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Susan Broomhall is Professor of Early Modern Studies and leads the Gender and Women's History Research Centre in the Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences. She is the author of numerous monographs and edited collections focussing on women and gender in the early modern world.
Michael D. Barbezat is a research fellow in Gender and Women’s History Research Centre at the Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences. His research on medieval intellectual and religious history frequently examines the ideologies and assumptions that justified and encouraged persecution during the Middle Ages. His work has examined the convergencies of discourses regarding sexuality, heresy, demonology, and theology in the writings of medieval churchmen. He is currently researching a new project on medieval attempts to speak with the dead. In his study of historical desires to speak with people in the past, he is inspired by the methodologies provided by certain strands of modern queer theory regarding trans-historical desire and spectrality or hauntology.
Sarah A Bendall is a Research Fellow at the Gender and Women's History Research Centre in the Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences. She is a material culture historian whose work specialises in the gendered and embodied experiences of dress, as well as the roles of gender in the production, trade and consumption of global commodities and fashionable consumer goods. She is the author of several journal articles on gender and early modern dress, on early modern women's garment production and on experimental history approaches. Her first monograph entitled Shaping Femininity was published by Bloomsbury in 2021. Her current research offers critical reassessment of the global whaling trade between 1500-1800 by focusing on the fashionable goods that it produced and how gendered assumptions mediated the demand for and perceived value of these consumer goods, as well as historical scholarship on this trade. She is also developing projects on women and the garment-making trades in seventeenth-century England and experimental history and embodiment.
Sylvie Brassard recently completed a PhD in history, working on the recognition of women's work in the history of French anthropology. She is particularly interested in gender, exploration history, and French studies. Past projects include strategies behind court cases withdrawal (16th century France), Saskatchewan French settlement and culture, and a translation of surgeon Paul Gaimard's travel diary on the Uranie (1816-1820). She is currently working on gender in Jean de Léry's account of the France Antarctique settlement in Brazil (16th century).
Clare is a Research Associate in the Gender and Women’s History Research Centre in the Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences, working within the ARC Discovery Project, “A History of Early Modern Natural Resource Management,” led by Susan Broomhall. Her research in this project analyses the relationship between gender, property, and natural resources in early modern law. She is also a historian and literary scholar of late medieval England who has published on sexuality, the history of emotions, Middle English literature, religion, and the modern reception of premodern texts. She is the author of Love in Late Medieval England (forthcoming with Manchester University Press), which identifies the relationship between religious, poetic, and other understandings of love as a phenomenon in fourteenth-century England.
Anh Nguyen Austen is a cultural historian and Research Fellow at the Centre for Refugees, Migration, and Humanitarian Studies in the Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences. Her research with refugees and asylum seekers considers the role of race and gender in the arts, creative expression, and entrepreneurship in the food, hospitality, and well-being industry. How does a nationalised resettlement context inform the dynamics of a presumptive traditional or racially informed gender roles and modes of expression? How are race and gender expectations historicised, negotiated, and inform the process of belonging and the conception of a good life in Australia and other national contexts? Anh is currently exploring these questions with several industry partners including Melbourne Museum, Free to Feed, Thrive Refugee Enterprise, and Mentoring Men in Australia.
Dr Jae-Eun Noh is a Research Fellow in the Gender and Women's History Research Centre in the Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences. She is currently working on the research project, Solidarity in/for Global Health”, funded by the Wellcome Trust. She also works on the project, "Moved Apart ", funded by the Swedish Research Council and led by Susan Broomhall. Jae-Eun has published over 25 articles and 7 book chapters exploring global development policies and practices from human rights and gender perspectives.
