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Susan Broomhall is Professor of Early Modern Studies and leads the Gender and Women's History Research Centre in the Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences. She is the author of numerous monographs and edited collections focussing on women and gender in the early modern world.
Michael D. Barbezat is a research fellow in Gender and Women's History Research Centre at the Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences. His research on medieval intellectual and religious history frequently examines the ideologies and assumptions that justified and encouraged persecution during the Middle Ages. His work has examined the convergencies of discourses regarding sexuality, heresy, demonology, and theology in the writings of medieval churchmen. He is currently researching a new project on medieval attempts to speak with the dead. In his study of historical desires to speak with people in the past, he is inspired by the methodologies provided by certain strands of modern queer theory regarding trans-historical desire and spectrality or hauntology.
Melissa Bellanta is an Associate Professor of History based in 糖心原创's National School of Arts and an affiliate of the Women's and Gender History Research Centre in the Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences. She is a social and cultural historian who investigates the relationship between men, gender and dress in twentieth-century Australian history. Bellanta's work also explores histories of masculine emotion, youth and street culture, and popular entertainment. Bellanta is sole chief investigator on the ARC Discovery Project "Men's Dress in Twentieth-Century Australia: Masculinity, Fashion, Social Change" and was a 2023 Powerhouse Research Fellow on the project "Dress and the Making of Queer Worlds in Sydney c.1980-1995". Bellanta's most recent work, published with Lorinda Cramer, explores the relationship between men's fashion and hegemonic masculinity; considers connections between Asian migrant men's suits and dignity in Australian society during the White Australia era; and explores how the Australian wool industry sought to target male consumers of fashion in response to the challenge of synthetics in the early postwar era. In addition, her recent chapter "Fashion and First Peoples" in the Cambridge Global of Fashion, vol. 1 (2023) foregrounded the significance of dress - and particularly ornament - in interactions between First Nations peoples and European settlers across Australia, New Zealand and North America between 1700 and 1850.
Sarah A Bendall is a Research Fellow at the Gender and Women's History Research Centre in the Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences. Her work focuses on the production, trade and consumption of global commodities and fashionable consumer goods, particularly in relation to women during the long 17th century. She also has expertise in recreative methodologies, such as historical dress reconstruction.
She is the author of Shaping Femininity (Bloomsbury, 2021) and co-editor of Embodied Experiences of Making in Early Modern Europe: Bodies, Gender, and Material Culture (Amsterdam UP, 2024). Her second monograph, The Women Who Clothed the Stuart Queens, will be published by Bloomsbury in mid-2026.
Her current research projects examine the widespread use of whaling products in fashion between the years 1500-1800 and the influence of French migrants on London's fashion marketplace during the seventeenth century.
Sharni is a final year PhD candidate researching women's economic and social activity in the Central Goldfields Region of Victoria, between 1835 and 1865. Her thesis primarily investigates their fundamental roles in the development of communities within this region, as well as the wider contexts of family migration, colonisation and female agency. Challenging the male-centric histories of the goldfields, and Australia more broadly, is also central to Sharni's research aims, with the purpose of revealing a more representational history.
Sharni's interests also extend into museology, archival collections and representations of female historical figures in these spaces, which she has researched in connection with her industry partnership with Sovereign Hill Museums Association.
Dr Tracey Clement is an award-winning artist and former Sydney Morning Herald art critic. Her recent non-traditional research outputs (NTROs) have been shown publicly in competitive exhibitions such as the 2025 Dobell Drawing Prize, the 2024 Blake Prize, and the 2022 North Sydney Art Prize. In 2021 Clement held a solo exhibition at the Casula Powerhouse (now Liverpool Powerhouse) which was the result of winning the 2018 Blake Prize Established Artist Residency and was informed by a 2019 AGNSW residency at the Cité in Paris.
Clement earned her PhD from the University of Sydney. For this research, which operated at the intersection of contemporary art and literary criticism, she developed a three-pronged research methodology which involved re-reading, re-writing and re-interpreting JG Ballard's 1962 speculative fiction novel The Drowned World through the lens of art. Clement used the novel as starting point from which to examine the ongoing climate crisis.
Although her primary medium is sculpture, all of Clement's work is multi-disciplinary in that her research relies on the synergy generated by thinking through both writing and the hands-on making of artworks. A key focus of her ongoing research is using the power of art as a visual communication tool designed to present the impact of an anthropocentric world-view in a way that beguiles with beauty -in order to foster dialogue and posit strategies for social adaptation-rather than bamboozling audiences with doom-laden facts.
