Associate Professor Frances M Clarke
Department of History
After receiving my doctorate from Johns Hopkins University in 2002, I worked for a year as a researcher for the American Historical Association in Washington D.C. I then took up a lectureship in University of Sydney’s History Department. Since that time, I have taught courses on a range of topics in American history—from the colonial era through the twentieth century. My research specialties include the history of the American Civil War and Reconstruction era; war, memory, and trauma; the history of childhood; and the social, legal, political, and cultural history of nineteenth century America. My first book, War Stories: Suffering and Sacrifice in the Civil War North (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), won the Australian Historical Association’s biennial Hancock Prize for the best first book in any field of History. I subsequently began collaborating with Professor Rebecca Jo Plant (University of California, San Diego) on a series of projects. First, we worked on an article focusing on the racial politics of war memory in 1930s America. This research was published in the Journal of American History in 2015. It received the Berkshire Conference Prize for the best article on the history of women, gender, or sexuality, as well as the Association of Black Women historians’ Letitia Woods Brown Article Prize. We then began researching debates over the enlistment age in America, from the Revolution to the turn of the twentieth century. Our initial publication on this topic—an article published in Law & History Review in 2017—won the Coordinating Council of Women in History’s Carol Gold Award for best article on any topic by an academic at or above the level of associate professor. In 2023, we completed research in this area by publishing Of Age: Boy Soldiers and Military Power in the Civil War Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 2023) - which won the 2024 Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize and the Society for the History of Childhood and Youth's Grace Abbot Book Prize.
- Nineteenth-century U.S. history
- Civil War and Reconstruction
- War, Trauma, and Memory
- The political, cultural, legal, and social history of warfare
- Gender and race relations in America
- History of childhood
- Cultural history
Junior Units:
- HSTY1005: History Workshop (Modern/Contemporary)
- HSTY1023: Emerging Giant, The Making of America
Senior Units:
- HSTY2656: A House Divided, The American Civil War
- HSTY2629: Sex and Scandal
- HSTY2657: American Cultural History
- HSTY2628: Boom! The History of War
Honours Units:
- HSTY4011: War & Trauma
- HSTY4011: Victorian Culture
- HSTY3093: Race & Gender in America I
- HSTY3094: Race & Gender in America II
- HSTY4011: American Utopias
Postgraduate Seminars:
- Experiences and Memories of War
- Historiography and Historical Thought
- Completing the Thesis
Supervisions
Current HDR Supervisions
- Ulduz Salmanova,”The Prohibition of Child Labour in New South Wales,” PhD
- Jordan Watkins, “Alliances in the Bonus March,” MA (Res).
PhD and M.A. Completions
- 2024 Bradley Fitzmaurice, “‘Take Me to the River:’ Wheeling, West Virginia in Time and Place” PhD.
- 2017 Claire Selwood, “Divorce Law and Divorce Culture in New South Wales, 1900-1939.”
- 2017 Liz Ingleson, “The End of Isolation: Rapprochement, Globalisation and American Trade with China, 1972-1979.”
- 2016 Danielle Thyer, “Reporting the ‘Unvarnished Truth’: the Origins and Transformation of Undercover Investigative Journalism in Nineteenth Century New York,” PhD.
- 2015 Elizabeth Miller, “A Planting of the Lord: Contemporary Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity in Australia,” PhD.
- 2014 Lauren N. Haumesser, “Democratic Women in the Second Party System: 1824-1856,” M.A. (Res.)
Honours Completions
- 2023 Nicholas Bogard, Moral Injury and the Transformation of PTSD, first class
- 2022 Samantha Destiny Whaitiri-Faitua, “On the Frontlines of Equality: Protests Against Segregated Streetcars in New Orleans and Richmond, 1862-1870.” (Honours first class)
- 2021 Nicholas Hudson, “Staging Union and Liberty: American Civil War Memory in Nineteenth-Century Amateur Theatricals,” (Honours first class)
- 2021 Gillian Diekman, “Band of Sisters: Cinematic Portrays of U.S. Military Women in Combat, 1996-2017,” (Honours first class)
- 2020 Ashleigh Taylor, “they took their death penalties from the enemy only’: The Resistance to the Infliction of the Death Penalty Against Australian Troops in the First World War.” (Honours first class)
- 2019 Elizabeth Heffernan, “‘Oh for places – green oases –': Australian Soldiers and the Environments of the First World War,” (Honours first class) Winner of the Australian Army History’s CEW Bean Prize (Honours Division), 2020.
- 2019 Pippa Herden, “The Anzac Coves and Vaudeville in World War One Australia.” (Honours first class)
- 2018 Liam Anderson, “Thank you for your service: How American Veterans’ Benefits Became Means for Recruitment Rather than Compensation,” (second class honours)
- 2017 Serena May, “Men of Limits, Not Principles? From Algeria to Mississippi: An Historical Comparison of Albert Camus and William Faulkner,” B.A. (Honours first class).
