The Centre for
Centre for the History of Violence


The Impact of Solitary Confinement on Convicts, 1817-1853

Professor Hamish Maxwell-Stewart; Professor Catharine Coleborne; Dr Jeremy Prichard; Professor Stefan Petrow; Professor Kris Inwood; Professor Hilary Marland; Dr Catherine Cox

2018-2020 ARC funded Discovery Project, $417,684

This project aims to explore the impact of solitary confinement on the health and well-being of 72,500 convicts transported to Australia between 1817 and 1853. It will do so by linking detailed life course histories for these men and women to psychiatric admission data for Tasmanian 19th century institutions. The project results will inform policy as well as increasing on-line access to Australia's UNESCO Memory of the World registered convict records. The project outcomes will help to contextualise the risks associated with different types and rates of solitary confinement exposure.

Unquiet Minds: Psychiatry in World War Two and its Aftermaths

Dr Elizabeth Roberts-Pedersen

2016-2018, Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA ), ($354,000)

This project aims to provide the first comprehensive account of psychiatry in World War Two and its consequences in American, British and Australian contexts. World War Two was a watershed in the theory and practice of psychiatry in the western world, yet it figures less in the literature than the shell shock of World War One and the post-traumatic stress disorder of the Vietnam War. The projects aims to investigate the diverse patient cohorts – such as prisoners of war, veterans and children separated from caregivers – encountered by psychiatrists and the impact of the theories and practices that resulted from these interactions. It expects to provide historical context for current psychiatric concepts and practices.

The Cambridge World History of Violence

General Editors: Prof Philip Dwyer and Prof Joy Damousi (Melbourne University)

This multi-volume world history is the first collection of its kind to look at 'violence' across all periods of human history and across all regions of the world. It capitalises on the growing scholarly interest in the history of violence, which is emerging as one of the key intellectual issues of our time... read more.

Sexual Offences, Legal Responses and Public Perceptions, 1880s-1980s

Dr Lisa Featherstone; Dr Amanda Kaladelfos (Griffith); Dr Carolyn Strange (ANU); Dr Nina Westera (Griffith)

2015-2017 ARC funded project, $237,326

Testimony of sexual abuse before the current Royal Commission has exposed the historic neglect and cover-up of institutional offences. Yet, to unearth the deeper and wider dimensions of sexual offending requires scholarly historical analysis. This project aims to use qualitative and quantitative analysis to track how and why certain forms of sexual behaviour sparked public concern and provoked legal responses and public inquiries from the 1880s to the 1980s. The systematic examination of these patterns through archival and published documents is intended to test the relation between shifting community and political concerns and the conduct of criminal trials.

Intimacy and Violence in Anglo Pacific Rim Colonial Societies, 1830-1930

Prof Lyndall Ryan; Prof Amanda Nettelbeck (Adelaide); A/Prof Anna Johnston (Utas); A/Prof Penelope Edmonds (Utas); A/Prof Victoria Haskins; Dr Angela Wanhalla (University of Otago)

2015-2018 ARC funded project, $500,137

Violence and intimacy were both fundamental to the formation of settler colonial societies, yet we know surprisingly little of how they were connected. Through a large-scale collaboration of leading scholars, this project aims to produce the first transnational analysis of intimacy and violence as key, intertwined vectors in the development of settler societies across the colonial Anglophone Pacific Rim. Drawing out connections between the broad-scale dynamics of colonial rule and the violent and intimate domains of its implementation on the ground, the project aims to generate new comparative insights into the development of colonial settler cultures and create enhanced understanding of their legacies for western settler democracies today.

