Humanities and Social Sciences

History Program

Staff Profiles

Professor Marilyn Lake

Professor of History Room: David Myers Building E116 Tel: (61 3) 9479 1610 Fax: (61 3) 9479 1942 Email: m.lake@latrobe.edu.au Qualifications: MA Tas., PhD Monash, FAHA

Professor Marilyn Lake was awarded a Personal Chair in History at La Trobe University in 1994. Since that time she has also held Visiting Professorial Fellowships at Stockholm University, the University of Western Australia, the Australian National University and the University of Sydney. Between 2001 and 2002, she held the Chair in Australian Studies at Harvard University. In 2004, she was awarded a five year ARC Professorial Research Fellowship and in 2008, a Research Fellowship at the Australian Prime Ministers Centre in Canberra.

She has published 12 books and numerous articles and book chapters in Australian and international anthologies, on subjects ranging from labour history to land settlement, sexuality and citizenship, gender and nationalism, feminism and the politics of anti-racism. She has a particular interest in the class, gender and racial dimensions of political history understood in both national and  transnational frames of analysis. She has spoken on invitation to symposia and historical conferences in Canada, Germany, Italy, New Zealand, Sweden, the United Kingdom and the United States.

Professor Lake is a Fellow of both the Academies of Social Sciences and Humanities, of which she is also a member of Council and International Secretary. She is Vice-President of the Australian Historical Association, a member of the Board of the Victorian Women’s Trust and a Board member of the Sullivan’s Cove Waterfront Authority in Hobart, where she grew up.

Research Projects

Current research projects include:

• Australian-American male friendships and republican desire c.1900 including those between Prime Minister Alfred Deakin and Harvard Professor of Philosophy Josiah Royce and HB Higgins, president of the Commonwealth Arbitration Court and Felix Frankfurter, Justice of the US Supreme Court.
• Australian imperial ambition in the Pacific, 1870-1920.
  
• The history of human rights and modern mobility.
  
• Democracy and race: a modern history.

Graduate Supervision Areas and Topics

Professor Lake has supervised sixteen postgraduate students to successful submission on topics including the significance of visual appearance to women’s subjectivity in the 1920s; feminist campaigns for Aboriginal rights; the remembering and mis-remembering of feminism in the 1980s and 1990s; class formation and lesbian desire in the twentieth century; women in rural politics; and the creation of an Australian navy.

Current students are working on the political mobilisation of temperance reformers in Victoria in the nineteenth century; immigration policies in Australia and the United States and the significance of teaching studentships to women’s mobility in the 1960s and 1970s.

She is happy to supervise on any aspect of Australian political and intellectual history, campaigns for racial equality, women’s rights and human rights and transnational political history.

Research Grants

Professor Lake has won several large ARC research grants, the most recent for the project on a transnational history of white men’s countries and international campaigns for racial equality.

1995-1997

Australian Research Council - Large Grant - Chief Investigator: Marilyn Lake
Project : Women and Nation

1995-1997

Australian Research Council - Large Grant - Chief Investigators : Susan Magarey, Ann Curthoys and Marilyn Lake
Project : Sex and Citizenship A History of Women’s Liberation

1999-2000

Australian Research Council - Large Grant - Chief Investigator :  Marilyn Lake
Project : Mary Bennett and the Struggle for Aboriginal Rights

2004-2006

Australian Research Council - Discovery Grant - Chief Investigator: Marilyn Lake
Project: White Man’s Country and the Critics: A Transnational History