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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.
Emeritus Professor Philip Dwyer (Founding Director)
Emeritus Professor 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 memory, the experience of war, the massacre in history, the aftermaths of war, and global patterns of violence.
Dr Kathleen McPhillips (Deputy Director)
Dr Kathleen McPhillips is a sociologist of religion and gender and specialises in gender-based violence in religious organisations. She leads the Interdisciplinary Trauma Research Network (ITRN) which examines the impacts of sexual and gendered violence on affected communities and victims.
Kathleen has expertise in analysing public inquiries into child sexual abuse and is currently engaged in three projects: 1) Mapping the movement of clerical perpetrators in the Hunter region 2) Examining the sexual abuse of Catholic Women Religious as part of the Australia-Germany grant (2024-2026) and 3) leading the Hunter Outreach Project (2024-2026), identifying and working with communities impacted by church-based child sexual abuse in regional and remote areas of the Hunter Valley.
Professor Margaret Alston, AM
Professor Margaret Alston is a leading researcher in the areas of gender, climate and environmental disasters, rural women and social work. With a focus on Australia and the Pacific, she draws attention to the role of social work in disaster recovery.
Dr Kit Candlin
Formerly an ARC Postdoctoral Fellow, Candlin specialises in violence in the Atlantic world, slave colonies of the Atlantic, and slave rebellion.
Dr Sacha Davis
Sacha Davis' primary research interest is in minorities and the state in Central/Eastern Europe (the former Habsburg lands) from in the late eighteenth century to the Second World War. He has particular interests in German nationalism, transnationalism and diaspora, and coercive regimes directed at Roma.
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 surveillance within the LGBTIQ+ community in Sydney.
Honorary 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 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.
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 Amy Maguire
Professor Maguire is a Director of the Centre for Law and Social Justice and an ARC Industry Fellow. She is partnering with the Australian Human Rights Commission on research into Australia’s human rights framework, with a focus on law reform, human rights education, and measurement of government human rights performance.
Honorary 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.
Dr Tracy McEwan
Dr Tracy McEwan is a theologian and sociologist of religion and gender. Her scholarship brings a critical and interdisciplinary approach to questions of power and authority in the Catholic Church, with particular attention to the experiences and perspectives of Catholic women globally. Major projects include: the International Survey of Catholic Women, a survey of more than 17,000 Catholic women from 104 countries, research investigating experiences of abuse among Catholic women religious (aka nuns), and the podcast “Australian Women Preach”. Her monograph, Women and the Catholic Church: Negotiating Identity and Agency was published with Bloomsbury Academic in March 2025.
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 Co-Director of the Centre for Society, Health and Care Research, and Editor of Health and History, the journal of the Australian and New Zealand Society for the History of Medicine.
Associate Professor Elizabeth Roberts-Pedersen
Elizabeth (Libby) Roberts-Pedersen is Associate Professor 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.
Emerita Professor Lyndall Ryan AM, FAHA
Lyndall Ryan passed away on 30 April 2024.
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. A tribute to her written by Professor Victoria Haskins can be found here: Lyndall Ryan AM FAHA 1943 – 2024 – Australian Academy of the Humanities.
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 and Psychology. 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.
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