney after teaching for several years at the University of Wales, Swansea. He has a book forthcoming entitled The Politics of War: Race, Class, and Conflict in Revolutionary Virginia (University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture), and has published several articles on the American Revolution in the William and Mary Quarterly, the Journal of American History, the Journal of American Studies, and the Australasian Journal of American Studies. He is currently working on a new project entitled ‘Beyond Borders: Indians, French, and Métis in the Great Lakes 1700-1850’.

John Maynard is an Australian Research Council post-doctoral fellow with Umullilko Centre for Indigenous Higher Education Research at the University of Newcastle. His traditional roots lie with the Worimi people of Port Stephens, New South Wales. He was the recipient of the Aboriginal History (ANU) Stanner Fellowship for 1996 and the New South Wales Premiers Indigenous History Fellowship for 2003–2004. He has worked with and within many Aboriginal communities, urban, rural and remote. He is the author of Aboriginal Stars of the Turf: Jockeys of Australian Racing History (Canberra, ACT: Aboriginal Studies Press, 2003) and a number of articles on the history of Aboriginal protest movements in New South Wales.

Hsu-Ming Teo teaches in the Department of Modern History, Macquarie University. She is currently researching the culture of romantic love in Australia and finishing another project on British colonialism, race and the mass-market romance novel. She co-edited Cultural History in Australia (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2003) and has published articles on travel history, romance and imperialism. In 1999 she won The Australian Vogel Literary Award for her first novel, Love and Vertigo. Her second novel, Behind the Moon, was published in 2005.

Patrick Wolfe is an ARC Research Fellow at the Europe-Australia Institute, Victoria University of Technology. He is the author of Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology : The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event (London and New York, NY: Cassell, 1999) and a number of articles on race, colonialism and the history of anthropology. His current research project is a comparative international study of racial discourse.

Angela Woollacott is Professor of Modern History at Macquarie University. Her books include Gender and Empire (Palgrave, 2006); To Try Her Fortune in London: Australian Women, Colonialism and Modernity (Oxford and New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2001); and On Her Their Lives Depend: Munitions Workers in the Great War (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1994). She has also co-edited two anthologies: Mrinalini Sinha, Donna J. Guy and Angela Woollacott (eds) Feminisms and Internationalism (Oxford and Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1999) and Miriam Cooke and Angela Woollacott (eds) Gendering War Talk (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993).