Clement is an external member of the Sydney Environment Institute (SEI) at the University of Sydney.
Clare Davidson is a cultural and legal historian of late medieval and early modern Europe, and its reception in the British Empire and modern Australia. Her monograph Love in Late Medieval England (contracted with Manchester University Press) revises the significance of romantic love, desire, and sexuality in fourteenth-century England by recontextualising emotional statements found within medieval laws and literature. Her current research examines the history of analytical traditions and institutions, specifically in medieval and early modern literary and legal culture, and the Australian reception of English law.
Lexi Eikelboom is a research fellow in Religion & Theology at the Institute for Religion and Critical Inquiry. Her research on the use of artistic and aesthetic categories in articulations of Christian theology includes an examination of the gendered nature of those categories. Her current research project interrogates the construction and functions of the category "form" in Christian theology. She argues that the traditional Aristotelian metaphysic operative in the background of theological work on form (particularly in Thomas Aquinas and Hans Urs von Balthasar) codes form as a masculine principle that acts on matter - a feminine principle - resulting in a third: substance. Rather than a neutral construction, this understanding has problematic political implications. The project asks how the category might be re-imagined using resources from Christian theology and art and literary criticism so that it might become a helpful tool through which to oppose the hegemony of particular (gendered) forms that govern societies.
Alison Fitchett-Climenhaga is a Research Fellow in Religion & Theology at the Institute for Religion and Critical Inquiry. She specialises in the history and contemporary practice of Christianity in eastern Africa, especially among Catholic communities in Uganda and Rwanda. Her current book project explores how the ritual life and organisational cultures of two Catholic lay associations devoted to the Holy Spirit shape different styles of Catholic practice among participants. Since women predominate in these lay associations, charismatic Catholicism affords insight into Ugandan Catholic women's devotional lives and social activism. More broadly, her work explores the relationship of religion and conflict and gendered patterns of religious practice and leadership in eastern Africa. Her research also engages women's history in the region, including an early-stage project using the history of Rwandan Catholic women religious to explore women's changing roles in Rwandan society since the early twentieth century.
Sarah Gador-Whyte is a research fellow in Biblical and Early Christian Studies in the Institute for Religion and Critical Inquiry. As a literary and cultural historian of late antiquity, Sarah has worked on emotions history, liturgical literature and the interplay of rhetoric and theology in liturgical hymns, and interreligious conflict and dialogue. She studies women's roles in early Christian liturgy and examines perceptions of women and their activities in late antiquity more broadly. She is currently involved in a project on late ancient night-time activities, emotions, gender and imagination.
Anh Nguyen Austen is a cultural historian and Research Fellow at the Centre for Refugees, Migration, and Humanitarian Studies in the Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences. Her research with refugees and asylum seekers considers the role of race and gender in the arts, creative expression, and entrepreneurship in the food, hospitality, and well-being industry. How does a nationalised resettlement context inform the dynamics of a presumptive traditional or racially informed gender roles and modes of expression? How are race and gender expectations historicised, negotiated, and inform the process of belonging and the conception of a good life in Australia and other national contexts? Anh is currently exploring these questions with several industry partners including Melbourne Museum, Free to Feed, Thrive Refugee Enterprise, and Mentoring Men in Australia.
Dr Jae-Eun Noh is a Research Fellow in the Gender and Women's History Research Centre in the Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences. She is currently working on the research project, Solidarity in/for Global Health", funded by the Wellcome Trust. She also works on the project, "Moved Apart ", funded by the Swedish Research Council and led by Susan Broomhall. Jae-Eun has published over 25 articles and 7 book chapters exploring global development policies and practices from human rights and gender perspectives.
Lisa O'Connell is Associate Professor of English in the Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences and a specialist in British Literature of the eighteenth century. Her research interests include the history and theory of the novel, women's fiction, enlightenment, secularisation and early global literatures. Lisa has published on a wide range of topics and genres including marriage, nationalism, libertinism, popular anthropology, travel writing, romance, courtesan memoirs, sermons and settler fiction. Her recent monograph (Cambridge 2019) offers a new account of why and how marriage became central to the realist novel. Another recent essay reveals the neglected links between Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and the fiction of . Lisa's current projects include The Worlding of British Literature, 1700-1820, a book-length study of the globalising of the literary heritage which offers a new understanding of the period's significance to what we now call 'world literature', and The Novel Form and Women After Marriage, a project in its earliest stages exploring how aging and widowed women helped develop the novel form in the eighteenth century and beyond.
