School of Humanities

Robert Aldrich, Professor Emeritus of European History, carries out research in modern European and colonial history, especially the history of the French and British overseas empires; the history of modern monarchy; and the history of gender and sexuality.

Fiona Allon is a cultural studies theorist whose work analyses how everyday cultural practices intersect with social formations such as gender, race and class. She has a particular interest in theories of everyday life including the way in which everyday life is shaped by political and economic ideas such as neoliberalism and the financial rationalities of investment and calculation. Conversely, she is interested in everyday life as a space-time of subtle tactics and quiet rebelliousness where minoritised subjects contest the governmental agendas they encounter, struggle to survive within economic conditions of austerity and precarity, and endure indebtedness, contingency and growing inequality.

Her most recent research is concerned with the transformation of home and housing by asset-based capitalism, especially through the ongoing integration of real estate and financial markets. This research will be published in the monograph Home Economics: Speculating on Everyday Life which is forthcoming with Duke University Press.

She is the author of Renovation Nation: Our Obsession with Home (2008) and the co-editor of The Temporalities of Waste: Out of Sight, Out of Time (2021). She is the author of numerous articles and book chapters in areas such as the environmental humanities, urban culture, the cultural geographies of space and place, travel and mobility, sport and gender, gender and finance, and money and cryptocurrencies.

In 2003 she curated the exhibition Flannelette: An Australian Story at the Liverpool Regional Museum. In 2004 she wrote the catalogue for the Australian Maritime Museum’s exhibition Sailor Style: Art, Fashion and Film. Popular culture, the vernacular and low/middle brow cultural history continue to be enduring research interests.

She has taught at universities in Australia and internationally. She has a background in film and media production and, with Lindsay Barrett, wrote and directed the 35mm short film Sacred.

BA DipEd UoN PhD UQ GradCertSust Sydney

Honorary Associate Professor Ruth Barcan is the author of Academic Life and Labour in the New University: Hope and Other Choices (Ashgate, Dec. 2013); Complementary and Alternative Medicine: Bodies, Therapies, Senses (Berg, 2011), Nudity: A Cultural Anatomy (Berg 2004), and the co-editor of The Temporalities of Waste Out of Sight, Out of Time (Routledge 2021), Imagining Australian Space: Cultural Studies and Spatial Inquiry (UWA Press 1999) and Planet Diana: Cultural Studies and Global Mourning (Research Centre in Intercommunal Studies, UWS Nepean, 1997). She is the author of numerous articles in areas such as the body in culture, consumer culture, environmental Humanities, and pedagogy.

BA (Hons), PhD Lond

Lesley Beaumont is Associate Professor of Archaeology. She was awarded a BA (Hons) in Ancient History and Archaeology by the University of Birmingham and a PhD in Classical Archaeology by the University of London (UCL). Prior to taking up her position at the University of Sydney, she was Assistant Director of the British School at Athens. Her publications include Childhood in Ancient Athens. Iconography and Social History (Routledge: 2012, 2015), and a Routledge handbook on Children in Antiquity (2021),co-edited with Matthew Dillon and Nicola Harrington. Her current archaeological fieldwork focuses on the Early Iron Age settlement site of Zagora on the Greek island of Andros. She serves as an Executive Board Member of the Australian Archaeological Institute at Athens, as a member of the Academic Board of the University of Sydney, and as an Expert Examiner for the Australian Government's Office for the Arts under the Protection of Movable Cultural Heritage Act 1986.

Habilitation, PhD, Magister Artium (Augsburg), FAHA

Prof Monika Bednarek has research interests in the areas of corpus linguistics, discourse analysis, sociolinguistics, pragmatics, media linguistics, and, more specifically, the linguistic expression of emotion and attitude. She is director of the Sydney Corpus Lab, which aims to promote corpus linguistics in Australia.

Please note that information in this profile (such as publications, grants, etc) is partially auto-generated and likely to contain errors such as duplicated or misclassfied entries and erroneous or missing information.

Professor Rick Benitez taught at the Catholic University of America and the Smithsonian Institution before coming to Sydney in 1992. He has been a visiting professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (1998). He was President of the Sydney Society of Literature and Aesthetics (1997-2004). He has served as Pro-Dean, Teaching and Learning for the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (2012).

MA PhD London, FAHA, FSA

I specialize in the archaeology of the lands along the Silk Roads from Western Asia to China. I have worked extensively in eastern Jordan, Karakalpakstan and Xinjiang and have a special interest in the study of nomadic peoples in mountains, deserts and steppes. My current research centres around the dispersal of early domesticated plants and animals across Asia from their centres of origin in the Middle East and China. I am exploring prehistoric economies and traditional agricultural practices along the southern rim of the Himalayas, a key crossroads for early cultural exchanges.

