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Mark Finnane is ARC Laureate Fellow at Griffith University, Professor of History in the School of... more Mark Finnane is ARC Laureate Fellow at Griffith University, Professor of History in the School of Humanities, and Chief Investigator in the ARC Centre of Excellence in Policing and Security (CEPS). He is a former Dean of Humanities and Dean of Graduate Studies at Griffith. He was Director of CEPS in 2009. He is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities (elected 2001), and of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia (2013). His books include Insanity and the Insane in Post-Famine Ireland (1981 and 2003), Police and Government: Histories of Policing in Australia (1994), Punishment in Australian Society (1997), When Police Unionise: the Politics of Law and Order in Australia (2002), JV Barry: a Life (2007) and most recently (with Heather Douglas) Indigenous Crime and Settler Law: White Sovereignty after Empire (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), a study of the criminal law’s response to Aboriginal crimes of violence over the last two centuries.

Richard's research investigates the history and philosphy of European science from the seventeent... more Richard's research investigates the history and philosphy of European science from the seventeenth to the eighteenth centuries. His work has deflty explored the histories of information gathering, note-taking and communication across this period. Among his manu publications are:

Notebooks, English Virtuosi, and Early Modern Science (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, in press due January 2014). ISBN-13: 978-0-226-10656-4 (cloth); and ISBN-13: 978-0-226-10673-1 (e-book)
- Reviews:
Times Higher Education review: Notebooks, English Virtuosi, and Early Modern Science, by Richard Yeo
The Arts Fuse review: A Whirlwind Journey from Memory to Reason — Notebooks, English Virtuosi, and Early Modern Science

Keeping Notes in Early Modern England: Scientific Inquiry and Hippocrates’ Complaint (Melbourne: Ancora Press; 2013). ISBN 978-0-646-95643-3

Science in the Public Sphere: Natural Knowledge in British Culture, 1800-60, London: Ashgate, Variorum series, 2001.

Encyclopaedic Visions: Scientific Dictionaries and Enlightenment Culture, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001 (a 350 page monograph, reissued in 2010).

Telling Lives in Science: Essays on Scientific Biography (edited with M. Shortland), Cambridge University Press, 1996.

Defining Science: William Whewell, Natural Knowledge and Public Debate in Early Victorian Britain (Cambridge University Press, 1993, reissued in 2003), a 290 page monograph in the 'Ideas in Context' series. Joint winner of W.K. Hancock Prize, 1993-4.Book cover Defining Science
The Politics and Rhetoric of Scientific Method: Historical Studies (D. Reidel, Boston and Dordrecht, 1986), (edited with J.A. Schuster). This book is volume 4 of the Australasian Studies in History and Philosophy of Science (General ed. Rod Home).

Regina Ganter is a historian specialising in interactions between indigenous, Asian and European ... more Regina Ganter is a historian specialising in interactions between indigenous, Asian and European peoples in Australia. She is the multi-award winning author of The Pearl Shellers of Torres Strait (1994) and Mixed Relations (2006) having published widely in the field of cross cultural encounters and contributed to a number of broadcasts, museum exhibitions and curriculum materials. She has also produced a web-directory of intercultural encounters between indigenous people and German missionaries in Queensland for the Queensland Sesquicentennial celebrations in 2009 German Missionaries in Queensland.

Regina migrated to Australia in 1979 and has taught Australian history and heritage studies in the School of Humanities at Griffith University since 1992. She has been on the national executive of the Australian Historical Association, and gained the inaugural AHA Prize in Australian History in 1992, and the NSW Premier's History Book Award and the Ernest Scott Prize in Australian History in 2007. She is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities and an elected member of the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies. She is currently undertaking an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship to prepare a website on German missionaries, ethnographers and collectors in Australia.