- 2017 Gabrielle Warwick, “The Conferences for Education in the South: The Common School and the Reconstruction of American Citizenship,” B.A. (Honours Second Class).
- 2017 Jack Dillon, “Interrogating Loyalty: The Southern Claims Commission, Law and Loss in Postbellum America,” B.A. (Honours first class).
- 2017 Ulduz Salmadova, “Banishing Children of ‘Tender Years’ from the Workplace: Examining Child Labor Legislation in Nineteenth-Century New South Wales,” B.A. (Honours First Class).
- 2014 Adele McInerney, “The Idealisation of Haiti in the Black Press, 1827-160,” B.A. (Honours First Class).
- 2014 Christina White, “‘A Country so Clothed With Majesty, so Bathed in Perpetual Sunshine’: Women, Nature, and Manifest Destiny in 1850s California,” B.A. (Honours First Class).
- 2014 Eloise Atkin, “The Cuban Missile Crisis in American Memory,” B.A. (Honours Second Class).
- 2014 Rebekah Harris, “The Import of Thy Letter’: Joseph John Burney and Epistolary Humanitarianism, 1780-1850,” B.A. (Honours First Class).
- 2012 Mary Willet, “The Word of a Gentleman and the Oath of a Patriot: Military Parole in the American Civil War,” B.A. (Honours First Class).
- 2012 Lucienne Guyot, “‘Fighting My Way Through’: Northern Rural Women in the American Civil War,” B.A. (Honours First Class).
- 2012 Zoe Fitzgerald, “A Tale of Two Haitis: Representations of an Island Republic in the American Press,” B.A. (Honours First Class).
- 2012 Joshua Levin, “Much Ado About Nothing: British Non-Intervention During The American Civil War,” B.A. (Honours First Class). University Medal Winner.
- 2010 Matthew Ainsworth, “The Shifting Elements of Identity in Pre- and Post-Revolutionary America,” B.A. (Honours First Class).
- 2009 Katherine Connelly, “The Wide, Free World of Men: Gender and the Nineteenth-Century American Saloon,” B.A. (Honours First Class).
- 2009 Victoria Broomfield, “Tipped Off: The Controversial Early History of American Social Gratuities,” B.A. (Honours Second Class).
- 2009 Christopher Beshara, “The Hidden History of Black Militant Abolitionism in Antebellum Boston,” B.A. (Honours First Class). University Medal Winner.
- 2008 Richard L’Estrange, “No Fools Errand: Albion Tourgee’s Radical Understanding of Race, Education and Democratic Citizenship in the American South During Reconstruction and its Aftermath,” B.A. (Honours First Class).
- 2008 Julia Bowes, “The Fourth Art of Government: Eleanor Roosevelt’s Advice on Child Rearing Between 1930 and 1962.” B.A. (Honours First Class).
- 2008 Julia Wood, “The Evolution of the Dime Novel Western: The Impact of Social Darwinism in America, 1865-1888,” B.A. (Honours First Class).
- 2008 Eve Carroll Dwyer, “Putting the Man in Female Emancipation: Feminist Men and Manhood in the Woman’s Journal and the Early American Suffrage Movement,” B.A. (Honours First Class).
- 2008 Naomi Hart, “The Priceless, Perishing Souls of Our Poor Sailor Brothers,” B.A. (Honours First Class). University Medal Winner.
- 2007 Shane Greentree, “From Viragos to Feminists: The Reception and Legacy of Catherine Macaulay and Mary Wollstonecraft B.A.” (Honours Second Class).
- 2007 Vania Chew, “From Europe to America: Patriotic Womanhood and the Rise of the Athletic Revival,” B.A. (Honours First Class).
- 2007 Ryan Middlemas, “Fatal Attraction: Dark Tourism and Morbid Media in the American Civil War,” B.A. (Honours Second Class).
- 2007 Kate McKee, “Gossip, Rumours and Reputation: Identity in the American Civil War South,” B.A. (Honours First Class).
- 2007 Amy Satchell, “Staging Gender: How Theatre Helped to Define and Defend Men and Women of Antebellum New York,” B.A. (Honours First Class).
- 2005 Altin Gavronovic, “Masters of Lost Worlds: Southern Slave-holders sfter the Civil War,” B.A. (Honours First Class). University Medal winner.
- 2005 Poppy J. Bourne, “White Queen White Empire: True Womanhood & Imperialism at the Turn of the Nineteenth-Century,” B.A. (Honours First Class).
- 2005 Katherine Courtney, “The New Woman Comes Into Her Own: Women’s Suffrage Parading in New York City, 1910-1917,” B.A. (Honours First Class).
