Rate My Professor Catharine Coleborne

Professor Catharine Coleborne is Professor of History in the School of Humanities, Creative Industries and Social Sciences at the University of Newcastle, within the College of Human and Social Futures. She serves as Director of Research Ethics and Integrity and previously held positions as Head of School and Dean of Arts from late 2015. Prior to joining the University of Newcastle in 2016, she was Associate Professor of History at the University of Waikato, New Zealand. Coleborne completed her PhD titled 'Reading Madness': Gender and Difference in the Colonial Texts of Lunacy at La Trobe University, following undergraduate studies at the University of Melbourne. She is an internationally recognised historian of health and medicine with an extensive record in research, teaching, and academic leadership.

For over 25 years, Professor Coleborne has investigated social and cultural histories of mental illness, psychiatric institutions created to confine, treat, and assist patients, immigrant experiences of confinement, madness in families, migration and ethnicity in mental health, colonial vagrancy, polio in Australia, and aftercare post-institutions from 1900-1960. She has secured Australian Research Council Discovery grants for projects including the hidden history of poliomyelitis in mid-twentieth-century Australia and life outside institutions. Key publications include the monograph Insanity, Identity and Empire: Immigrants and Institutional Confinement in Australia and New Zealand, 1873–1910 (Manchester University Press, 2015); Madness in the Family: Identifying Psychiatric Disorders in the Past (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); co-edited Why Talk About Madness?: Bringing History into the Conversation (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020); Migration, Ethnicity, and Mental Health: International Perspectives, 1840–2010 (Routledge, 2016); and Law, History, Colonialism (Manchester University Press, 2001, co-edited). Coleborne was elected Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Social Sciences (FASSA) in 2021 and Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. She delivers public lectures on topics such as colonial vagrancy laws punishing the poor and memories of polio, and supervises PhD research in medical and psychiatric history.