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Professor Angela Woollacott

PhD, History, University of California, Santa Barbara 1988,
MA, History, University of California, Santa Barbara 1984,
BA (Honours), History, University of Adelaide 1979,
BA, Political Science and History, Australian National University 1978

Office:	W6A 413
Phone:	+61 2 9850 8877
Fax:	+61 2 9850 6594
Email:	angela.woollacott@mq.edu.au

 

Angela Woollacott is a historian of Australia and the British Empire , with interests in the areas of race and settler colonialism, postcolonial history, feminist, women's and gender history, transnational history and cultural history. She currently serves on the Executive Committee of the Australian Historical Association, and on the editorial boards of Journal of British Studies , Journal of Women's History and London Journal . She is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society (UK) and a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia .

• Research
• Selected Publications
• Teaching
• Administration

 

Research

 

Research interests and areas of supervision:
I am willing to supervise in the areas of Australian history, empire and postcolonial history, women's and gender history, race and settler colonialism, cultural history and transnational history.

Current research projects:
I am currently working on three projects, which are at different stages:

• Gender and White-Settler Colonialism: Political and Cultural Change in the Australian Colonies 1830s to 1860s
  This is an ARC-funded research project in its early stages. It will draw on an extensive range of primary sources to study the transition to self-government in the Australian colonies in imperial context (using major developments elsewhere in the British Empire as a mirror to changes in Australia ), employing gender analysis and cultural history methodology.
  
  
• Race and the Modern Exotic: 'Australian' Women on the Transnational Stage
  This project uses the stories of three 'Australian' women performers--who enjoyed differing degrees of international celebrity--to explore issues of performance, modernity, the female body, and the diverse racial meanings attached to Australianness in the first decades of the 20th century. Essays from the project are published and in process, and I am developing the larger project into a book.
  

• Transnational Lives
  With Desley Deacon and Penny Russell, I am coediting two interdisciplinary anthologies of essays from the highly successful 'Transnational Lives' conference held at the Humanities Research Centre at the Australian National University in July 2006.

Research funding and fellowships:

Currently I hold an ARC Discovery Grant 2008-2010 for my research project on 'Settler Society in the Australian Colonies' described above. I have held fellowships at the Humanities Research Centre, ANU; Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio (Senior Faculty Fellowship), and Dartmouth College, New Hampshire; a travel grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, USA; and have been a visiting scholar at the University of Melbourne and the University of Adelaide, an affiliated scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, and a visiting professor at Oberlin College in Ohio.

 

Selected Publications

Monographs:

Gender and Empire (Basingstoke : Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). Published simultaneously in paperback and hardback. Book Description This is the first single-authored book to survey the role of gender in the 'new imperial history'. Through key topics and episodes across a broad range of British Empire history, Angela Woollacott examines how gender ideologies and practices affected both sexes and saturated imperial politics and culture. Essential reading for all students of world history, imperial history and gender relations.
To Try Her Fortune in London : Australian Women, Colonialism, and Modernity (New York : Oxford University Press, 2001). Published simultaneously in paperback and hardback. Book Description Between 1870 and 1940, tens of thousands of Australian women were drawn to London, their imperial metropolis and the center of the publishing, art, musical, theatrical, and educational worlds. Even more Australian women than men made the pilgrimage "home," seeking opportunities beyond those available to them in the Australian colonies or dominion. In tracing the experiences of these women, this volume reveals hitherto unexamined connections between whiteness, colonial status, gender, and modernity.
On Her Their Lives Depend: Munitions Workers in the Great War (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). Published simultaneously in paperback and hardback. Book Description In this evocative book, Angela Woollacott analyzes oral histories, workers' writings, newspapers, official reports, and factory song lyrics to present an intimate view of women munitions workers in Britain during World War I. Munitions work offered working-class women--for the first time--independence, a reliable income, even an improved standard of living. But male employers and trade unionists brought them face-to-face with their subordination as women within their own class, while experiences with middle-class women co-workers and police reminded them of their status as working class. Woollacott sees the woman munitions worker as a powerful symbol of modernity who challenged the gender order through her patriotic work and challenged class differences through her increased spending power, mobility, and changing social behavior.

