People
Associate Professor Nancy Cushing (Director)
Nancy Cushing is an environmental historian specialising in human-other animal relations. She is interested in interspecies and environmental violence, having published on captive animals, forced mobility and killing as conservation. Nancy is the 2024 - 25 Coral Thomas Fellow at the State Library of NSW and the Deputy President of the University of Newcastle's Academic Senate for Research.
Professor Philip Dwyer (Founding Director)
Dwyer is one of the leading international scholars in the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic eras, as well the world's pre-eminent biographer of Napoleon. His work on violence emanating from this research includes the experience of war, the massacre in history, and memory and has made a significant contribution to the field.
Dr Kit Candlin
Formerly an ARC Postdoctoral Fellow, Candlin specialises in violence in the Atlantic world, slave colonies of the Atlantic, and slave rebellion.
Professor Catharine Coleborne
Professor Coleborne is an internationally recognised historian of health and medicine with an extensive portfolio of research, teaching, administration and academic leadership. Her research and publishing in the histories of mental health, families, illness, colonial worlds and medical institutions, as well as in law and history has attracted world-wide attention.
Dr Sacha Davis
Sacha Davis' primary research interest is in German nationalism in Central/Eastern Europe (the former Habsburg lands) from in the late nineteenth century to the Second World War, with a focus on the interwar period. He has particular interests in German nationalism, transnationalism and diaspora.
Dr Justin Ellis
Dr Justin Ellis is a lecturer in Criminology. His research examines the impact of digital technologies on trust in public institutions. His current focus is the scrutiny of public order policing through sousveillance within the LGBTIQ+ community in Sydney.
Dr Nafi Ghafournia
Nafi Ghafournia's research revolves around domestic violence, social policy, gender and immigration. She has published several papers on religion and domestic violence, Islamic feminism, domestic violence policy, immigration policy, culture, domestic violence and intersectionality.
Dr Effie Karageorgos
Effie Karageorgos is a historian whose work centres on social histories of war including trauma, gender, protest, psychiatry and violence. Her monograph _Australian Soldiers in South Africa and Vietnam: Words from the Battlefield_ was published in 2016 by Bloomsbury Academic. She is the Deputy Convenor of the University’s Future of Madness Network, and Editor of Health and History, the journal of the Australian and New Zealand Society for the History of Medicine.
Associate Professor Hans-Lukas Kieser
An Australian Research Council (ARC) Future Fellow, Kieser's focus is war and revolution in the declining Ottoman Empire; the relationship between state formation, political violence, and genocide; apocalyptic violence (secular and religious) and the challenges of non-violence as they emerge in 'modern millennialism'.
Dr Alexandra Lewis
Alexandra Lewis joined the University of Newcastle in 2019. She arrived from Aberdeen, Scotland, where she was Senior Lecturer in English and Creative Writing, Director of the Centre for the Novel, and Undergraduate Programme Coordinator of Creative Writing. Alexandra has published widely on literature and psychology/medicine; nineteenth-century fiction; and contemporary literature and is currently researching gendered violence in fiction.
Professor Deb Loxton
With a background in psychology, Professor Deborah Loxton is an experienced quantitative and qualitative researcher in women's health, with particular interests in reproductive health and the impact of stressful life events, including the health impact of abuse, such as domestic violence. She is Director of the Centre for Women's Health Research, the Australian Longitudinal Study on Women’s Health and HMRI Women’s Health Research Program.
Associate Professor Amy Maguire
Dr Amy Maguire is an Associate Professor and the Indigenous Student Liaison at the University of Newcastle Law School.
Associate Professor Maguire's fields of research are public international law and human rights, with particular focus on self-determination, Indigenous rights, climate change, refugees and asylum seekers, and the death penalty. Amy has ongoing research collaborations with UoN and external partners in relation to climate change, human rights and human displacement, the legal regulation of climate change mitigation strategies, the Indigenisation of curriculum, and blended/active teaching and learning.
Associate Professor Xanthé Mallett
Associate Professor Xanthé Mallett is a forensic anthropologist and criminologist. Her current criminological interests include developing our understanding of gendered criminal activity as well as societal responses to crime, and the media’s influence of the judicial process. She is also a passionate advocate for transparency and equity in the criminal justice system, as a result of which she has become involved with a number of high profile cases of filicide (murder of a child by a parent) that may be miscarriages of justice.
