Kirsten McKenzie will take up the prestigious role of Harvard University’s Gough Whitlam and Malcolm Fraser Visiting Professor of Australian Studies for 2026-7.
Professor Kirsten McKenzie holds the Chair in Australian History at the University of Sydney’s School of Humanities and is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities and Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. The University’s Chair of Australian History was established with support from the New South Wales Parliament.
The Harvard University Gough Whitlam and Malcolm Fraser Chair in Australian Studies was established in 1976 to mark the United States’ Bicentennial celebrations. Over the years, the Chair has been held by distinguished Australian scholars such as Manning Clark, Tim Flannery, Helen Irving and Leone Kramer. Professor McKenzie is the fourth historian from the University of Sydney to be appointed to the position.
Professor McKenzie was born in South Africa and completed her doctoral research on gender and colonial identity as a Rhodes Scholar at Magdalen College, Oxford, in 1997. It was the ground-breaking work being done in Australian feminist historiography that inspired her to take up a postdoctoral research fellowship at the University of Queensland in 1998 and later to make her permanent home in Australia. She joined the University of Sydney in 2002.
Since that time, her research has connected the history of colonial Australia with the wider world, using the perspectives of cultural history to ask questions about the relationship between identity, social status, political liberties and constitutional change. She has a particular interest in researching and teaching the history of Sydney, most recently joining a team of historians, archaeologists, field robotics experts and remote pilots to map the historical landscapes of Wareamah Cockatoo Island in Sydney Harbour.
Professor McKenzie is also the inaugural Director of the multidisciplinary Vere Gordon Childe Centre, connecting researchers across the humanities, social sciences and life sciences to come to new understandings of the human past, its importance in the present and its impact on the future.
In Professor McKenzie’s own words, she writes “serious books about ripping yarns”. They include Scandal in the Colonies (2004), A Swindler’s Progress (2009) and Imperial Underworld (2016). She delights in following the transnational lives of marginal historical characters – from escaped convicts and serial con artists to wastrel aristocrats – and using them to expose the social and legal power structures of empire.
I am honoured by the opportunity to represent Australia at Harvard. I have based my career on the interface between Australian and global history and the chance to engage with so many distinguished scholars in my field, and to contribute my specialist knowledge of Australia to teaching and scholarly dialogue in the United States is tremendously exciting.
Kirsten McKenzie
Focusing on instances of scandal and imposture to understand the relationship between politics large and small, she writes history that brings the individual to the fore in understanding broad forces of change. As Professor McKenzie explains, “Scandal brings into public view matters and assumptions often hidden from history. Scandals can spark state repression, political activism and moral panics, and are used to both promote and resist change.” Her most recent books are both collaborative projects tracking worldwide struggles over law, labour and subjecthood: Mobility and Coercion in an Age of Wars and Revolutions (2024) and Inquiring into Empire: Colonial Commissions and British Imperial Reform, 1819 – 1833 (2025).
The Head of the School of Humanities at Sydney University, Professor Chris Hilliard, PhD ‘O3, said: “Like all her colleagues, I’m delighted to see Kirsten receive this honor—and excited that Harvard students will have the opportunity to work with her. Kirsten is a dedicated and creative undergraduate teacher and an influential trainer of graduate students. She did much to open up the field of Australian history to the energies of transnational history. She’s an extraordinary scholar and the best of colleagues.”
Professor McKenzie will be located in the Department of History where she will be researching and teaching on themes related to Australia’s role in the upheavals of war and revolution that shifted the geo-politics of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
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