Violence on the Australian Colonial Frontier, 1788-1960

Prof Lyndall Ryan, and Dr Jonathan Richards (UQ)

2013-2016 ARC funded project, $289,000.00

How many Aborigines and settlers were killed on the Australian frontier? Were they mostly killed in ones and twos or in mass killings? How can we know? These questions are of first national importance in understanding the past. This project takes a fresh approach to frontier violence by employing new analytical methods to investigate the complex array of sources to produce new estimates of casualties 1788 to 1960. The findings will be made available in online maps and transform our understanding of the ongoing trauma of frontier violence that persists in Australian society today

War, Violence, and Apocalyptic-Millenarianism in the Middle East: Talat Pasha and the Foundation of Modern Turkey, 1874-1921

ARC Future Fellow A/Prof Hans-Lukas Kieser

2013-2017 ARC funded Future Fellowship, $790,764.00

This research project considers the Young Turk Revolution of 1908, the Ottoman entry into the First Word War on the side of the Axis powers, and the subsequent demise of the Ottoman Empire in a broad international context. It addresses matters of deep analytical import - state formation, political violence, and genocide - and the relationship between these elements. It focuses in particular on the Grand Vizir, Talat Pasha, the founder of the modern Turkish nation-state, and the architect of the Armenian genocide. This history is essential for a contemporary understanding of the most controversial problems - the Kurdish conflict, the Armenian question, Palestine - facing Turkey and the Middle East today.

Massacre and Colonization, 1780-1820

Prof Philip Dwyer, Prof Lyndall Ryan, Nigel Penn (UCT) and Barbara Mann (Toledo),

ARC funded project

This collaborative study examines massacre and colonization in a critical period in modern history
(1780-1820) in four different parts of the world - Australia, South Africa, North America and Europe. It will yield new conclusions about the massacre in history, and reverse accepted norms surrounding the interactions between conquerors and subaltern peoples. It is particularly important for understanding how societies identify with their past and especially in understanding contemporary race relations. Expected outcomes include a significant conceptual advance in the study of the history of massacre.

Women, Stalinism and the Soviet Home Front, 1941-45

Prof Roger Markwick, and Prof Dr Beate Fieseler (Düsseldorf) (ARC funded project)

Women have long been hidden players in warfare; nowhere more so than on the Eastern Front during the Second World War, where they played a crucial role in the defeat of Nazism by Stalin's Red Army. This international collaborative project is bringing to light the hitherto hidden wartime experiences of Soviet women who bore the brunt of maintaining life on the home front. The overarching objective of the project is to determine exactly what it was about Soviet state, society and culture that enabled the draconian Stalinist regime, confronted with catastrophic defeat, to mobilise millions of women on the home front.

British paramilitary violence in Ireland and Palestine, 1920–1926

Dr Matthew Lewis

In the aftermath of the First World War, paramilitarism became a central feature of British colonial policing. Focusing on the intersecting case studies of Ireland and Palestine, this study combines comparative, transnational and interdisciplinary approaches to assess how, why and with what consequence. In doing so, it offers a new perspective on the causes and dynamics of phenomenon in contrasting situations of imperial decline and accession, and examines the extent to which transnational actors transmitted violent methods and mentalities from one colonial context to another.

Sex Crimes in the Fifties

Dr Lisa Featherstone, and Dr. Amanda Kaladelfos (Griffith)

This project is the first major Australian study of the history of sex crime in the twentieth century. Covering the full range of sexual crimes that came before the courts—including gang rape, crimes against children, homosexuality, and acts of indecency—this study considers the perpetration of sex crime, the ways it was policed and treated in Australian courtrooms, as well as the ways the wider public understood these attacks. This study is particularly significant in light of the Federal Government's Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse: our research provides crucial historical background and analysis to the study of child sexual offences in the mid twentieth century.

Collateral Damage and World War II in Southeast Asia

Dr Shigeru Sato

World War II brought great misery, privation, and death to the people in Southeast Asia but the cause of the problem is poorly understood. This project casts light on some nonviolent aspects of the war's destructive forces. In places like Vietnam and Java that used to export food, millions of people starved to death although there was little exploitation or fighting. Through a comparative study of British Borneo, French Indochina, and the Dutch East Indies, this research presents a fuller understanding of the war's socio-economic impact, focusing on the problems of food, clothing, and labour.