Lisa O'Connell is Associate Professor of English in the Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences and a specialist in British Literature of the eighteenth century. Her research interests include the history and theory of the novel, women's fiction, enlightenment, secularisation and early global literatures. Lisa has published on a wide range of topics and genres including marriage, nationalism, libertinism, popular anthropology, travel writing, romance, courtesan memoirs, sermons and settler fiction. Her recent monograph The Origins of the English Marriage Plot: Literature, Politics and Religion in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge 2019) offers a new account of why and how marriage became central to the realist novel. Another recent essay reveals the neglected links between Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and the fiction of Therese Huber, the little-known German author of the first novel set in the Australian penal colony. Lisa's current projects include The Worlding of British Literature, 1700-1820, a book-length study of the globalising of the literary heritage which offers a new understanding of the period's significance to what we now call 'world literature', and The Novel Form and Women After Marriage, a project in its earliest stages exploring how aging and widowed women helped develop the novel form in the eighteenth century and beyond.
Elizabeth Reid is an historian of gender and early modern Italy, specializing in the social implications of allegory. She is currently a Research Associate with the Gender and Women’s History Research Centre in the Institute for Humanities and Social sciences. Her first book Naturalising Social Hierarchies in Cesare Ripa’s Iconologia: Personified Perceptions of Gender, Class, and Race has been accepted for publication with Brepols’ IKON series. This book provides a wholly new perspective on personification in Early Modern Europe. It argues that in appropriating socialised bodies to contextualise and codify allegorical expression, Cesare Ripa’s Iconologia naturalised and perpetuated historically impactful hierarchies of gender, class and race. Reid has articles and a book chapter that expose the gendered violence implied by the personifications created to adorn or reflect on Ceremonial Entries during the Italian Wars. Her current research includes analysing the cultural context and gendered social meaning of Tuscan Marian iconography that hinged on Mary’s identity as a nursing mother; a study of how early modern natural philosophy concerning the physical and emotional power of olfactory experience was translated into material culture, with a particular interest in the correlation of fertility, femininity, and flowers conveyed through the key figures of Venus and the Virgin Mary; and an investigation into the cultural connotations and experiences of the helmet (from a suit of armour) its implications of 'readiness', virtue, violence, as a guard against displays of emotion, and its allusions to monstrosity or fashion. She is also a sort-after research assistant, project manager, and copyeditor, and has worked in this capacity across various disciplines including history, sociology, musicology, and pedagogy. In this capacity she is currently working as a research assistant, copyediting and conducting research with the ARC Linkage project ‘Mobilising Dutch East India Company Collections for New Global Stories.’
Natalie Tomas is a Honorary Fellow at the Gender and Women's History Research Centre in the Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences. She is a social and cultural historian of the early modern period interested in the exercise of power by women in the public sphere in early modern societies and how female leadership has been perceived at the time and throughout history. She is also interested in the gendering of space in early modern societies and how successful women are in negotiating the boundaries of gendered space. Her current research is focussed on the Spanish-born duchess of Florence and Siena, Eleonora di Toledo and her role in state formation. She is on the Academic Board of the Medici Archive Project. She has previously published in Renaissance Studies and has published two monographs and several book chapters in her field of interest. She has also published a bibliography on Eleonora di Toledo for Oxford University Press.
Melissa Bellanta is an Associate Professor of History based in ACU's National School of Arts and an affiliate of the Women's and Gender History Research Centre in the Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences. She is a social and cultural historian who investigates the relationship between men, gender and dress in twentieth-century Australian history. Bellanta's work also explores histories of masculine emotion, youth and street culture, and popular entertainment. Bellanta is sole chief investigator on the ARC Discovery Project "Men's Dress in Twentieth-Century Australia: Masculinity, Fashion, Social Change" and was a 2023 Powerhouse Research Fellow on the project "Dress and the Making of Queer Worlds in Sydney c.1980-1995". Bellanta's most recent work, published with Lorinda Cramer, explores the relationship between men's fashion and hegemonic masculinity; considers connections between Asian migrant men's suits and dignity in Australian society during the White Australia era; and explores how the Australian wool industry sought to target male consumers of fashion in response to the challenge of synthetics in the early postwar era. In addition, her recent chapter "Fashion and First Peoples" in the Cambridge Global of Fashion, vol. 1 (2023) foregrounded the significance of dress - and particularly ornament - in interactions between First Nations peoples and European settlers across Australia, New Zealand and North America between 1700 and 1850.