Fiona Paisley is a cultural historian who studies the history of human rights and the politics of... more Fiona Paisley is a cultural historian who studies the history of human rights and the politics of race and gender in a variety of early twentieth century imperial and colonial settings. Her focus is on the ways in which Europeans and Indigenous peoples have separately and sometimes in cooperation debated the morality of settler colonialism in Australia and the Pacific, and sought to deploy new ideas within liberal internationalism and the promise of self-rule and decolonization arising in the first half of the twentieth century to the settler colonial question. She has written three sole-authored monographs concerned with a number of transnational critiques of colonialism and modernity advanced by humanitarian and Indigenous critics of empire – firstly in Loving Protection? she investigated the campaigns of white Australian women and their networks in London in the interwar decades; secondly she turned her attention to the activities of white and non-white women who were delegates to the Pan-Pacific Women’s Association meeting from 1920s to 1950s in the Pacific region (Glamour in the Pacific); and most recently she has completed a biographical study of an Aboriginal Australian man who protested settler colonial rule on the streets of London and Europe from the early 1900s (The Lone Protestor). Paisley’s international contribution to the field of critical imperial, transnational and settler colonial history has been through her investigations of the ways in which the politics of gender, culture and race have been variously mobilised by a diversity of progressives, intellectuals and activists involved either directly or indirectly in international debate about Australian Aboriginal conditions, particularly via London and in relation to the possibilities suggested by the League of Nations and a supposedly reformed British Empire. Her interest in the ways such ideas about empire and settler colonialism have circulated between colonies and empires as well as between Indigenous activists and non-Indigenous advocates for change is also reflected in a forthcoming co-written monograph about two US film-makers and their expeditions in the Pacific and Africa (Across the World with the Johnsons: Visual Culture and American Empire).

Bruce is a political theorist whose research focuses on the historical articulation of concepts o... more Bruce is a political theorist whose research focuses on the historical articulation of concepts of war, security, corruption, civility and savagery in Western history in the Early Modern period (c.1500-1800). In tracing the significant shifts in the meaning and use of these concepts in Western political thought, Bruce's work helps to illuminate the problems, limitations and the possibilities in their re-current usage in contemporary thought and practice. Bruce's current research projects investigate:
1. How modern understandings of corruption have emerged from a long history of moral argument that once entailed fears about physical degeneration, the decay of polities and the spiritual fate of human beings. This approach culminated in his latest book (with Professor Lisa Hill), An Intellectual History of Political Corruption (London and New York: Palgrave, 2014).
2. Why notions of security and warfare have become so entwined in the modern period. This research has been funded by an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship 2010-14 and has resulted so far in a variety of research papers published worldwide in Intellectual History Review, Alternatives, South Atlantic Quarterly, Global Change, Peace and Security, and Cultural Studies Review.
3. What we can learn about the meaning, communication and influence of the idea of civility by paying attention to its sonic profile in historic judgments about ‘uncivil’ noise and ‘civil’ sounds. Funded by an Australian Research Council Discovery Grant (2013-15) with colleagues at Griffith University, David Ellison and Pete Denney, so far this work has led to two co-convened research symposia and the preparation of new papers on civility, sound and colonization to be published.
4. When did modern ideas of race begin to supplant older notions of universal historical progress of all peoples? This question is the subject of a new project with Linda Andersson-Burnett (Linnaeus University, Sweden) funded by a Riksbankens Jubileumsfond Network Initiation Grant. This project has so far involved the co-convening of an initial workshop (Linnaeus University, February 2014), and commencement of work on a new chapter in the intellectual history of the relationship between Scottish Enlightenment moral philosophy and Linnaean natural history.
These projects build on Bruce's earlier work on Western political thought and the history of European colonization, especially in Australia, that was the focus of his first book, The Empire of Political Thought: Indigenous Australians and the Language of Colonial Government (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2008).