A note on my appointment: Edwin Cuthbert Hall (1874–1953) was an Australian physician and philanthropist who, through a generous bequest, endowed a Professorship at the University of Sydney in the subjects of Archaeology and Mythology in the Ancient Middle East.

Jacob L. Bongers is a digital archaeologist of Australia and Peru with a Ph.D. in Archaeology from the University of California, Los Angeles. He investigates how Indigenous communities confront political and environmental change, focusing on ritualised practices, land-use strategies, and ceremonial landscapes. He specialises in geospatial mapping and archaeological survey, drone-based photography and photogrammetry, and GIS analyses.

David Braddon-Mitchell is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sydney. He was previously at the University of Auckland and a Research Fellow at the Australian National University.

He is the author of articles in leading philosophy journals including The Journal of Philosophy, Nous, Mind, The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, Philosophical Studies, Philosophy and Phenomenological Review, Synthese, Erkenntnis, Analysis, The Monist, Ratio, The Journal of Political Philosophy, and the Australasian Journal of Philosophy.

He is the author, with Frank Jackson, of The Philosophy of Mind and Cognition.

Senior archaeologist and First Nation Mentor. Gulamada Project co-director at The University of Sydney, School of Humanities, Discipline of Archaeology. BA Archaeology.

I am currently a Doctorial candidate at the University of Sydney with my research focusing on ceremonial practices and cultural mapping in the Greater Blue Mountains World Heritage Area (GBMWHA) in NSW. I am of Gamilaraay decent and still strongly practice my lore and culture.

My main area of research has been in rock art and engravings, and I am now currently working on a project with the Dharug Custodians Aboriginal Corporation (DCAC) in the Blue Mountains, the Gulamada project, recording and documenting rock art. This involves a close examination of the archaeological record, intense surveying, reviewing ethnographic information as well as the gathering of oral histories from both indigenous and non-indigenous people from the Blue Mountains Region. I am Co Director of the Blue Mountains Rock Art Project with Prof Paul Tacon (Griffith University QLD). I am also in a research partnership with Dr Amy Way (University of Sydney) in a three-year high altitude ARC archaeological project which starts in August 2026 and runs for three years.

I have also had extensive experience in community consultation and developing interpretation education and training programs for the conservation of natural and cultural heritage in NSW. This has been mainly through my work with National Parks and Wildlife Service (NPWS) both here in the Blue Mountains and other regions of the NPWS.

I have over 40 years’ experience working in archaeology and cultural heritage both in Australia and the USA, having undertaken diverse tasks such as field survey, site recording, excavation, rock art recording, conservation, repatriation, risk management and development of training programs. I have devised research designs and budgets, managed projects and fieldwork teams, and worked in various cultural heritage roles for NPWS and OEH, as well as an independent consultant. I am conversant with legislation and policy surrounding cultural heritage and have extensive experience liaising with Aboriginal groups, traditional owners, government agencies and developers. I have jointly published extensively in various academic journals in Australia and internationally.

MA PhD Harvard

I study the social and political history of China’s northwest, particularly the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, and its connections with the Islamic and Russian/Soviet worlds. After finishing my PhD in 2011, I spent two years as a postdoctoral fellow at the Australian Centre on China in the World, at the Australian National University, before coming to the University of Sydney in 2013. My first book, Uyghur Nation (2016), explores the politics of Uyghur nationalism between China and the Soviet Union in the early twentieth century. My more recent work has focused on the Qing Empire's expansion into Central Asia, and on Australia-China relations.

Sydney born and bred, Dr Brown studied Ancient History at Macquarie University and Classical Greek at University of Sydney; he taught at Macquarie University, University of New South Wales and ACU before rejoining Classics at University of Sydney.

Barbara Caine was the head of the School of Philosophical and Historical Inquiry from 2011-2019. Prior to taking up this position, she was a Professor of History and ARC Professorial Fellow at Monash University. Barbara has a long association with the University of Sydney: she did her BA here and, after doing a postgraduate degree at Sussex University, returned to a lectureship in History. Barbara was also the first Director of the Women’s Studies Centre.

Barbara has been Visiting Fellow at the Humanities Research Centre at ANU, at the Centre for European Studies at the University of Michigan and at Goldsmith’s College in London.

