Rate My Professor Desley Deacon

Desley Deacon is Emeritus Professor in the School of History at the Australian National University. She earned a BA (Hons) in English from the University of Queensland in 1963 and a PhD in Sociology from the Australian National University in 1986 for her thesis on the naturalization of dependence among women workers. Her career began in the Australian Public Service through the elite Administrative Training Program in 1964. In 1979, she joined ANU as Tutor in Sociology in the Research School of Social Sciences. From 1985 to 2001, she held positions at the University of Texas at Austin: Lecturer in Government, Assistant Professor in American Studies, Co-Director of the Clark Center for Australian Studies (1988-1991), and Director of Women's and Gender Studies (1999). Returning to ANU in 2001 as Professor of Gender History, she headed the Department of History from 2002-2004 and 2007-2008, during which the Australian Centre for Indigenous History and the National Centre of Biography were established. She retired in 2009.

Deacon's research focuses on gender history, women's biography, professional women in Australia and the United States, transnational lives, global modernity, and the history of sound and voice. Major publications include co-authoring Elites in Australia (1979); Managing Gender: The State, the New Middle Class and Women Workers 1830-1930 (1987); Elsie Clews Parsons: Inventing Modern Life (1997, recipient of the Robert W. Hamilton Faculty Book Award); editing Elsie Clews Parsons' Fear and Conventionality (1997); co-editing Talking and Listening in the Age of Modernity (2007), Transnational Ties: Australian Lives in the World (2008), and Transnational Lives: Biographies of Global Modernity 1700-present (2009); and authoring Judith Anderson: Australian Star, First Lady of the American Stage (2019), shortlisted for awards. Her articles won the Women and Politics Prize of the Australasian Political Studies Association in 1983 and 1984. A Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia since 2002, she received a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for University Teachers and served on editorial boards including History Australia and the ANU Lives series. Deacon advanced equity and women's issues at ANU and the University of Texas, mentored postgraduate students, and contributed to interdisciplinary historical approaches.