- 2005 Karen Gambian, “Motherhood and the Movement: Responses to the Declining Birth Rate in Australia and the United States 1890-1910,” B.A. (Honours First Class).
- 2004 Allison Blake, “John Brown’s Body: Northern Manhood and the Legacy of the Harper’s Ferry Raid,” B.A. (Honours First Class).
I am currently working on several collaborative projects. The first is a multi-scholar collaboration that looks at the aftermath of war from the Napoleonic era to the end of WWII. Another focuses on court-martial trials and the history of sexuality during the American Civil WAr; and a third looks at the roots and functioning of America's miltary justice system from the 1770s to the 1980s.
Australian & New Zealand American Studies Association
American Historical Association
Society of Civil War Historians
Society for the History of Childhood and Youth
2024
2024 Grace Abbott Book Prize, awarded by the Society for the History of Childhood and Youth to Frances M. Clarke and Rebecca Jo Plant, co-authors of Of Age: Boy Soldiers and Military Power in the Civil War Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 2023).
Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize – awarded by The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History to Frances M. Clarke and Rebecca Jo Plant, co-authors of Of Age: Boy Soldiers and Military Power in the Civil War Era (Oxford University Press, New York, 2023).
2018
Carol Gold Prize for the best article published in a peer-reviewed journal in 2018 by an academic at mid-career or above level, given out by the American Historical Association’s Coordinating Council of Women Historians for “No Minor Matter: Underage Soldiers, Parents, and the Nationalization of Habeas Corpus in Civil War America. Law and History Review, 35(4), 881-927.”
2016
Association of Black Women Historians' Letitia Woods Brown Article Prize for “‘The Crowning Insult’: Federal Racism and the Gold Star Mother Pilgrimages of the Early 1930s,” Journal of American History.
2015
Berkshire Conference of Women Historians' Annual Article Prize for the best work on women, gender & sexuality for "'The Crowning Insult': Federal Racism and the Gold Star Mother Pilgrimages of the Early 1930s," Journal of American History.
2012
JAustralian Historical Association's biennial Hancock Prize for best work of history by a first time author for War Stories: Suffering and Sacrifice in the Civil War North.
2005
Awarded a Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Teaching Excellence Award.
United States | (University of California, San Diego) Extensive collaboration on book and article projects with Associate Professor Rebecca Jo Plant |
| Project title | Research student |
|---|---|
| Australian Airmen in Europe: The Personal Costs of Aerial Doctrine (1939-1945) | Kurt-owen CORRIGAN |
| Mrs Anzac: A Study of the War Brides of the First World War | Charles HEWAT |
Selected publications
(Oxford University Press, 2023)
(University of Massachusetts Press, 2013)
(The University of Chicago Press, 2011)
Publications
Books
- Clarke, F., Plant, R. (2023). Of Age: Boy Soldiers and Military Power in the Civil War Era. Oxford: Oxford University Press. [More Information]
- Clarke, F. (2011). War Stories: Suffering and Sacrifice in the Civil War North. Chicago, US: The University of Chicago Press. [More Information]
Edited Books
- McDonnell, M., Corbould, C., Clarke, F., Brundage, W. (2013). Remembering the Revolution: Memory, History, and Nation Making from Independence to the Civil War. Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press.
Book Chapters
- Clarke, F. (2019). At Nathaniel Bowditch's Grave. In Gary W. Gallagher, J. Matthew Gallman (Eds.), Civil War Places: Seeing the Conflict through the Eyes of Its Leading Historians, (pp. 85-90). North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press. [More Information]
- Moyd, M., Clarke, F., Plant, R. (2018). Moral Panic versus Moral Blindness: Responses to Children's Militarization in Uganda and the U.S. In Micol Seigel (Eds.), Panic, transnational cultural studies, and the affective contours of power, (pp. 45-66). New York: Routledge. [More Information]
- Clarke, F. (2013). Old-Fashioned Tea Parties: Revolutionary Memory in Civil War Sanitary Fairs. In Michael A. McDonnell, Clare Corbould, Frances M. Clarke, W. Fitzhugh Brundage (Eds.), Remembering the Revolution: Memory, History, and Nation Making from Independence to the Civil War, (pp. 294-312). Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press.