Roberto Chauca is a Lecturer in the Department of History at the University of Sydney and Co-Editor of the Reviews section of the Journal of Historical Geography. His research and publications focus on the history of Amazonian cartography, more specifically, on the dialogue between missionary and indigenous science and its repercussions on the production and transmission of spatial and visual knowledge in early modern Amazonia.

Annie Clarke joined the University of Sydney in 2003. She has previously been a Lecturer in Archaeology at the ANU, a Lecturer in Archaeology and Cultural Resource Management at Charles Sturt University and held post-doctoral Fellowships at the North Australian Research Unit, Darwin and the ANU.

After receiving my doctorate from Johns Hopkins University in 2002, I worked for a year as a researcher for the American Historical Association in Washington D.C. I then took up a lectureship in University of Sydney's History Department. Since that time, I have taught courses on a range of topics in American history-from the colonial era through the twentieth century. My research specialties include the history of the American Civil War and Reconstruction era; war, memory, and trauma; the history of childhood; and the social, legal, political, and cultural history of nineteenth century America. My first book, War Stories: Suffering and Sacrifice in the Civil War North (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), won the Australian Historical Association's biennial Hancock Prize for the best first book in any field of History. I subsequently began collaborating with Professor Rebecca Jo Plant (University of California, San Diego) on a series of projects. First, we worked on an article focusing on the racial politics of war memory in 1930s America. This research was published in the Journal of American History in 2015. It received the Berkshire Conference Prize for the best article on the history of women, gender, or sexuality, as well as the Association of Black Women historians' Letitia Woods Brown Article Prize. We then began researching debates over the enlistment age in America, from the Revolution to the turn of the twentieth century. Our initial publication on this topic-an article published in Law & History Review in 2017-won the Coordinating Council of Women in History's Carol Gold Award for best article on any topic by an academic at or above the level of associate professor. In 2023, we completed research in this area by publishing Of Age: Boy Soldiers and Military Power in the Civil War Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 2023) - which won the 2024 Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize and the Society for the History of Childhood and Youth's Grace Abbot Book Prize.

James Collins is Senior Lecturer in Greek Language and Literature in the Department of Classics and Ancient History at the University of Sydney, and Associate for Civic and Philosophical Engagement at Harvard’s Center for Hellenic Studies. He uses a variety of literary, philosophical, sociological, and neuroscientific approaches to study the pragmatics of intellectual life in antiquity, with a principal focus on philosophical recruitment (Exhortations to Philosophy. Oxford 2015) and ancient education including choral training and performance (“Dancing the Virtues, Becoming Virtuous,” Ramus 42: 183-206). He is founder and director of the interdisciplinary Performing Wisdom program which develops strategies for introducing people of all walks and ages to philosophy as an active, often public discipline through dramatic and rhetorical training and performance. He has staged over a dozen productions of ancient Greek tragedy and comedy with school and university students, military veterans, and working professionals.

Eleanor Cowan (BA (First Class Hons and University Medal), LLB (First Class Hons), USyd, PhD, Exeter University) is an ancient historian at the University of Sydney. Her research concentrates on communities emerging from conflict, on Latin historiography, on gender and on law. Dr Cowan grew up in Wagga Wagga in regional NSW and attended local primary and high schools.

I joined The University of Sydney in 2010, after holding temporary posts at the Universities of Exeter and Bristol and Brasenose College, Oxford, and a Tutorial Fellowship and University Lectureship at Balliol College, Oxford. My main teaching and research interests are in Latin poetry, though I also teach and research in Greek drama, Latin prose and Hellenistic poetry. Though I have published on a wide range of authors, my main focus has been on Roman epic and tragedy. I am particularly interested in the intersection between the often opposed methodologies of historicism, emphasizing contexts of production and reception, and approaches which focus on the formal and intertextual features of the text itself.

BA, MA, GradCert, PhD

Ryan Cox is a Lecturer in the Discipline of Philosophy in the School of Humanities. His areas of research specialisation include moral and political philosophy, the philosophy of mind, epistemology, and the philosophy of language.

He has published on a wide range of topics including educational justice, democracy and social equality, introspection and self-knowledge, and the syntax and semantics of why-questions. He has ongoing research projects in political philosophy, the philosophy of language, and the philosophy of mind.