Elizabeth Reid is an historian of gender and early modern Italy, specializing in the social implications of allegory. She is currently a Research Associate with the Gender and Women's History Research Centre in the Institute for Humanities and Social sciences. Her first book Naturalising Social Hierarchies in Cesare Ripa's Iconologia: Personified Perceptions of Gender, Class, and Race has been accepted for publication with Brepols' IKON series. This book takes sociologist Serge Mostovici's Social Representation Theory as a lens to provide a wholly new perspective on personification in Early Modern Europe. It argues that in appropriating socialised bodies to standardise allegorical expression, Cesare Ripa's Iconologia naturalised and perpetuated historically impactful social hierarchies. Reid has articles and a book chapter that expose the gendered violence implied by the personifications created to adorn or reflect on Ceremonial Entries during the Italian Wars. Her current research includes analysing the cultural context and gendered social meaning of Tuscan Marian iconography that hinged on Mary's identity as a nursing mother; a study of how early modern natural philosophy concerning the physical and emotional power of olfactory experience was translated into material culture, with a particular interest in the correlation of fertility, femininity, and flowers conveyed through Venus and the Virgin Mary; and a study that examines Renaissance theories of how embodied responses to visual stimulus can enhance empathetic faith experiences. She is also a sought-after research assistant, project manager, and copyeditor, and has worked in this capacity across various disciplines including history, sociology, musicology, and pedagogy. In this capacity she is currently working as a research assistant, copyediting, and conducting research with the ARC Linkage project 'Mobilising Dutch East India Company Collections for New Global Stories.'
Natalie Tomas is a Honorary Fellow at the Gender and Women's History Research Centre in the Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences. She is a social and cultural historian of the early modern period interested in the exercise of power by women in the public sphere in early modern societies and how female leadership has been perceived at the time and throughout history. She is also interested in the gendering of space in early modern societies and how successful women are in negotiating the boundaries of gendered space. Her current research is focussed on the Spanish-born duchess of Florence and Siena, Eleonora di Toledo and her role in state formation. She is on the Academic Board of the Medici Archive Project. She has previously published in Renaissance Studies and has published two monographs and several book chapters in her field of interest. She has also published a bibliography on Eleonora di Toledo for Oxford University Press.
Robert T. Tomczak is a historian of late medieval and early modern East Central Europe, specialising in intellectual and cultural exchange, the history of universities, and peregrinatio academica. His work focuses on Polish and Czech history, with particular interests in alba amicorum, biography, genealogy, and heraldry. He is Assistant Editor of the Brepols series East Central Europe, 476-1795. He is a Postdoctoral Fellow on the project 'Polish queen consorts in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries as wives and mothers'. He is affiliated with the Institute of History of the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, and is an Honorary Adjunct Research Fellow at 糖心原创. A former recipient of the Swiss Government Excellence Scholarship, he conducted postdoctoral research at the University of Basel. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.
Professor Darius von Güttner-Sporzyński is a historian of East Central Europe, specialising in the political, cultural, and religious history of the late medieval and early modern periods. His research focuses on the Jagiellon dynasty, queenship, and the relationship between power, belief, and material culture in Poland-Lithuania and neighbouring regions. He is General Editor of the Brepols series East Central Europe, 476-1795. At 糖心原创, he is Campus Dean (Canberra) and Professor of History, contributing to teaching, research leadership, and curriculum development. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and the Royal Society of Arts. He has edited volumes on dynastic power and queenship, including The Jagiellon Dynasty, 1386-1596: Politics, Culture, Diplomacy (2024), Queen Bona Sforza of Poland: Sources and the Practice of Rulership in East Central Europe (with Agnieszka Januszek-Sieradzka, forthcoming 2026), and The Jagiellon Queens, 1386-1596: Power, Mediation, and Authority (with Susan Broomhall, forthcoming 2026).
Grace Waye-Harris is a Research Associate for the Gender and Women's History Research Centre. Grace's research examines the workings of dress in sixteenth-century court culture. Her forthcoming monograph examines the functions of fashion in diplomacy during the reign of Henry VIII. Recent publications include a journal article on Henry VIII's horned helmet, a cluster article on Henrician dress and the performance of diplomacy, and a forthcoming book chapter which considers the affective significance of queenly dynastic dress. Areas of interest include historical fashion and materiality, politics and diplomacy, the History of Emotions, the Tudors, and Italian Renaissance art and culture.