Rate My Professor Ann McGrath

Ann McGrath is a Distinguished Professor in the School of History at the Australian National University, holding the Kathleen Fitzpatrick ARC Australian Laureate Fellowship. She served as the W K Hancock Professor of History from 2019 to 2024. She earned a Bachelor of Arts with Honours from the University of Queensland in 1976 and a Doctor of Philosophy from La Trobe University in 1984. A Fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities and the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia, she holds an Honorary Doctorate from Linnaeus University in Sweden. Her accolades include the Member of the Order of Australia (AM) for services to history, particularly Indigenous history, the NSW Premier's History Prize for Illicit Love: Interracial Sex and Marriage in the United States and Australia, the Inaugural W.K. Hancock Prize and Human Rights Award for non-fiction for Born in the Cattle, the John Barrett Prize, and fellowships such as the Archibald Hannah Junior Fellowship at Yale's Beinecke Library, memberships at the Institute for Advanced Study in Durham and Princeton, a Rockefeller Foundation Scholarly Residency at Bellagio, and the 2017 Kathleen Fitzpatrick Australian Laureate Fellowship.

McGrath's research spans deep history in global context, spatial history and scale, gender and colonialism, Indigenous relations and intermarriage in Australia and North America, birth, love, marriage, law, justice, museums, museology, public history, and art in historical evidence. Key publications include Illicit Love: Interracial Sex and Marriage in the United States and Australia (2015), Born in the Cattle (1987), Everywhen: Australia and the Language of Deep History (editor, 2023), Long History, Deep Time (editor, 2015), and articles such as Deep history and deep listening: Indigenous knowledges and the narration of deep pasts (2021) and People of the Footprints: Rediscovery, Indigenous Historicities and the Science of Deep Time (2022). She has led projects like Rediscovering the Deep Human Past: Global Networks, Future Opportunities. Commencing her career in the Northern Territory, she held positions at Monash University, the University of New South Wales, and the National Museum of Australia. McGrath has presented history through exhibitions, films including A Frontier Conversation (2006) and Message from Mungo (2014), television advising, and consultancies such as the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody history project and expert witness in land claims and legal cases. With over 85 research outputs, her scholarship bridges academic inquiry and public engagement.