We are delighted that Professor Joy Damousi AM FASSA FAHA, one of Australia’s most distinguished historians and humanities thought leaders, will deliver the 2023 Women’s History Month Lecture, part of our Distinguished Lecture series.

Joy is the Immediate Past President of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, and a Fellow of both the Australian Academy of the Humanities and the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia.

She has also served as Chair of the Australian Research Council’s humanities and creative arts panels for Excellence in Research for Australia and on the College of Experts. She is currently the Director of the Australian Catholic University’s Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences, and has held leadership positions as Professor in the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies, Head of School, Associate Dean (Research) and Pro-Vice Chancellor (Research) at the University of Melbourne.

She was the 2015 Fred Alexander Fellow in History at the University of Western Australia, and is a holder of the Kathleen Fitzpatrick Fellowship for “outstanding female researchers in humanities, arts and social sciences”.

Joy’s areas of research include Australian social and cultural history, gender history and memory and the history of emotions. Her current research project is a history of child refugees, humanitarianism and internationalism from 1920, for which she was awarded an Australian Research Council Laureate Fellowship. Key publications include The Labour of Loss: Mourning, Memory and Wartime Bereavement in Australia (1999), Living with the Aftermath: Trauma, Nostalgia and Grief in Post-war Australia (2001), a collection of essays edited with Robert Reynolds, History on the Couch: Essays in History and Psychoanalysis (2003), Freud in the Antipodes: A Cultural History of Psychoanalysis in Australia (2005 – winner of the Ernest Scott Prize), Colonial Voices: A Cultural History of English in Australia 1840-1940 (2010) and Memory and Migration in the Shadow of War: Australia’s Greek Immigrants after World War II and the Greek Civil War (2015). Joy is the co-editor of a four-volume, Cambridge World History of Violence (2020). Her latest publication is The Humanitarians: Child War Refugees and Australian Humanitarianism in a Transnational World, 1919-1975 (Cambridge 2022).