Barbara Caine

Barbara Caine is Emeritus Professor of History in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Sydney. She served as Head of the School of Philosophical and Historical Inquiry from 2011 to 2019 and as Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. From 1991 to 1995, she was Associate Professor in the Department of History at the University of Sydney, where she established and served as the first Director of the Women's Studies Centre. Between 1995 and 2011, Caine held a Professorial Chair at Monash University, heading the School of Historical Studies and coordinating a Masters program in Biography and Life Writing. In 2007, she was awarded an Australian Research Council Professorial Fellowship for the project History and the Individual Life: Autobiography, Biography and the History of the Self in the British World c.1750-1980.

Caine earned her BA with the University Medal from the University of Sydney in 1969, an MPhil from the University of Sussex in 1976, and a PhD from Monash University. Her academic interests center on the history of feminism, women's history, biography, life-writing, and nineteenth-century studies. Key publications include Victorian Feminists (Oxford University Press, 1992), English Feminism 1780-1980 (Oxford University Press, 1997), Bombay to Bloomsbury: A Biography of the Strachey Family (Oxford University Press, 2005), Biography and History (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), and Friendship: A History (Equinox Publishing, 2009). She has edited Australian Feminism: A Companion (Oxford University Press, 1999) and Companion to Women's Historical Writing (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). Caine is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities (elected 1995; Vice-President 2002-2005), the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia, and the Royal Historical Society. In 2014, she received the Member of the Order of Australia (AM) for significant service to tertiary education, particularly gender studies.

Professional Email: barbara.caine@sydney.edu.au