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Associate Professor Stephen Robertson

BA (Hons) (Otago); PhD (Rutgers)
Room 818 MacCallum Building

+61 2 9351 3782

Stephen Robertson joined the History Department in 2000. Prior to that he was a post-doctoral fellow at the American Bar Foundation in Chicago (1997-98), and the JNG Finley Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of History at George Mason University (1998-99). He also taught for a semester at Massey University in New Zealand. Stephen has won a number of teaching awards, including a Carrick Australian Award for University Teaching Citation for Outstanding Contributions to Student Learning in 2006 and a Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Excellence in Teaching Award in 2008. The website Digital Harlem he created with his collaborators in the Black Metropolis project won the American Historical Association's Roy Rosenzweig Prize for Innovation in Digital History and the ABC-CLIO Online History Award of the American Library Association in 2010.

Research Areas

  • The twentieth-century United States
  • The history of sexuality
  • Law and society
  • New York City
  • Digital history

Current Projects

Selected Publications

Books
Cover of Numbers Book




(With Shane White, Graham White and Stephen Garton)
Playing the Numbers:
Gambling in Harlem Between the Wars
(Harvard University Press, 2010)

*Winner of the 2011 NSW Premier's History Awards, General History Prize


Crimes Against Children:Sexual Violence and Legal Culture in New York City, 1880-1960




Crimes Against Children:
Sexual Violence and Legal Culture
in New York City, 1880-1960
(University of North Carolina Press, 2005)

Articles

"Putting Harlem on the Map," in Writing History in the Digital Age, ed Kristen Nawrotzki and Jack Dougherty (University of Michigan Press, forthcoming) | online

(with Shane White and Stephen Garton)
"Harlem in Black and White: Race and Place in the 1920s," Journal of Urban History (forthcoming)

(with Shane White and Stephen Garton)
"Disorderly Houses: Residences, Privacy, and the Surveillance of Sexuality in 1920s Harlem," Journal of the History of Sexuality (forthcoming)

(with Shane White, Stephen Garton and Graham White)
"The Black Eagle of Harlem," in Beyond Blackface: African Americans and the Advent of American Mass Culture, 1890-1930, ed W. Fitzhugh Brundage (University of North Carolina Press, 2011)

(with Shane White, Stephen Garton and Graham White)
"This Harlem Life: Black Families and Everyday Life in the 1920s and 1930s," Journal of Social History, 44, 1 (Fall 2010): 97-122

"Shifting the Scene of the Crime: Sodomy and the History of Sexual Violence," Journal of the History of Sexuality 19, 2 (May 2010): 223-42

"Harlem Undercover: Vice Investigators, Race and Prostitution in the 1920s," Journal of Urban History 35, 4 (May 2009): 486-504

"Showing Its Age," Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 2,1 (Winter 2009): 103-9.

“Teaching Module: Age of Consent Laws,” Childhood and Youth in History (Center for History and New Media, George Mason University)

(with Shane White, Stephen Garton and Graham White)
"The Envelope, Please," in The Cultural Turn in U.S. History: Past, Present and Future, eds James Cook, Lawrence Glickman and Michael O'Malley (University of Chicago Press, 2008), 121-52

""Boys, of course, cannot be raped": Age, Homosexuality and the Redefinition of Sexual Violence in New York City, 1880-1955," Gender and History 18, 2 (August 2006): 389-416.

“What’s Wrong with Online Readings? Text, Hypertext, and the History Web,” The History Teacher 39, 4 (August 2006): 441-54.

"Seduction, Sexual Violence and Marriage in New York City, 1886-1955," Law and History Review 24, 2 (Summer 2006): 331-74.

"Teaching Students to Read Online Sources," Australasian Journal of American Studies 24, 1 (July 2005): 112-124.

"What's Law Got to Do with it? Legal Records and Sexual Histories," Journal of the History of Sexuality 14, 1/2 (January/April 2005): 161-185.

"Doing History in Hypertext," Journal of the Association for History and Computing 7, 2(August 2004)

"Making Right a Girl's Ruin: Working-Class Legal Culture and Forced Marriage in New York City, 1890-1950," Journal of American Studies (August 2002).