BA PhD Sydney

James Curran is Professor of Modern History specialising in political and foreign relations history. He is also a foreign affairs columnist at The Australian Financial Review where he was also International Editor from 2023-2025. In 2025 Curran also delivered one of the ABC's Boyer Lectures on Australia's current strategic dilemma. His latest book is Australia's China Odyssey: From Euphoria to Fear (New South Press, 2022). Prior to joining Sydney University, James served in the Department of The Prime Minister and Cabinet, the Department of Defence and at the Office of National Assessments. In 2013, He was Chair of Australian History at University College Dublin and in 2010 a Fulbright Scholar at Georgetown University. Curran has published in Diplomatic History, The Journal of Cold War Studies and The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History. He has also written for Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, The National Interest, and Australian Foreign Affairs. He is writing a book about former Australian PM Paul Keating's foreign policy. Curran is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Social Sciences and a Fellow of the Australian Institute of International Affairs. His study of Australian rugby legend David Campese was published in 2022 and is entitled, Campese: The Last of the Dream Sellers (Scribe).

Robert Curry’s early career was in music performance. He was a foundation member of staff of the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts and served twice as its Head of Classical Music. He was a regular guest artist in the Sydney Spring International Festival of New Music and toured for the Department of Foreign Affairs & Trade giving representational lecture-recitals in the Middle East and South-East Asia. 

His research interests in central European medieval music and ecclesiastical history date from his post-graduate studies in Warsaw (PWSM), New York (SUNY Stony Brook ) and Toronto (U of T and Pontifical Institute). Most frequently cited are his publications on the Stary Sącz fragments of 13^th-century Parisian polyphony and Franciscan double monasteries.

His current project is a study of three manuscripts from Gniezno, Kraków and Rome, dating from 1548. The central character in all three documents, Dr Francesco Lismanini, is best known as an apostate and acolyte of Jean Calvin. Robert’s focus is on the little studied Franciscan career of Lismanini, his activities as commissary-general of Poland, Bohemia and Lithuania, and his role as confessor and advisor to Queen Bona Sforza.

Ann Curthoys has researched, taught, and published on many aspects of Australian history, and also on questions of feminism, cultural studies, and historical writing and theory. Her major publications include Freedom Ride: A Freedomrider Remembers (2002); (with John Docker) Is History Fiction? (2005, 2010); and (with Jessie Mitchell), Taking Liberty: Indigenous Rights and Settler Self-government in the Australian Colonies, 1830 – 1890. Her other books, edited collections, and essays in journals and book collections are listed in her attached CV.

Ann completed her BA honors degree at the University of Sydney in 1966, and her PhD at Macquarie University in 1973, with a thesis on Race and Ethnicity: Responses of British Colonists to Aborigines, Chinese, and non-British Europeans in New South Wales, 1856-1883. She taught at the University of Technology, Sydney (1979-1994) and the Australian National University (1977-8 and 1995 – 2008) before taking up an ARC Professorial Fellowship at the University of Sydney in 2008, retiring in 2013. She continues to research, write, and publish.

Carole M. Cusack received her Bachelor of Arts (Honours) in Religious Studies and English Literature from the University of Sydney in 1986. She later graduated PhD in Studies in Religion in 1996 and Master of Education (Educational Psychology) in 2001. She has taught in Studies in Religions since 1989, first as a casual tutor and lecturer, and from 1996 as a full-time staff member.

Her research interests include medieval European religion, religious conversion, medieval and modern Paganism, contemporary religious trends, alternative spiritualities and new religious movements. She was the editor (with Dr Christopher Hartney, University of Sydney) of the Journal of Religious History from 2007-2015, and (with Dr Liselotte Frisk, Dalarna University, Sweden) the Founding Editor of International Journal for the Study of New Religions (2010-2013). In 2015 she became Editor of Literature & Aesthetics, the journal of the Sydney Society of Literature and Aesthetics. In 2016 became Editor (with Professor Rachelle M. Scott, University of Tennessee at Knoxville) of Fieldwork in Religion. She has a close relationship with the University of Edinburgh, where she takes her Special Studies Program Leave and has taught on exchange in 2009.

As of 2018 Carole Cusack is a member of eleven journal editorial boards, including: Journal of Religion Media, and Digital Culture (Brill); Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions (University of California Press); Implicit Religion (Equinox); Alternative Spirituality and Religion Review (Academic Publishing); Atlantis: A Journal of the Spanish Association for Anglo-American Studies (journal of the Spanish Association for Anglo-American Studies); and Journal of Religious History (John Wiley and Sons).

Carole is also involved in many Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences and University initiatives. She was Pro-Dean (Teaching and Learning) for 2013-2014, was Director of Academic Support and Development for two semesters in 2011 and 2012, Associate Dean (Undergraduate) in 2008 to 2010, and Degree Director of the Bachelor of Arts from 2008-2010.