About Associate Professor Stephen Robertson
Dr Stephen Robertson’s research interests include: The twentieth-century United States; The history of sexuality; Law and society; New York City; and digital history.
Prior to joining the Department of Histsory, Dr Stephen Robertson 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. In 2006, Dr Robertson was awarded a Carrick Australian Award for University Teaching Citation for Outstanding Contributions to Student Learning 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.
Current projects
- Private Eyes and Ears: Covert Surveillance in American life, 1865-1941 (ARC Discovery Grant, 2008-2010
- Year of the Riot: Harlem 1935 (with Shane White and Stephen Garton) ARC Discovery Grant, 2011-2015
Topics in twentieth-century American history, the history of sexuality, law and society and the history of childhood.
For more details see: http://sydney.edu.au/arts/history/staff/profiles/robertson.shtml
Selected publications
(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, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005
Articles
"The Company's Voice in the Workplace: Labor Spies, Propaganda and Personnel Management, 1918-1920," Labor: Studies in the Working-Class History of the Americas (forthcoming 2013)
"Putting Harlem on the Map," in Writing History in the Digital Age, ed Kristen Nawrotzki and Jack Dougherty (University of Michigan Press, forthcoming) | online (2012)
(with Shane White and Stephen Garton)
"Harlem in Black and White: Mapping Race and Place in the 1920s," Journal of Urban History (forthcoming 2013)
(with Shane White, Stephen Garton and Graham White)
"Disorderly Houses: Residences, Privacy, and the Surveillance of Sexuality in 1920s Harlem," Journal of the History of Sexuality 21, 3 (September 2012): 443-66
(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