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 global alcohol production, trade and drinking cultures - along with studies of business, colonies and empire. I argue for the need to conceptualise 'global' as a re-entanglement of social, environmental and economic historical factors in the communities produced by settler capitalism. 

At the completion of my Bachelor of Arts (Hons First Class) from the University of Newcastle in 2004 I received Faculty and University Medals and subsequently gained 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 British Library and Kew Gardens archives on several themes in Australian wine history. I especially explored intra- and trans-imperial solutions to grape phylloxera, the insect from North America that destroyed most of Europe's vineyards; affording colonial wine growers reinvigorated aspirations to access the British market. 

My research appears in major journals including Australian Historical Studies, the Journal of Australian Colonial History 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 the NSW Premier's History Awards, as well as other honours. 

On the Australian Research Council Linkage Project 'Vines, Wine & Identity: the Hunter Valley NSW and changing Australian taste' (LP140100146) I work with a team examining the connection between people, place and ideas in Australia's oldest continually-producing wine region. Agricultural industries exist in rural and regional Australian environments for chiefly urban and international consumers and tourists. The consequent past and present interdependence of ideas and identities in these spaces is of particular interest to me. 

Through researching Australian 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 transoceanic mobilities to non-British supply port settlements and intimate mobilities within these other social and cultural spaces encountered during British imperial voyaging.

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 am a member of the organising committee for the Australian Historical Association Annual Conference and a member of the scientific committee for the Wine & Culinary Tourism Conference, University of British Columbia, Okanagan Valley, Canada.

I serve as a member of the steering committee for an extension of the Australian and New Zealand Environmental History Network and as 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.