Rate My Professor Chris Dixon

Professor Chris Dixon serves as Executive Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Professor of History at Macquarie University. He completed his BA (Hons) and MA at the University of Western Australia and his PhD at the University of New South Wales. A revised version of his doctoral thesis, Perfecting the Family: Antislavery Marriages in Nineteenth-Century America, was published by the University of Massachusetts Press. Dixon's research centers on American history, including African American history, US military history, and American cultural history. Key publications include African America and Haiti: Emigration and Black Nationalism in the Nineteenth Century (Greenwood Press, 2000), African Americans and the Pacific War: Race, Nationality, and the Fight for Freedom (Cambridge University Press, 2018), Hollywood's South Seas and the Pacific War (co-authored with Sean Brawley), and The South Seas: A Reception History from Daniel Defoe to Dorothy Lamour. He has also co-authored textbooks on the Vietnam and Pacific wars.

Prior to joining Macquarie University in 2016, where he first served as Dean of the Macquarie School of Social Sciences, Dixon was Reader in History at the University of Queensland (2007–2016), Associate Professor of History at the University of Newcastle (1994–2007), and Lecturer in History at Massey University (1993–1994), with earlier appointments at the University of Sydney. His accolades include the Fulbright Scholarship in Australian-U.S. Alliance Studies (2016) and grants from the Australian Research Council and the Australian Learning and Teaching Council. Dixon has held leadership positions as President of the Australian and New Zealand American Studies Association for two terms and President of the International Society for Cultural History. Current research projects explore African Americans in the Korean War and American servicemen on rest and recreation leave in Australia during the Vietnam War. Recent publications feature '"The pause that refreshes": American Servicemen on R&R in Australia, 1967–1971' (with J. Piccini, 2025) and 'Black America and Hollywood’s Korean War: The Steel Helmet (1951) and Pork Chop Hill (1959)' (with J. Johnson, 2024).