Lexi Eikelboom is a research fellow in Religion & Theology at the Institute for Religion and Critical Inquiry. Her research on the use of artistic and aesthetic categories in articulations of Christian theology includes an examination of the gendered nature of those categories. Her current research project interrogates the construction and functions of the category "form" in Christian theology. She argues that the traditional Aristotelian metaphysic operative in the background of theological work on form (particularly in Thomas Aquinas and Hans Urs von Balthasar) codes form as a masculine principle that acts on matter - a feminine principle - resulting in a third: substance. Rather than a neutral construction, this understanding has problematic political implications. The project asks how the category might be re-imagined using resources from Christian theology and art and literary criticism so that it might become a helpful tool through which to oppose the hegemony of particular (gendered) forms that govern societies.
Alison Fitchett-Climenhaga is a Research Fellow in Religion & Theology at the Institute for Religion and Critical Inquiry. She specialises in the history and contemporary practice of Christianity in eastern Africa, especially among Catholic communities in Uganda and Rwanda. Her current book project explores how the ritual life and organisational cultures of two Catholic lay associations devoted to the Holy Spirit shape different styles of Catholic practice among participants. Since women predominate in these lay associations, charismatic Catholicism affords insight into Ugandan Catholic women's devotional lives and social activism. More broadly, her work explores the relationship of religion and conflict and gendered patterns of religious practice and leadership in eastern Africa. Her research also engages women's history in the region, including an early-stage project using the history of Rwandan Catholic women religious to explore women's changing roles in Rwandan society since the early twentieth century.
Sarah Gador-Whyte is a research fellow in Biblical and Early Christian Studies in the Institute for Religion and Critical Inquiry. As a literary and cultural historian of late antiquity, Sarah has worked on emotions history, liturgical literature and the interplay of rhetoric and theology in liturgical hymns, and interreligious conflict and dialogue. She studies women's roles in early Christian liturgy and examines perceptions of women and their activities in late antiquity more broadly. She is currently involved in a project on late ancient night-time activities, emotions, gender and imagination.
Darius von Güttner Sporzyński is a Research Associate at the Gender and Women's History Research Centre in the Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences, working within the ARC Discovery Project, "A History of Early Modern Natural Resource Management", led by Susan Broomhall. Darius is a historian of Central Europe with a particular interest in cultural aspects of transmission of ideas and identity. He is the General Editor of Brepols' series, "East Central Europe". His publications cover diverse aspects of history from the Middle Ages to early modern and the modern eras. Darius' book, Poland, Holy War and the Piast Dynasty (Brepols, 2014), examined the transmission of the idea of Christian holy war to and from the European periphery and challenged established historiographical position that the Poles did not participate in sacred warfare because of their "aversion to the use of violence in the matters of faith". In numerous publications on the aspects of crusades and crusading Darius analysed medieval Polish chronicles and the impact of chronicle writing on constructing Polish history. More recently Darius' interests expanded to include gendered responses to, and identify performances by, elite women, including a key Early Modern figure, Bona Sforza d'Aragona (1494-1557), Queen consort of Poland and her land management reforms in Lithuania. He is currently editing two collections of essays for Brepols Publishers: "Jagiellon Europe - Central Europe", examining the early modern dynastic networks of power and gender politics, and "The Jagiellon Queens Consort: Queenship, Role and Impact", examining cultural, familial, religious, and political aspects of women's exercise of power.
Linda Zampol D'Ortia is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global Fellow at the Gender and Women's History Research Centre in the Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences, and at the department of Asian and North African Studies of Ca' Foscari University of Venice (Italy). Linda's current project, "Emotions as Practice in the early modern Jesuit missions in the Asia-Pacific" (EMOPractices), approaches the XVI-XVIII-century Asian enterprises of the Society of Jesus through the lens of emotions. By analysing manuscript letters from six early modern Jesuit missions, it aims to reveal the previously disregarded role of Jesuit emotional practices and their impact on the creation of stereotypes of peoples of the Asia-Pacific region. Her project includes a focus on the construction of Jesuit masculinities and the gendered regulations of the mission's emotional communities, and if and how they differed from both European Catholic and Asian ones; and an analysis of the presence and role of women in the Japanese mission.