Journals
- Clarke, F., Gleeson-White, S., Ingleson, E., Maddock, P., Kotlowski, D., Plant, R., Fourmy, S. (2022). New Digital Resources for Teaching in the COVID Age. Australasian Journal of American Studies (AJAS), 41(1), 59-80. [More Information]
- Clarke, F., Thompson, L. (2020). Editorial Note. Australasian Journal of American Studies (AJAS), 39(1), 1-4. [More Information]
- Clarke, F., Thompson, L. (2019). Editorial Note. Australasian Journal of American Studies (AJAS), 38(2), 1-2. [More Information]
Other
- Regas, C., Plant, R., Clarke, F. (2023), 'Do not toss this letter away': Women's Hardship Petitions to the U.S. Federal Government During the Civil War, Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600 - 2000, Alexander Street. [More Information]
2023
- Regas, C., Plant, R., Clarke, F. (2023), 'Do not toss this letter away': Women's Hardship Petitions to the U.S. Federal Government During the Civil War, Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600 - 2000, Alexander Street. [More Information]
- Clarke, F., Plant, R. (2023). Of Age: Boy Soldiers and Military Power in the Civil War Era. Oxford: Oxford University Press. [More Information]
2022
- Clarke, F., Gleeson-White, S., Ingleson, E., Maddock, P., Kotlowski, D., Plant, R., Fourmy, S. (2022). New Digital Resources for Teaching in the COVID Age. Australasian Journal of American Studies (AJAS), 41(1), 59-80. [More Information]
2020
- Clarke, F., Thompson, L. (2020). Editorial Note. Australasian Journal of American Studies (AJAS), 39(1), 1-4. [More Information]
2019
- Clarke, F. (2019). At Nathaniel Bowditch's Grave. In Gary W. Gallagher, J. Matthew Gallman (Eds.), Civil War Places: Seeing the Conflict through the Eyes of Its Leading Historians, (pp. 85-90). North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press. [More Information]
- Clarke, F., Thompson, L. (2019). Editorial Note. Australasian Journal of American Studies (AJAS), 38(2), 1-2. [More Information]
2018
- Moyd, M., Clarke, F., Plant, R. (2018). Moral Panic versus Moral Blindness: Responses to Children's Militarization in Uganda and the U.S. In Micol Seigel (Eds.), Panic, transnational cultural studies, and the affective contours of power, (pp. 45-66). New York: Routledge. [More Information]
- Plant, R., Clarke, F. (2018). Studying Underage Enlistment in the American Civil War. Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth, 11(1), 47-52. [More Information]
2017
- Clarke, F., Plant, R. (2017). No Minor Matter: Underage Soldiers, Parents, and the Nationalization of Habeas Corpus in the Civil War America. Law and History Review, 35(4), 881-927. [More Information]
2016
- Clarke, F. (2016). Feeling the Pain: Coming to Terms with Suffering in America's Civil War. J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, 4(1), 181-189. [More Information]
2015
- Plant, R., Clarke, F. (2015). "The Crowning Insult": Federal Segregation and the Gold Star Mother and Widow Pilgrimages of the Early 1930s. Journal of American History, 102(2), 406-432. [More Information]
2013
- Clarke, F. (2013). Old-Fashioned Tea Parties: Revolutionary Memory in Civil War Sanitary Fairs. In Michael A. McDonnell, Clare Corbould, Frances M. Clarke, W. Fitzhugh Brundage (Eds.), Remembering the Revolution: Memory, History, and Nation Making from Independence to the Civil War, (pp. 294-312). Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press.
- McDonnell, M., Corbould, C., Clarke, F., Brundage, W. (2013). Remembering the Revolution: Memory, History, and Nation Making from Independence to the Civil War. Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press.
- McDonnell, M., Corbould, C., Clarke, F., Brundage, W. (2013). The Revolution in American Life from 1776 to the Civil War. In Michael A. McDonnell, Clare Corbould, Frances M. Clarke, W. Fitzhugh Brundage (Eds.), Remembering the Revolution: Memory, History, and Nation Making from Independence to the Civil War, (pp. 1-15). Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press.
2011
- Clarke, F. (2011). Forgetting the Women: Debates over Female Patriotism in the Aftermath of America's Civil War. Journal of Women's History, 23(2), 64-86. [More Information]
- Clarke, F. (2011). War Stories: Suffering and Sacrifice in the Civil War North. Chicago, US: The University of Chicago Press. [More Information]
2007
- Clarke, F. (2007). So Lonesome I Could Die: Nostalgia and Debates Over Emotional Control in the Civil War North. Journal Of Social History, 41(2), 253-282. [More Information]
2006
- Clarke, F. (2006). 'Let All Nations See': Civil War Nationalism and the Memorialization of Wartime Voluntarism. Civil War History, 52(1), 66-93.
2002
- Clarke, F. (2002). 'Honorable Scars': Northern Amputees and the Meaning of Civil War Injuries. In Paul A. Cimbala and Randall M. Miller (Eds.), Union Soldiers and the Northern Home Front: Wartime Experiences and Postwar Adjustments, (pp. 361-393). New York: Fordham University Press.
Selected Grants
2020
- Aftermaths of War: Violence, Trauma, Displacement, 1815-1950, Damousi J, Dwyer P, Edele M, Clarke F, Kieser H, Gatrell P, Plant R, Hofmann R, Australian Research Council (ARC)/Discovery Projects (DP)
2017
- Debating Youth Enlistment in Civil War America, Clarke F, DVC Research/Thompson Fellowships