Pete is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Humanities. His research on British cultural history i... more Pete is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Humanities. His research on British cultural history in the eighteenth century centres on the literary representation of the senses in the Enlightenment and Romantic periods. Pete's work on sensory history also encompasses studies of the art, history and literature of landscape, and of the literature and politics of the 1790's. Currently, Pete is working as on Associate Investigator Grant from the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions, entitled: ‘The Battle of the Senses: Politics, Emotions and the Senses in Britain, c. 1760-1800'. Pete is also a joint Chief Investigator (with Bruce Buchan and David Ellison) on an ARC Discovery Project Grant, 2013-15, entitled: ‘Policing Noise: The Sounds of Civility in British Discourse, c. 1700-1850’. Pete's recent publications include:
‘Picturesque Farming: The Sound of “Happy Britannia” in Colonial Australia,’ Cultural Studies Review 18, no. 3 (2012).
‘Popular Radicalism, Religious Parody and the Mock Sermon in the 1790s,’ History Workshop Journal 74, no. 1 (2012).
‘The Talk of the Tap-Room: Bloomfield, Politics and Popular Culture,’ Romantic Circles Praxis Series (2012).
‘Looking Back, Groping Forward: Rethinking Sensory History,’ Rethinking History 15, no. 4 (2011).
‘The Pleasures and Perils of Gossip: Sociability, Scandal and Plebeian Poetry in the Long Eighteenth Century,’ in Claire Walker and Heather Kerr (eds.) Fama and her Sisters: Gossip and Rumour in Early Modern Europe, Brepols, forthcoming.
‘The Sounds of Population Fail: Changing Perceptions of Rural Poverty and Plebeian Noise in Eighteenth-Century Britain,’ in Anne Scott (ed.) Experiences of Poverty in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and France, Ashgate, 2012.

Mike is a Lecturer in the School of Humanities whose research concentrates on the history of Brit... more Mike is a Lecturer in the School of Humanities whose research concentrates on the history of Britain in the eighteenth century, with a particular focus on the politics and radicalism of the 1790's. In addition to this, Mike has also written on the history of political violence and terrorism. Mike currently convenes the Enlightenment & Romanticism Research Network. His recent publciations include:
‘“Humbug in the Field”: The Outdoor Meetings of the London Corresponding Society, 1793-1797’, in Disturbing the Peace: Crowd Actions in Britain and France, 1381 to the Present, ed. Michael T. Davis (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming 2015).
‘"Meet and Sing, and Your Chains Will Drop Off Like Thread": The Political Songs of Thomas Spence', in Thomas Spence: The Poor Man's Revolutionary, ed. Alastair Bonnett and Keith Armstrong (London: Breviary Stuff Publications, forthcoming 2014).
Edited, The Transportation of the Scottish Political Martyrs to Botany Bay: The Correspondence (Edinburgh: Scottish Historical Society, forthcoming 2015).
Edited, Disturbing the Peace: Crowd Actions in Britain and France, 1381 to the Present (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming 2015).
Edited (with Brett Bowden, with a Preface by Geoffrey Robertson QC), Terror: From Tyrannicide to Terrorism in Europe, 1605 to the Future (Brisbane: The University of Queensland Press, 2008).
Edited (with Paul A. Pickering), Unrespectable Radicals? Popular Politics in the Age of Reform (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008).

Prue Ahrens is a Lecturer in Art Theory at the Queensland College of Art at Griffith Univeristy. ... more Prue Ahrens is a Lecturer in Art Theory at the Queensland College of Art at Griffith Univeristy. Prue is also currently the Convenor of the Transnational Histories Group in the Griffith Centre for Cultural Research. Prue’s research and teaching focus on the Asia-Pacific region, in terms of the histories and theories of colonialism and post-colonialism, modernism and modernity.