Professor Roger Markwick
Markwick is Professor of Modern European History (retired), with particular expertise in Soviet and Russian history and historiography. His most recent research focuses on Soviet women in the Second World War. He has additional research interests in European fascism, genocide, and colonial settler states.
Professor Lynne McCormack
Professor Lynne McCormack is both a psychology clinician and a researcher with over 40 publications in the field of complex trauma and posttraumatic growth. Her therapeutic work has spanned over three decades primarily working with those exposed to complex high risk environments or political and family/childhood trauma.
Dr Kathleen McPhillips
Dr Kathleen McPhillips is a sociologist of religion and gender and has recently specialised in trauma studies. She is currently leading a research project into the Catholic Church and their participation in State Inquiries into child abuse. She has attended the NSW Special Commission of Inquiry and the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse and is currently publishing in this area.
Lucinda Mithen
Lucinda is a PhD candidate and full time academic. She has an extensive background in Emergency Nursing and Critical Care Nursing with a special interest in triage and trauma care. After working for many years as a full time RN/CNS in several Emergency Departments she has gained a profound respect and admiration for our nurses working on the front line of health care. In her experience, nurses have an incredible but poorly defined level of resilience unlike any other profession. This has informed her interest in the well being of our nursing workforce.
Dr Elizabeth Roberts-Pedersen
Elizabeth (Libby) Roberts-Pedersen is a Senior Lecturer in History and former ARC DECRA Fellow researching the impact of World War Two on the theory and practice of psychiatry. Her current ARC-funded project, ‘Unquiet Minds: Psychiatry in World War Two and its aftermaths’, aims to provide the first comprehensive account of the consequences of that conflict for psychiatric theory and practice by focusing on the ways in which the stringencies of total war forged new patient cohorts on the battlefield and the home front and thus implicated psychiatry in the social and economic projects of the post-war world.
Professor Lyndall Ryan
With a focus on massacre studies and in particular to the development of a coherent method to interrogate the disparate sources of frontier massacre, Ryan's work has resulted in significant conceptual advances in the study of the Australian frontier and the history of massacre.
Dr Nisha Thapliyal
Nisha is a Lecturer in the School of Education. She comes to the field of Comparative and International Education from a background in Social Work (MA) and Psychology (BA). Her interest in critical pedagogies and education for social justice grew out of her work with institutionalised children in India including street children, orphans, and so-called juvenile delinquents.
Dr Ümit Kurt
Ümit Kurt is a historian of the modern Middle East, with a research focus on the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. He is currently a DECRA Fellow in the School of Humanities, Creative Industries, and Social Sciences (History). A Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, he is the author of award-winning book, The Armenians of Aintab: The Economics of Genocide in an Ottoman Province (Harvard University Press, 2021) and the co-author of The Spirit of the Laws: The Plunder of Wealth in the Armenian Genocide (Berghahn, 2017). He is now working on his third book manuscript project on the global patterns of mass violence in the Ottoman borderlands in 1860s-1920s.
Adjunct Members
Associate Professor Candan BademAssociate Professor | Dr. Lance R. BlythResearch Associate |
Professor Robert CribbProfessor, School of Culture, History & Language | Professor Joy DamousiProfessor of History |
Associate Professor Vesna DrapacAssociate Professor, School of History and Politics | Professor Penny EdmondsMatthew Flinders Professor |
Associate Professor Robert FosterAssociate Professor, School of History and Politics | Associate Professor Kevin FosterAssociate Professor, Literary Studies |
Professor Lisa FeatherstoneProfessor of History | Professor Robin GersterAdjunct Professor, Literary Studies |
Professor Hélène JaccomardProfessor | Professor Anna JohnstonProfessor of English |
Professor Amanda NettelbeckProfessor of History | Professor Hans PolsProfessor of History |
Professor Joanna BurkeProfessor of History | Dr Kate AriottiARC DECRA Fellow School of Historical and Philosophical Inquiry |
The University of Newcastle acknowledges the traditional custodians of the lands within our footprint areas: Awabakal, Darkinjung, Biripai, Worimi, Wonnarua, and Eora Nations. We also pay respect to the wisdom of our Elders past and present.