Professor Shane White
Challis Professor of American History
Australian Research Council Professorial Fellow, 2011-2015
PhD (Sydney)
Room 844 Brennan Building
+61 2 9351 2858
I have been either a student or a teacher in the History Department here, continuously, since I was seventeen years of age, and as you can tell from the accompanying photograph, that was some time ago. I try to read broadly in American history, but my main research interests are in African American history and in the history of New York City.
Research areas
- African American History
Current projects
Selected publications
[with Stephen Garton, Stephen Robertson & Graham White]
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
[with Graham White]
The Sounds of Slavery: Discovering African American History through Songs, Sermons and Speech (Boston: The Beacon Press, 2005).
– Winner of the 2005 Queensland Premier's History Book Prize
Stories of Freedom in Black New York (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002).
– Co-Winner of the 2003 James A. Rawley Prize, Sponsored by the Organization of American Historians
– Winner of the 2002 Dixon Ryan Fox Prize of the New York State Historical Association
– Runner-up, Queensland Premier's History Book Prize
[with Graham White]
Stylin': African-American Expressive Culture From Its Beginnings to the Zoot Suit
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998). Paperback edition 1999.
– Winner of the 1998 John Cawelti Book Award, given by the American Culture Association
– Honorable Mention, Frederick Douglass Book Prize, given by the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition
– Runner-up, 1999 New South Wales Premier's History Awards Prize for General History
Somewhat More Independent: The End of Slavery in New York City, 1770-1810
(Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 1991). Paperback edition 1995.
–Choice Magazine Outstanding Academic Book for 1992
Areas of teaching and research supervision
- I supervise theses in American history, particularly American cultural history.
Recent PhD completions
Clare Corbould, "Making African Americans, 1919-1936." (2005)
Obelia Jane Modjeska, “Seeking Dad, Seeking Master: Patriarchal Crisis, Middle Class Masculinity and the Representation of the Father in American Cinema, 1970 to the Present.” (2004)