Prue contributes research on Asia-Pacific imagery to journals such as Third Text, American Art Journal and Continuum. She has co-edited the first cultural map of modern networks across the Pacific, Coast to Coast: Case Histories of Modern Pacific Crossings (2010) and is co-author of the first cultural history of Martin and Osa Johnson’s Asia-Pacific films, Across the World with the Johnsons: Film, Photography and American Empire (Ashgate). Prue’s research also informs exhibitions, and she has curated two international exhibitions of American wartime photography in the Pacific, Tour of Paradise: An American Soldier in the South Pacific (2006) and Arthur Lavine’s Pacific Inspirations (2008). Prue’s interests include material culture and dress histories of the Pacific region and she contributed to the Berg Encyclopedia of World Dress and Fashion: Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific Islands. Her research has evolved towards representations of refugees in contemporary Australian visual culture and in 2011 she co-curated Waiting for Asylum: Figures from an archive at the University of Queensland Art Museum.

Prue’s PhD in Art History from the University of Sydney was titled ‘The Missionary Agenda and George Brown’s Photography’ (2004). Before joining Queensland College of Art, Prue lectured in art history at the University of Queensland and participated in the multi-disciplinary research program of the Cultural History Project. In 2010, she was the Terra Foundation Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Smithsonian American Art Museum where she researched ‘Travelling modernisms: American Art and the South Pacific’. Her research has been recognized by awards from the Paul Mellon Centre for British Art (Yale University), Huntington Library and Art Collection Los Angeles, and Universitas 21 in conjunction with the University of Glasgow. She serves on the board of Shima: The International Journal of Research into Island Cultures and regularly contributes to the visual arts community through reviews and public programs.

Yorick is currently working in the ARC Centre for Excellence in Policing and Security, Griffith U... more Yorick is currently working in the ARC Centre for Excellence in Policing and Security, Griffith University, as part of the ARC Laureate 'Prosecution Project' directed by Profesor Mark Finnane. Yorick is an Australian historian and postdoctoral fellow at CEPS. He previously taught at the University of Queensland. Yorick has particular interests in sex and gender, war and society, and the law and criminal justice system. He is currently undertaking a study of child-sex crime in nineteenth and twentieth century Queensland, the first substantial longitudinal historical project of its kind in any Australian jurisdiction. Yorick is also working on two other projects: homosexuality and Army management; and models of sexual identity in Queensland in WWII.
Yorick's recent publications include:
Yorick Smaal, Sex, soldiers and the South Pacific: Homosexual Identities in World War II, Palgrave Macmillan (UK), under contract
Yorick Smaal and Graham Willett, eds, Gay and lesbian perspectives VII, Monash University Publishing, offered for contract by Monash University Publishing, forthcoming 2013.
Yorick Smaal and Graham Willett, eds, Out here: gay and lesbian perspectives VI, Melbourne: Monash University Publishing, 2011.
Yorick Smaal ‘Keeping it in the family: Incest in colonial Australia’, Journal of Australian Studies, forthcoming Nov 2012.
Yorick Smaal ‘Historical Perspectives on Child Sexual Abuse’, part 1, History Compass, forthcoming
Yorick Smaal ‘Historical Perspectives on Child Sexual Abuse’, part 2, History Compass, forthcoming
Yorick Smaal, ‘“It’s one of those things no-one can explain”: medicine, homosexuality and the Queensland courts in World War 2’, Journal of the History of Sexuality, forthcoming
Yorick Smaal, ‘“The leniency problem”: a Queensland case study on sentencing male same-sex offences, 1939-1948’, in Rebecca Jennings and Lisa Featherstone, eds, Women’s History Review, forthcoming 2012.

Amanda is an historian and Research Fellow with the ARC Laureate Fellowship Project ‘Prosecution ... more Amanda is an historian and Research Fellow with the ARC Laureate Fellowship Project ‘Prosecution and the Criminal Trial in Australian History’ at the ARC Centre of Excellence in Policing and Security, Griffith University. Prior to my current position, I joined Griffith in 2012 after being awarded the competitive Arts, Education and Law Postdoctoral Research Fellowship.

I received my PhD in History from the University of Sydney in 2010. Since that time, I’ve lectured in Australian history at the University of Newcastle. I have held the Arts New South Wales Archival Research Fellowship and the New South Wales State Library’s David Scott Mitchell Fellowship. I have received funding from the Francis Forbes Society for Australian Legal History to create an online database of the three thousand capital convictions handed down in New South Wales from 1788-1954 (http://research.forbessociety.org.au/).

