Humanities and Social Sciences

History Program

Staff Profiles

Dr Alice Garner

ARC Postdoctoral Fellow Room: David Myers Building E113 Tel: (61 3) 9479 4700 Fax: (61 3) 9479 1942 Email: a.garner@latrobe.edu.au Qualifications: BA (Hons) Melb., PhD Melb.

Alice Garner joined La Trobe University’s History Program in 2009 as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow (Industry), working on ‘A Study of the Fulbright Program in Australia 1949-2009’, an ARC-funded Linkage project. Research interests include educational exchange and cultural diplomacy, travel and tourism history, Australian refugee and asylum seeker policy, spatial representation and early hitchhiking history.

Alice is also known as a professional actor in television (SeaChange, Secret Life of Us) and film (most recently Jindabyne), is a cellist with Melbourne trio Euphonia, and occasionally appears on ABC’s Einstein Factor as a member of the Brains Trust. She co-founded advocacy and performance group Actors for Refugees in 2001, and is a regular public speaker.

Research Projects

Alice is investigating the rich sixty-year history of the Fulbright exchange, alongside Professor Diane Kirkby, Professor Dennis Altman (Politics, Institute for Human Security), and Professor David Walker (Australian Studies, Deakin University), and in partnership with the Australian-American Fulbright Commission and the National Library of Australia. The Fulbright program has enabled over 2500 Australian students, academics and professionals to study and carry out research in the United States, in every field, from neurophysics to economics to dance. Almost as many US scholars have visited Australia over the same period.

This project will seek to uncover whether and how Australian society and research cultures have been shaped by the experiences of this influential body of scholars, through the post-war period to the present day. The experience of individual scholars will be investigated through surveys, in-depth interviews (with the National Library’s Oral History Unit), and archival research. We will also delve into the story of the Australian-American Fulbright Commission, the independent, bi-national body which administers the program.

Research Publications

• A Shifting Shore: Locals, Outsiders, and the Transformation of a French Fishing Town, 1823-2000 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press). Shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s History Awards (2005)
• The Student Chronicles (MUP, 2006)

Links to other websites

National Library of Australia Oral History Unit: http://www.nla.gov.au/oh/index.html
Australian-American Fulbright Commission: http://www.fulbright.com.au/index.html