Associate Professor Kirsten McKenzie
BA MA (Capetown) DPhil (Oxford)
Room 815 Brennan Building
+61 2 9351 6668
Kirsten McKenzie began teaching Australian History in the Department in 2002. She has a BA (Hons) and an MA from the University of Cape Town and completed her DPhil at Magdalen College, Oxford in 1997. She moved to Australia in 1998, taking up a post-doctoral research fellowship at the University of Queensland. Since then she has also taught at the University of New South Wales.
Research Areas
- Social status and settler identity in the British empire, with particular reference to the Cape colony and New South Wales
- scandal and gender issues
Current Projects
- Personal Liberty, British Identity and Surveillance in the Antipodes, 1780s - 1830s.
ARC Discovery Project, 2011-2013 - Changing models of social status and political power at the Cape of Good Hope: the cross-colonial connections of William Edwards/Alexander Lockaye
Selected Publications
Books
A Swindler’s Progress: Nobles and Convicts in the Age of Liberty
- (University of New South Wales Press, 2009) [image on left]
- (Harvard University Press, 2010) [image on right]
Scandal in the Colonies: Sydney and Cape Town, 1800-1850 (University of Melbourne Press, 2004; reprinted 2005)
Recent Articles and Book Chapters
- ‘Opportunists and Impostors in the British Imperial World: The Tale of John Dow, Convict, and Edward, Viscount Lascelles’ in Desley Deacon, Penny Russell and Angela Wollacott (eds) Transnational Lives: Biographies of Global Modernity, 1700 - Present (Palgrave Macmillan: New York, 2010)
- ‘Being Modern on a Slender Income: Picture Show and Photoplayer in early 1920s Sydney.’ Journal of Women’s History, 22: 4 (2010), 114 – 136.
- ‘The Daemon Behind the Curtain: William Edwards and the Theatres of Liberty’ South African Historical Journal 61:3 (2009), 482 - 504
- "Social mobilities at the Cape of Good Hope: Lady Anne Barnard, Samuel Hudson and the opportunities of empire, c. 1797-1824," in Tony Ballantyne and Antoinette Burton (eds) Moving Subjects: Gender, Mobility, and Intimacy in an Age of Global Empire (University of Illinois Press, Urbana, 2008)
- "'My voice is sold, and I must be a Slave': Abolition, Industrialisation and the Yorkshire Election of 1807," History Workshop Journal, 64 (2007), 48-73
- "Britain: Ruling the Waves," in Robert Aldrich (ed) The Age of Empires (Thames and Hudson, London, 2007)
- "Dogs and the Public Sphere: the ordering of social space in early nineteenth-century Cape Town," in Sandra Swart (ed) Canis Africanis: A Dog History of South Africa (Brill, Netherlands, 2007)
- "Performing the Peer: Status, Empire and Impersonation," History Australia 1, 2 (July 2004), 209-228
Areas of teaching and research supervision
| Teaching |
|---|
Kirsten teaches units of study in nineteenth and twentieth century Australian history as well as thematic units that situate Australia within broader British Imperial developments.
- HSTY2304 Imperialism 1815-2000
- HSTY2614 Australian Social History 1919-1998
- HSTY2619 Living in Colonial Australia
- HSTY2629 Sex And Scandal
- HSTY2678 Race Around the World
| Supervision |
|---|
- Topics in Australian history generally, particularly social and cultural history, gender history, and colonial Australia
Other professional contributions
- In 2004 Kirsten McKenzie was awarded the Crawford Medal by the Australian Academy of the Humanities. The medal is awarded every two years to an Australian-based scholar in the early stages of their career whose work contributes towards an understanding of their discipline by the general public.