My research spans the fields of history, law, and criminal justice studies, examining the intersections between justice systems and conceptions of race, gender, and sexualities. My major research project, ‘Homicide: Violence, Law and Australian Society, 1850s-1950s’, compares and contrasts the policing and prosecution of homicide in four Australian jurisdictions over one hundred years. I have published a range of articles on the historical treatment of violence and am currently completing Sex Crimes in the Fifties (with Lisa Featherstone) under contract with Melbourne University Publishing for release in 2015.

Amanda's recent publications include:
Kaladelfos, Amanda and Feathertone, Lisa, Sex Crimes in the Fifties, under contact with Melbourne University Publishing, 2015.

Kaladelfos, A. and Featherstone, L. (Eds.), ‘Special Issue: Sex and Violence’, Australian Feminist Studies, forthcoming, mid-2014.

Featherstone, Lisa and Kaladelfos, Amanda 'Hierarchies of Harm: Historicising Familial Sexual Violence in Australia’, Australian Feminist Studies, Special Issue ‘Sex and Violence’ Kaladelfos and Featherstone (Eds.), (accepted 21 January 2014, forthcoming publication July 2014).

Kaladelfos, Amanda, ‘The Dark Side of the Family: Paternal Child Homicide in Australia’, Journal of Australian Studies, 37, 3 (2013): 333-348.

Kaladelfos. A. ‘The ‘Condemned Criminals’: Sexual Violence, Race, and Manliness in colonial Australia’, Women’s History Review, Vol. 21, Issue 5 (August, 2012): 697-714.

Kaladelfos, A. ‘The Politics of Punishment: Rape and the Death Penalty in colonial Australia, 1841-1901’, History Australia, Vol. 9, No. 1 (April, 2012): 155-175.

Alana Piper is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow attached to the Prosecution Project. Her postdoctor... more Alana Piper is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow attached to the Prosecution Project. Her postdoctoral project ‘Theft on Trial: Stealing, Society and Self in Australia, 1861-1961’ will look at the legal, cultural and emotional circumstances and ramifications of theft, particularly in regards to personal and community identities. Alana received her PhD from the University of Queensland in 2014. Her thesis examined relationships between women in criminal subcultures in Brisbane and Melbourne during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Alana is a University medal recipient, and in 2011 she was awarded the John Barrett award for Australian studies for her article on alcohol use amongst young girls in early twentieth-century Brisbane. She has published in History Workshop Journal, History Australia, Journal of Australian Studies and Queensland Review.
Alana's publications include:
“‘A Menace and an Evil’: Fortune-telling in Australia, 1900-1918,” History Australia 11, no. 3, forthcoming 2014.
(with Melissa Bellanta) “Looking Flash: Disreputable Women’s Dress and ‘Modernity’, 1870-1910,” History Workshop Journal 77, no. 2, forthcoming 2014.
“‘I Go Out Worse Every Time’: Connections and Corruption in a Female Prison,” History Australia 9, no. 3, 2012, 129-150.
“All the Waters of Lethe: An Experience of Female Alcoholism in Federation Queensland,” Queensland Review 18, no. 1, 2011, 85-97.
“‘A Growing Vice’: The Truth about Brisbane girls and Drunkenness in the Early Twentieth Century,” Journal of Australian Studies 34, no. 4, 2010, 485-497.
“Great Expectations: Efforts to Entice Women to Queensland from 1860 to 1901,” Queensland History Journal 20, no. 8, 2008, 370-390.
“Female Convicts: Victims or Agents?” Crossroads 1, no. 1, 2006, 55-60.
(with Ana Stevenson), Perspectives on Power Special Issue, Crossroads, 6: 2, 2013.
(co-authored with Melissa Bellanta) “‘The Appearance of a Flash Prostitute’: Brisbane Prostitutes’ Street Style, c. 1870-1920,” The Fashion Archives, thefashionarchives.org issue 5, October 2013.

