Professor Ann McGrath
Professor Ann McGrath is the Director of the Research Centre for Deep History at the Australian National University. She holds the WK Hancock Distinguished Chair of History at the Australian National University and was awarded the Kathleen Fitzpatrick ARC Laureate Fellowship in 2017. Ann’s current interests are deep history in global context, spatial history and scale. Recently, she is the co-editor (with Lynette Russell) of The Routledge Companion to Global Indigenous History, the co-editor (with Mary-Anne Jebb) of Long History, Deep Time and the author of Illicit Love: Interracial Sex and Marriage in the United States and Australia which was awarded the NSW Premiers History Prize.
Professor Jackie Huggins
Professor Jackie Huggins AM FAHA, a Bidjara/Birri Gubba Juru woman, has enjoyed a stellar career across academic, corporate and social sectors. She is among the first First Nations historians in Australia. Currently Co-Chair of the Treaty Advancement Committee in Queensland, she has served on a number of national and state boards, directed her own consulting firm, and was Deputy Director of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies at the University of Queensland. She was made a Member of the Order of Australia in 2001 and a Fellow of the Academy of Humanities in 2007. She has written widely for history books and journals nationally and internationally.
Dr Beth Marsden
Beth has a background in Aboriginal history, history of education and childhood, and critical archival studies. She has worked as a Research Fellow in History at La Trobe University on the ARC-funded project ‘Ngura Ninti: an Indigenous History of Documents 1788-2000’ with Katherine Ellinghaus, Barry Judd and Richard Broome, and as a Research Fellow at the Melbourne Graduate School of Education on the ARC-funded project ‘Progressive Education and Race’ with Julie McLeod, Fiona Paisley and Sana Nakata. Her PhD, ‘Histories of Aboriginal Education and Schooling in Victoria 1904-1968′, focussed on Aboriginal peoples’ engagement with education, policy and practice within broader cultures of resistance.
Eri Kashima
Eri is a trained linguist who joins the Research Centre for Deep History as a project manager and research officer. She received her PhD as part of a Laureate Project investigating linguistic diversity in Australia and the Pacific. Her background is in the sociolinguistics of language change in small-scale multilingual communities, with expertise on the Nmbo speech community of southern Papua New Guinea. Eri’s role is supporting the research and outreach activites at the centre.
Tabs M. Fakier
Tabs Fakier is a web developer and designer at the Research Centre for Deep History. Her background is primarily in user experience and user interfaces – mostly designing for and building for the frontend web with some backend experience. She absolutely loves working with web technologies. At the Centre, Tabs has been building a speedy static website with a headless CMS, interacting with open-source communities, and using map creation libraries. Discrete mapping projects as well as the interactive atlas form the technical core of her work. Tabs has been building social communities for over ten years (mostly creative tech communities), mentoring budding entrepreneurs, and often streams Centre work on Twitch.
Dr Mike Jones
Deputy Director (from November 2021 to 2023)/Postdoctoral Research Associate
Dr Mike Jones is an archivist, historian, and collections consultant. Since 2008 he has collaborated with diverse researchers, community organisations, and the GLAM sector (galleries, libraries, archives, and museums) on digital collections and public history projects. His research explores the history of collections and collections-based knowledge, and the ways in which contemporary technologies can help to develop and maintain relationships within and between collections, communities, and their histories. His first book, Artefacts, Archives, and Documentation in the Relational Museum, was published by Routledge in 2021.
Dr Laura Rademaker
Deputy Director (October 2019 to November 2021)/Postdoctoral Research Associate
Dr Laura Rademaker is Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Centre for Indigenous History at the Australian National University. She was formerly a Postdoctoral Fellow and Deputy Director at the Research Centre for Deep History and now holds an ARC DECRA. Laura is the author of Found in Translation: Many Meanings on a North Australian Mission (University of Hawai’i Press, 2018) on language and cross-cultural exchange at Christian missions to Aboriginal people, which was awarded the 2020 Hancock Prize. Her work explores the possibilities of ‘cross-culturalising’ history, interdisciplinary histories as well as oral history and memory. Laura is currently a collaborating scholar with the Research Centre for Deep History.
Dr Ben Silverstein
Dr Ben Silverstein is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Rediscovering the Deep Human Past Laureate Program at the Australian National University. Ben’s research focuses on colonial and Indigenous histories, with a focus on Australia, southern and eastern Africa, and the Pacific. His work engages questions of race and settler colonialism as well as contests over sovereignties and colonial government. His first book, titled Governing Natives: Indirect Rule and Settler Colonialism in Australia’s North (Manchester University Press, 2019), explores Australian articulations of indirect rule as a mode of governing Aboriginal people in the interwar period.
Dr Amy Way
Dr Amy Way is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Laureate Research Centre for Deep History at the Australian National University, Canberra. She specialises in the history of human antiquity and deep time in Australia, and its conceptualisation within geology, archaeology, anthropology and public discourse. Amy received the Vice Chancellor’s Commendation for Academic Excellence for her PhD dissertation (2020), and in 2021, was awarded the Australian Historical Association’s Ann Curthoys Prize for her study of Aboriginal antiquity in Australian anthropology. Her work has been published in History Australia and Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science. She is a Visiting Fellow with the New Earth Histories Research Centre at the University of New South Wales, Sydney.
Jennifer Bird
Jennifer Bird is the Project Manager in the Research Centre for Deep History and a PhD Candidate in the National Centre of Biography in the School of History. Her doctoral research explores the single case of a recidivist convict in the Australian colonial penal system. Jennifer’s research interests focus on Australian colonial history, convict history, Indigenous history, gender studies, biography and oral history. She has worked as a research assistant and editorial assistant on books and journals in areas such as Indigenous and colonial histories, and Indigenous knowledges and culture.
