Humanities and Social Sciences

History Program

Staff Profiles

Dr Diane Erica Kirkby

Reader Room: David Myers Building E123 Tel: (61 3) 9479 2379 Fax: (61 3) 9479 1942 Email: diane.kirkby@latrobe.edu.au Qualifications: BA UNSW, PhD Calif.

Erica currently teaches USA Art and political cultural history; Australian history centuries; history of Food and Drink; film in history. Her research interests include:Labour history and gender; Women's work and popular culture; law and history; feminism. Erica won the WK Hancock Prize for her book Alice Henry:The Power of Pen and Voice.

>>Research Projects

Marriage women and property in 19th century Australia; Australian seafarers and their union.

>>Research Publications Selected Publications include: Voices From the Ships: Australia's Seafearers and Their Union, UNSW Press, 2008 Co-editor with Tanja Luckins, Dining on Turtles; Food Feasts and Drinking in History, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Alice Henry: The Power of Pen and Voice: The Life of an Australian-American Labor Reformer, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1991. Alice Henry was the winner of the WK Hancock Prize, 1995. Barmaids: A History of Women's Work in Pubs [1790-1990s], Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1997. Editor of Sex, Power and Justice: Historical Perspectives on Law in Australia, Melbourne, Oxford University Press, 1995. Co-Editor of Law History Colonialism: The Reach of Empire, Manchester, Manchester University Press, and N.Y. Palgrave, 2001. Dealing With Difference: Essays in Gender, History and Culture, Melbourne, Melbourne University, 1997.

>>Graduate Supervision Areas and Topics

Two previous PhD students have won the Australian Historical Association Serle Prize for the Best Thesis in Australian History:
Tanja Luckins, (in 2001) for her thesis "Gates of Memory:Loss Memory and the Great War in Australia "
and Marina Larsson,(in 2008) for her thesis, "The Burdens of Sacrifice:War Disability in Australian Families 1914-39."

Currently supervises students working on the New Left in US history; Australian women's history; histories of art; economic and social history of wheat farming in Victoria; gender and education history in Australia

>>Full Profile (pdf 96kb)