Researcher Profile

Dr Jon Piccini

Faculty of Education and Arts, National School of Arts and Humanities

Areas of expertise: history; Australian history; historiography; transnational history; history of protest/activism; international history
HDR Supervisor accreditation status: Provisional 
ORCID ID: 0000-0002-0770-8963
Phone: +61 7 36237173
Email: jon.piccini@acu.edu.au
Location: ACU Brisbane Campus

I am a historian of twentieth-century Australia and its global entanglements. In particular I have published two monographs exploring the engagement of Australian activists, politicians and ordinary people with global ideas, firstly the 'global 1960s' and secondly Human Rights. My current projects include a history of American 'Rest & Recreation' leave in Sydney during the Vietnam War, and an intellectual and cultural history of Australian engagement with decolonization after the Second World War. I am available to supervise topics across the field of Australian political, social and cultural history, as well as global/transnational history

Visit academia

Select publications

Books

• Human Rights in Twentieth Century Australia (Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, 2019)
• Transnational Protest, Australia and the 1960s: Global Radicals (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave, 2016)

Edited books

• The Far Left in Australia since 1945 (Oxon, UK: Routledge, 2019) - with Evan Smith and Matthew Worley

Book chapters

• “Australia and the United Nations”, in Bridget Brooklyn, Benjamin T. Jones, Rebecca Strating (eds), Australia on the World Stage: History, Politics and International Relations (Oxon, UK: Routledge, forthcoming 2023)
• “Elizabeth Reid, Second Wave Feminism and Australia’s performance of International Law in the 1970s”, in Madelaine Chiam and Alison Duxbury (eds), Australia in the International Legal System: From Empire to the Contemporary World (London UK, Hart Publishing, forthcoming 2023)
• “Humanitarianism in the age of human rights: Amnesty International in Australia”, in Joy Damousi, Trevor Burnard and Alan Lester (eds)., Humanitarianism, Empire and Transnationalism, 1760-1995: Selective Humanity in the Anglophone World (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2022)
• “Myth and Myth-Making”, in Jenny M. Lewis and Anne Tiernan (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Australian Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020)
• “Australia, the Long 1960s and the ‘winds of change’ in the Asia-Pacific”, in Chen Jian, Martin Klimke, Masha Kirasirova, Mary Nolan, Marilyn Young, Joanna Waley-Cohen, eds., Routledge Handbook of the Global Sixties (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2018)
• “The Anti-Vietnam War Movement: International Activism and the Search for World Peace,” in Christian Peterson and William Knoblauch (eds.), The Routledge History of World Peace since 1750 (Abingdon, UK: Routledge: 2018) – with Chris Dixon
• “Reading and Contesting Germaine Greer and Dennis Altman: the 1970s and Beyond”, in Jon Piccini, Evan Smith and Matthew Worley (eds.), The Far Left in Australia from 1945 (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2018) – with Ana Stevenson
• ‘The “White Australia” policy must go’: The Far Left and the politics of whiteness”, in Jon Piccini, Evan Smith and Matthew Worley (eds.), The Far Left in Australia from 1945 (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2018) – with Evan Smith

Refereed journal articles

• “Over Sexed, Over Paid and Over Here … Again? Americans on R&R in Vietnam-Era Sydney”, Australian Historical Studies, Forthcoming 2023, doi:10.1080/1031461X.2022.2032225

• “‘A fundamental human right’? Mixed-race marriage and the meaning of rights in the British Commonwealth, 1948-9’” Comparative Studies in Society and History (63, No. 3): 655-84 – with Duncan Money

• “The Ex-Services Human Rights Association of Australia, the Vietnam War and the remaking of the Anzac Tradition”, Australian Journal of Politics and History (Forthcoming, 2021).

• “International House Brisbane and the Everyday Life of Humanitarianism in Cold War Australia”, History Australia 17, No. 3 (2020): 695-710

• “‘Women are a colonised sex’: Elizabeth Reid, Human Rights and International Women’s Year 1975”, Australian Historical Studies 49, No. 3 (August 2018): 307-23

• “‘People treated me with equality’: Indigenous Australians, the Soviet Union and the Cultural Cold War, 1951-1968’, Labour History 111(November 2016): 45-57

• “‘More than an abstract principle’: Reimagining rights in the Communist Party of Australia, 1965-1971”, Journal of Australian Studies 39, No. 2 (2015): 200-215

• “‘Light from the East’: Travel to China and the transformation of Australian activism in the long Sixties”, The Sixties: A journal of history, politics and culture 6, No. 1 (July 2013): 25-44

• “‘There is no solidarity, peace or friendship with dictatorship’: Australians at the World Festival of Youth and Students, 1957-1968”, History Australia 9, No. 3 (December 2012): 175-194

• “Bacchanalian Carnival or Political Event? Remembering the Sixties in Australia”, Melbourne Historical Journal 40, No. 1 (2012): 149-167

Projects

Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia workshop, “The Past and Future of International Education”, co-hosted by Profs David Lowe (Deakin), Kate Darian Smith (Utas) and Melanie Oppenheimer (ANU). Total value: $7,890

Accolades and awards

University of Queensland Postdoctoral Fellowship, 2016-19

Appointments and affiliations

Member of the Australian Historical Association and International Australian Studies Association

Editorial roles

Book reviews editor, Journal of Australian Studies

Grant agency review panel

State Library of Queensland Memory Awards, 2019-2021

Public engagement

See articles in The Conversation.