Dr Julie McIntyre

My research on agriculture and environments focuses on how the growing, making, selling, drinking and export of Australian grape wine is a window to human desire, changing identities and landscapes. These inquiries cross into histories of alcohol production, business and trade, drinking cultures and tourism. I argue for the need to conceptualise 'global' as a re-entanglement of social, environmental and economic historical factors in settler capitalist communities. This notion frames my research as the State Library of NSW 2018 Merewether Fellow on the project 'Settlers in the Empire of Science: William Macarthur, James King and Australian agricultural modernity'. 

My research career followed completion of a Bachelor of Arts (Hons First Class) at the University of Newcastle in 2004, for which I earned Faculty and University Medals. This led to an Australian Postgraduate Award to undertake a PhD (History) at the University of Sydney. My PhD thesis, conferred in 2009, is titled A "Civilised" Drink and a "Civilising" Industry: Wine growing and cultural imagining in colonial New South Wales. In 2010 I held the Rydon Fellowship at the Menzies Centre for Australian Studies (MCAS), King's College London. This fellowship enabled access to archives at the British Library and Kew Gardens to explore histories of economic theories and the sciences connected with wine growing in colonial Australia. 

My research appears in major journals including Australian Historical Studies, the Journal of Australian Studies and Australian Economic History Review. My monograph First Vintage: Wine in Colonial New South Wales (UNSW Press, 2012) received a international publishing prize and was shortlisted for a NSW Premier's History Award, as well as other honours. 

My current project is the Australian Research Council Linkage Project 'Vines, Wine & Identity: the Hunter Valley NSW and changing Australian taste' (LP140100146) which examines the connection between people, place and ideas in Australia's oldest continually-producing wine region. It is of particular interest to me that agricultural industries exist in rural and regional Australian environments for chiefly urban and international consumers and tourists, which has created an interdependence of ideas and identities across these spaces. 

Through researching wine environments and communities I have been drawn to more closely investigate places at the peripheries of Australian history. This has led to new projects titled Global Newcastle - on the city and hinterland where I am based - and Australia's Atlantic; a transimperial study of British imperial mobilities to non-British supply port settlements in the making of Australia.

In May 2016 I convened an international conference on wine studies in the humanities and social sciences in conjunction with the MCAS in London and, in September 2016, served as an invited plenary panelist at the Australian Consortium of Humanities Research Centres Regional Conference at the University of Wollongong. In 2017 I served on the organising committee for the Australian Historical Association Annual Conference - at which I delivered a plenary paper presentation - and am a member of the scientific committee for the Wine & Culinary Tourism Conference, University of British Columbia, Okanagan Valley, Canada.

I am a committee member of the Australian and New Zealand Environmental History Network and Assistant Editor (Humanities and Social Sciences) for the Journal of Wine Research (UK).

Higher Degree Research students under my supervision are exploring topics on wine, trans-imperialism and settler histories.