Professor Robert Aldrich

Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities
Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia
Room 836 Brennan Building

+61 2 9036 5479

BA, Emory University; MA, PhD, Brandeis University

Robert Aldrich, Professor of European History, teaches and carries out research in modern European and colonial history, especially the history of France since the Revolution and of France's overseas empire, the history of 'sites of memory' and the history of gender and sexuality.

Current projects

Robert Aldrich's new book, Gay Life Stories, is currently in press with Thames & Hudson in London.

His next project, 'Banishing Potentates', is a study of indigenous rulers exiled by French and British colonial authorities.

From September to December 2011, Professor Aldrich will be a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH) and at Wolfson College, Cambridge University.

Selected publications

Robert Aldrich’s most recent publications are several edited volumes. Gay Life and Culture: A World History was published by Thames and Hudson in the UK in 2006 and has been translated into eight languages. In 2007, again for Thames and Hudson, he edited The Age of Empires, which has also been published in Spanish, German, Estonian, Rumanian and Turkish. In 2006, he was the guest editor for a special issue of the French journal Outre-Mers on ‘sites of memory’ in the French overseas empire.

Aldrich is the author of several books on colonial history: The French Presence in the South Pacific, 1842-1940 (1990), France and the South Pacific since 1940 (1993) and Greater France: A History of French Overseas Expansion (1996) and Vestiges of the Colonial Empire in France: Monuments, Museums and Colonial Memories (2005). With John Connell, he is the author of France's Overseas Frontier: Départements et Territoires d'Outre-Mer (1992) and The Last Colonies (1998).

In gay history, Aldrich is the author of The Seduction of the Mediterranean: Writing, Art and Homosexual Fantasy (1993). With Garry Wotherspoon, he edited a two-volume Who's Who in gay and lesbian history, published in 2001, that contains entries on almost a thousand figures of importance in the history of homosexuality in the Western world since Antiquity. Aldrich and Wotherspoon also edited several collections of chapters on Australian gay history, which appeared between 1992 and 1998. Colonialism and Homosexuality (2003) brought together two of Aldrich’s fields of research, looking at the phenomenon of male homosexuality, primarily in the British and French empires, from the mid-1800s to the mid-1900s.

Areas of teaching and research supervision

Teaching

• HSTY1045 Modern European History 1750-1914
• HSTY2659 Nationalism
• HSTY2304 Imperialism, 1815-2000
• HSTY2658 French Politics and Culture
• HSTY2681 Colonialism in Modern Asia
• HSTY6942 Historical Constructions of Sexuality
• HSTY6992 Monuments and History

Supervision

• political, social and cultural history of modern Europe, including nationalism, social change and historical memory
• French history, particularly in the period since the Revolution of 1789, and the history of the French overseas empire
• history of European colonialism and decolonisation in the nineteenth and twentieth-century, especially the case of France;
• history of homosexuality, especially in the late modern period

Other professional contributions

Professor Aldrich was Chair of the Department of History from 2006 through 2009.

He is Co-Director of the ‘Nation, Empire, Globe’ Research Cluster at the University of Sydney.

He is a member of the advisory board of Outre-Mers, the French colonial history journal.

He has held fellowships at the Camargo Foundation in Cassis, France, and at the Columbia University Institute for Scholars in Paris.

The French government in 2002 decorated Aldrich with the Ordre des Palmes Académiques in recognition of 'services to French culture'