Juliette is an Adjunct Research Fellow in History in the School of Humanities. Her work explores ... more Juliette is an Adjunct Research Fellow in History in the School of Humanities. Her work explores British imperial and commonwealth history with a focus on race, ethnicity and identity formation in the British Empire. Juliette's innovative PhD research applied autoethnographical historical methodologies in the study of the colonial culture of Zambia. She has continued to extend this research and her publications include:
Milner-Thornton JB, 2012, the Long Shadow of the British Empire: the Ongoing Legacies of Race and Class in Zambia, Palgrave Macmillan, New York.
Milner-Thornton, J.B., 2014, “Rider of Two Horses: Eurafricans in Zambia”. In Rebecca Chiyoko King-O'Riain, Stephen Small, Minelle Mahtani, Miri Song (Eds.), Global Mixed Race, New York: New York University Press.
Milner-Thornton JB, 2009, ‘Absent white Fathers: coloured identity in Zambia’ in Mohamed Adhikari (ed.), 2009, Burdened By Race: Coloured Identities in southern Africa; University of Cape Town Press: Cape Town, pp. 185 -207.
Milner-Thornton, J. B. ‘Gender, Sexuality and Dr Broomfield the Transnational Subject in Australia and Zambia’ Issue 3 Transnational Subjects Journal special editions: "Gender, Sexuality, and the Transnational Subject", to be guest edited by Gregory Smithers (forthcoming) October 2012.
Milner-Thornton JB, 2007, ‘Feather Bed Dictionary: Sex and Colonialism’, History Compass Journal published online Volume 4 issue 4 May 2007; Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd, pp111-1135

Veronika is a PhD candidate in the Schoo of Humanities. Her thesis is entitled: Multiple layers o... more Veronika is a PhD candidate in the Schoo of Humanities. Her thesis is entitled: Multiple layers of history on North Stradbroke Island in the beginning of the 20th century. This PhD project looks at the multiple layers of history on North Stradbroke Island, the relations and interactions between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people in the beginning of the 20th century. The issues addressed include inter-racial relations, identity, gender, space and the concept of entanglement.

Georgia-Lee is a PhD candidate in the School of Humanities, whose thesis title is: Approaches to ... more Georgia-Lee is a PhD candidate in the School of Humanities, whose thesis title is: Approaches to the Consumption of Australian History. This PhD project explores popular narratives of Australian history and how these narratives are consumed by audiences. My research looks into how the consumption of popular history influences personal and national identity, and how the production of history is changing in both scholarly and public/popular fields. In the process, this work will challenge dominant Australian historical narratives, and critically asses the plethora of new histories being created over a wide range of formats.

Jo is a PhD candidate in the School of Humanites. Her thesis title is: Bertrand Russell’s and Jul... more Jo is a PhD candidate in the School of Humanites. Her thesis title is: Bertrand Russell’s and Julian Huxley’s Utopian Encounters in the Antipodes: 1950s Australia as a Space of Hope.
British internationalists Bertrand Russell and Julian Huxley made separate lecture tours of Australia in the early 1950s under the auspices of the Institute of International Affairs, speaking to the public on the folly of nuclear war and the progressive capacities of scientific knowledge. During their visits both Russell and Huxley imagined Australia as a utopian space that contained cultural and natural possibilities for a peaceful, global civilisation. The PhD will explore some of the questions raised by these imaginings that are significant to the transnational histories of internationalism and colonialism in the mid-twentieth century.

