Rate My Professor Christine De Matos

Dr Christine de Matos is a Research Adjunct and Adjunct Senior Lecturer in History within the School of Arts and Sciences at the University of Notre Dame Australia, Sydney campus. She earned her BA (Hons) and PhD from the University of Western Sydney, and a Diploma of Education from the University of Sydney. Previously serving as a Senior Lecturer in History and Associate Dean of Academic Development and Research at the same institution, her academic career centers on the historical examination of power dynamics in military occupations and international relations.

De Matos's research interests include Australian history, Australia-Japan relations, the Allied Occupation of Japan (1946-1952), military occupations and power, gender and history, labour history, digital history, and fiction and history. Her primary focus is the Australian role in the Allied Occupation of Japan, analyzing occupier-occupied relationships through gender, race, and class lenses. She has received the Japan Foundation Fellowship (2004), the Ann Moyal Essay Prize (2023), and the Circa Prize for best article (2020) for 'Dance as Performative Public History?: A journey through Spartacus'. Her publications include books such as Imposing Peace and Prosperity: Australia, Social Justice and Labour Reform in Occupied Japan 1945-1949 (Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2008), Japan as the Occupier and the Occupied, co-edited with Mark E. Caprio (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), Gender, Power and Military Occupation: Asia Pacific and the Middle East since 1945, co-edited with Rowena Ward (Routledge, 2012), and Occupying the 'Other': Australia and Military Occupations from Japan to Iraq, co-edited with Robin Gerster (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009). Recent articles comprise ‘The Home as a Space of Re-Education: Imperialism, Military Occupation, and Housekeeping Manuals’ (The International History Review, 2024), 'Visualising the Modern Housewife: US Occupier Women and the Home in the Allied Occupation of Germany, 1945–1949' (Histories, 2024), and ‘Forgotten Forced Migrants of War: Civilian internment of Japanese in British India, 1941–1946’, co-authored with Rowena Ward (Journal of Contemporary History, 2021).