Staff
Professor Ann McGrath
Director
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.
Dr Mike Jones
Deputy Director (from November 2021)/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.
Professor Jackie Huggins
Honorary Professor/Senior Advisor
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.
Jennifer Bird
Project Manager/Research Associate
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.
Dr Ben Silverstein
Postdoctoral Research Associate
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
Postdoctoral Research Associate
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.
Tabassum M. Fakier
Web Developer
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.
Emma Batchelor
Media and Events
Emma Batchelor is a writer and author from Canberra. She holds a Bachelor of Medical Science (Hons) from the Australian National University. From 2016-2019 she edited and wrote for online publication Leiden, and in 2017 published Building a Conscious Wardrobe (and other fun things) a book championing conscious consumerism. In May, 2021 her first novel Now that I see you won the Australian/Vogel Literary Award. She is currently the Chair of ACT Writers and an ambassador for the Chief Minister’s Reading Challenge. Emma has a professional background in events, communications, and operations and has most recently worked with the Australasian Centre for Corporate Responsibility supporting shareholders in Australian listed companies to make use of their rights to improve corporate behaviour on issues such as climate change, worker’s rights, human rights and cultural heritage.
Dr Bethany Phillips-Peddlesden
Research Assistant
Dr Bethany Phillips-Peddlesden is a research assistant with the Research Centre for Deep History; and Executive Officer for the Australian Historical Association. She completed her PhD at the University of Melbourne in 2019 and was awarded a 2019 Gilbert Postdoctoral fellowship. She researches and publishes on the functioning of political power in Australian history through cultural history perspectives, gender theory, masculinity studies and political history.
Jessica Urwin
Research Assistant
Jessica Urwin is a PhD Candidate in the School of History. Her doctoral research interrogates the ways that nuclear processes have interacted with colonialism since the beginning of the twentieth century in South Australia. Aspects of this research have been published in Australian Historical Studies, The Conversation, Inside Story and the Australian Book Review. Her research interests include Australian, political, environmental, and Indigenous history and she has worked as a research assistant on a variety of projects within and outside these varied fields of history.
Dr Laura Rademaker
Deputy Director (October 2019- 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.