Edited books:

Mrinalini Sinha, Donna J. Guy and Angela Woollacott (eds.), Feminisms and Internationalism (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1999). First published as a special issue of Gender & History Vol. 10, No. 3 (November 1998). Book Description Feminisms and Internationalism addresses the theme of the history of internationalism in feminist theory and praxis. It engages some of the following topics: the ways in which 'internationalism' has been conceived historically within feminism and women's movements; the nature of and historical shifts within 'imperial' feminisms; changes in the meaning of feminist internationalism both preceding and following the end of most formal empires in the twentieth-century; the challenges to, and the reformulations of, internationalism within feminism by women of color and by women from colonized or formerly colonized countries; the fragmentation of internationalism in response to a growing emphasis on local over global contexts of struggle as well as on a variety of different feminism instead of a singular feminism; and the context for the re-emergence of internationalism within feminisms and women's movements as a result of the new modes of globalization in the late twentieth-century.

Miriam Cooke and Angela Woollacott (eds.), Gendering War Talk (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993). Published simultaneously in hardback and paperback. Book Description In a century torn by violent civil uprisings, civilian bombings, and genocides, war has been an immediate experience for both soldiers and civilians, for both women and men. But has this reality changed our long-held images of the roles women and men play in war, or the emotions we attach to violence, or what we think war can accomplish? This provocative collection addresses such questions in exploring male and female experiences of war--from World War I, to Vietnam, to wars in Latin America and the Middle East--and how this experience has been articulated in literature, film and drama, history, psychology, and philosophy. Together these essays reveal a myth of war that has been upheld throughout history and that depends on the exclusion of "the feminine" in order to survive. The discussions reconsider various existing gender images: Do women really tend to be either pacifists or Patriotic Mothers? Are men essentially aggressive or are they threatened by their lack of aggression? Essays explore how cultural conceptions of gender as well as discursive and iconographic representation reshape the experience and meaning of war. The volume shows war as a terrain in which gender is negotiated. As to whether war produces change for women, some contributors contend that the fluidity of war allows for linguistic and social renegotiations; others find no lasting, positive changes. In an interpretive essay Klaus Theweleit suggests that the only good war is the lost war that is embraced as a lost war.

Refereed journal articles:

• 'A Feminist History of Violence: History as a Weapon of Liberation?', Lilith: A Feminist History Journal No. 16 (2007), pp. 1-11.
  
  
• 'Rose Quong Becomes Chinese: An Australian in London and New York ', Australian Historical Studies (No. 129, April 2007): 16-31.
  
  
• "The Colonial Flaneuse: Australian Women Negotiating Turn-of-the-Century London ," Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society Vol. 25 No. 3 (Spring 2000): 761-87.
  
  
• "Inventing Commonwealth and Pan-Pacific Feminisms: Australian Women's Internationalist Activism in the 1920s-30s," Gender & History Vol. 10 No. 3 (November 1998): 425-448. Reprinted in Mrinalini Sinha, Donna J. Guy and Angela Woollacott (eds.), Feminisms and Internationalism (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1999).
  
  
• "The Fragmentary Subject: Feminist History, Official Records and Self-Representation," Women's Studies International Forum Vol. 21 No. 4 (1998): 329-340.
  
  
• "From Moral to Professional Authority: Secularism, Social Work and Middle-Class Women's Self-Construction in World War I Britain ," Journal of Women's History Vol. 10 No. 2 (Summer 1998): 85-111.
  
  
• "'All this is the Empire, I told myself': Australian Women's Voyages 'Home' and the Articulation of Colonial Whiteness," The American Historical Review Vol. 102 No. 4 (October 1997): 1003-1029.
  