Karen is a PhD candidate in the School of Humanities. Her thesis title is: Constructing Social Hi... more Karen is a PhD candidate in the School of Humanities. Her thesis title is: Constructing Social Hierarchies: The Institutionalisation of Children and British Colonisation in Australia 1750-1850. Studies of late eighteenth and early nineteenth century child institutional practices in Britain and colonial Australia have predominantly been linked to discussions about industrialisation and child labour, education, ideas of child, childhood and family, social policies, and studies of the poor. This research provides an understanding of the varying roles of child institutional practices in the development of society during this dynamic period of economic, political, social and intellectual change. The aim of this project is to contribute to this scholarship by exploring how child institutional practices influenced the social formation and construction of hierarchies within each location.
Karen's publications inlcude:
Karen Laughton 'The Parramatta Native Institution: A Civilizing Experitment in Early Colonial Australia' in M. Gillespie, Philippe and Michel Savaric Laplace (eds.) Margins and Peripheries in English-Speaking Countries, (Paris: L'Harmattan, 2014), pp. 205-216

Jill is a PhD candidate in the School of Humanities. Jill's thesis: Conciliation in British Colon... more Jill is a PhD candidate in the School of Humanities. Jill's thesis: Conciliation in British Colonial Governance 1750-1850, investigates the meaning and practice of conciliation in colonial governance using a conceptual history approach. I challenge the notion that conciliation was about establishing friendship with Indigenous populations. I examine the political theory that informed this strategy of colonial governance and detail the manner in which it was practised.
Jill's publications include:
Jillian Beard, 'Conciliation in New South Wales, 1788-1815: A Colonial Governance Strategy' in J. Bonnevin, D. Waterman, and S. Ryan-Fazilleau
(eds.), Aboriginal Australians and Other 'Others', Paris: Les Indes Savantes, 2014, pp.171-185.
Jillian Beard 'Conciliation at the Margins and Peripheries of the British Empire, 1788- 1815' in M. Gillespie, Philippe and Michel Savaric Laplace (eds.) Margins and Peripheries in English-Speaking Countries, (Paris: L'Harmattan, 2014), pp. 217-228.

Lisa Durnian graduated from the University of Queensland with first class honours in criminology ... more Lisa Durnian graduated from the University of Queensland with first class honours in criminology in 2013. Lisa joined the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Griffith University as an ARC Laureate PhD candidate with the Prosecution Project. Her doctoral research will identify the structural mechanisms that led to system transformation in criminal trials; that is, the shift from traditional jury trials to the current phenomena where most criminal matters end in guilty pleas. Her thesis involves mixed-methods analyses to track changes in the disposition of criminal cases over time.

Funded Research Programs by Griffith History

This project is led by Australian Research Council Laureate Professor Mark Finnane. Mark's resear... more This project is led by Australian Research Council Laureate Professor Mark Finnane. Mark's research focusses on the history of policing, punishment and criminal justice in modern Australia. His current focus is on the history of prosecution and the criminal trial in Australia. This project was awarded an ARC Laureate Fellowship in 2013 which supports a research team including myself as ARC Laureate Fellow, with Research Fellows Dr Amanda Kaladelfos and Dr Alana Piper, and PhD student Robyn Blewer. Further staff and students will be appointed in time, and we welcome expressions of interest from prospective students, from honours to PhD.

The project: The criminal trial is the core of the Australian criminal justice system. It is the product of police investigation and its outcomes include the sentences of imprisonment that populate our prisons. Criminal trials have been taking place in Australia since the first days of settlement. The archives of the Australian states are custodians of their records, which are among the most complete in the world.

The Prosecution Project will examine the history of the criminal trial in Australia. Its starting point is the digitisation of the registers of Supreme Court cases that are available in most jurisdictions in one form or other from as early as the beginning of settlement (eg the Western Australia register of indictments commences in 1830). From this base data, extended through use of other archival sources and supplemented by the National Library of Australia's 'Trove' digitised newspapers, researchers will be in a better position to analyse patterns of crime, prosecution and punishment over long periods of time, with more intensive archival studies of particular crimes, regions, eras, and legal and policing policies and practices. The project’s start and end dates of 1850-1960 will vary for jurisdictions according to the availability of records.

The Prosecution Project is designed to offer two other outcomes for the longer term – a rich database of materials for the use of future researchers; and a database that can be used also by family, community and genealogical researchers and users.