"Age of Consent Law and the Making of Modern Childhood in New York City, 1886-1921," Journal of Social History 35, 4 (Summer 2002): 781-798.

"Separating the Men from the Boys: Masculinity, Psycho-Sexual Development and Sex Crime in the United States, 1930s-1960s," Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 56, 1 (January 2001): 3-35.

"Signs, Marks and Private Parts: Doctors, Legal Discourse and Evidence of Rape in the United States, 1823-1930," Journal of the History of Sexuality 8, 3 (January 1998): 345-388.

Digital Harlem
Screen shot of Digital Harlem site

Part of the Black Metropolis project, Digital Harlem employs digital technology to integrate a range of sources – the case files of the Manhattan District Attorney, probation files, prison records, undercover investigations, social surveys, census schedules and the two major newspapers published in Harlem, The New York Age and The Amsterdam News – and to map that data, making it possible to visualize and explore the spatial dimensions of everyday life in Harlem.

  • The Digital Harlem Blog provides updates, news and feedback, and a detailed guide to how to use the site.
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Areas of teaching and research supervision

Teaching
Supervision

Topics in twentieth-century American history, the history of sexuality, law and society, and the history of New York City.

I am currently supervising PhDs on early-twentieth-century Christian internationalism, the transnational movement against the Vietnam War, art activism in NYC in the 1960s and 1970s, Vogue magazine & American culture, 1945-1980, and, in 2009, Honours theses on Irish gangsters, the politics of fear in 1970s mayoral elections in LA, Chicago and NYC, the spectacle of the Great Depression in NYC, and middle-class African Americans in the 1920s.

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Recent Presentations

2012: "Private Detectives and Privacy," to be presented at the Australian and New Zealand American Studies Association Conference, Brisbane (July 3-6)

2012: "The Challenge of Virtual Cities," to be presented at the Organization of American Historians Annual Meeting, Milwaukee (April 21)

2012: "Putting Harlem on the Map," to be presented at Digital Humanities Australasia 2012: Building, Mapping, Connecting, Canberra (March 28-30)

2012: "The Company's Voice in the Workplace: Labor Spies, Propaganda and Personnel Management, 1918-1920," to be presented at the Department of History Seminar, University of Sydney (March 19)

2012: "Private Detectives and Privacy," to be presented at Surveillance and/in Everyday Life, University of Sydney (February 20-21)

2011: "Lightning Short: Digital Harlem: Race and Place in the 1920s," presented at the American Studies Association Annual Meeting, Baltimore (October 22)

2011: "Global Collaborations in American Studies: Learning From Practitioners - the University of Sydney & UNC, Chapel Hill," presented at the American Studies Association Annual Meeting, Baltimore (October 20)

2011: "Digital Harlem: Race and Place in the 1920s," presented at the CUNY Graduate Center, New York City (October 17)

2011: "Playing the Numbers: Gambling in Harlem Between the Wars," presented at the Lehman Center for American History, Columbia University (October 12)

2011: Keynote Speaker, "Digital Harlem: Visualizing Everyday Life in a Black Metropolis," at Digital Resources in the Humanities and Arts 2011, University of Nottingham Ningbo (September 4)

2010: "Digital Harlem," presented at the Virtual Cities / Digital Histories Virtual Symposium (December 4)

2010: “The Company’s Eyes, Ears, and Voice in the Workplace: A Reconsideration of Labor Spying in Interwar Bag and Cotton Mills,” presented at the Australian and New Zealand American Studies Association Conference, Adelaide (July 2)

2010: "Mapping Everyday Life: Digital Harlem," presented at Expanding Horizons: History, the City and the Web, University of South Australia, Adelaide (May 18)

2010: “We Are Very Anxious To Have An Intelligent [Woman] Worker’s Point Of View”: Gender and the Practices of Workplace Surveillance in Interwar Cotton Mills," presented at the Organization of American Historians Annual Meeting, Washington, DC (April 9)

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Other professional activities

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