  
• "`Khaki Fever' and Its Control: Gender, Class, Age and Sexual Morality on the British Homefront in World War I," Journal of Contemporary History 29 (April 1994): 325-347.
  
  
• "Maternalism, Professionalism and Industrial Welfare Supervisors in World War I Britain ," Women's History Review 3 (March 1994): 29-56.

Chapters in books:

• 'Gender and Sexuality', Ch. 13 in Australia's Empire (eds. Deryck Schreuder and Stuart Ward) companion volume in the Oxford History of the British Empire series (general editor Wm. Roger Louis; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 312-335.
  

• 'Postcolonial histories and Catherine Hall's Civilising Subjects ', Ch. 4 in Ann Curthoys and Marilyn Lake (eds.), Connected Worlds: History in Trans-National Perspective (Canberra: ANU E-Press, 2006), pp. 63-74.
  
  
• 'Modernity', in Mary Spongberg, Ann Curthoys and Barbara Caine (eds.), Companion to Women's Historical Writing (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2005), pp. 349-360.
  
  
• "Creating the White Colonial Woman: Mary Gaunt's Imperial Adventuring and Australian Cultural History," in Hsu-Ming Teo and Richard White (eds.), Cultural History in Australia ( Sydney : University of New South Wales Press , 2003), pp. 186-200.
  
  
• "The Metropole as Antipodes: Australian Women in London and Constructing National Identity," in Pamela Gilbert (ed.), Imagined Londons ( Albany , NY : SUNY Press, 2002), pp. 85-99.
  
  
• "Australian Women's Metropolitan Activism: From Suffrage, to Imperial Vanguard, to Commonwealth Feminism," in Ian Christopher Fletcher, Laura E. Nym Mayhall, and Philippa Levine (eds.), Women's Suffrage in the British Empire: Citizenship, Race, and Nation (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 207-223.
  
  
• "Dressed to Kill: Clothes, Cultural Meaning and First World War Women Munitions Workers," in Moira Donald and Linda Hurcombe (eds.), Representations of Gender from Prehistory to the Present ( Basingstoke , UK : Macmillan and New York : St. Martin 's Press, 2000), pp. 198-217.
  
  
• "The First World War and Australian National Identity in Dorothy Hewett's play The Man From Mukinupin ," in Claire M. Tylee (ed.), Women, The First World War and the Dramatic Imagination (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2000), pp. 153-70.
  
  
• "White Colonialism and Sexual Modernity: Australian Women in the Early 20th-Century Metropolis," in Antoinette Burton (ed.), Gender, Sexuality and Colonial Modernities (London: Routledge, 1999), pp. 49-63.
  
  
• "Women Munitions Makers, War and Citizenship," in Lois Ann Lorentzen and Jennifer Turpin (eds.), The Women and War Reader (New York: New York University Press, 1998), pp. 126-31. Originally published in Peace Review 8:3 (September 1996): 373-378.
  
  
• "Sisters and Brothers in Arms: Family, Class and Gendering in World War I Britain " in Cooke and Woollacott (eds.), Gendering War Talk , pp. 128-47.

On-line publication:

• Women, Gender, Politics and the Literature of Empire," essay in Empire On-Line Section II research database published by Adam Matthew Publications in March 2004. My essay has hypertext links to approximately 3,000 pages of original primary

 

Teaching

Undergraduate:
HIST 217 Australia , Britain and the Empire in the 19 th Century
HIST 245 Women in Australian History
HIST 253 War and Peace in World History
HIST 255 Sex and Gender in Europe and Empire
HIST 367 Gender and Empire

Postgraduate:
MHPG 811 Colonialism, Sex, Gender

 

Administration

Administrative roles at Macquarie University
Member, Academic Senate 2004-2008

Committee
Member, Research Strategy and Policy Committee, Nov. 2005 - Nov. 2009

 

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