Rate My Professor Jacinta Walsh

Dr. Jacinta Walsh, a Yawuru, Jaru, and Kitja woman from Western Australia with English and Irish heritage and a mother of three sons, serves as Lecturer at the Monash Indigenous Studies Centre within the Faculty of Arts at Monash University since 2020. She completed her PhD at Monash University in September 2024, titled "Our Mabel. Our Voice: Through Life Story One Aboriginal Family Writes for Self-Love, Justice and Reconciliation," which chronicles seven generations of her family's experiences of colonisation, centering on her great-grandmother Mabel Ita Eatts, a Stolen Generations survivor removed by police in 1911 at age four or five. Walsh also holds a Bachelor of Education. Earlier in her career, she worked as Research Officer at the Monash Indigenous Studies Centre from 2018 and in Indigenous student support and recruitment roles at Monash University, the University of Melbourne, and Swinburne University over the past two decades. She is an Indigenous Research Fellow with the ARC Centre of Excellence for Indigenous and Environmental Histories and Futures and coordinates the unit ATS3584: The Indigenous History of Modern Australia.

Walsh's research focuses on Indigenous family histories, spirit-centered and trauma-informed truth-telling, reconciliation, and healing through life story research and writing; rights of First Nations youth in juvenile justice and out-of-home care systems; and access to historical archives, including narrative repatriation, Country as an archive, family oral histories, and textual records. She serves on the Victorian Stolen Generations Reparations Package Advisory Committee and the First Nations Biography Working Party of the Australian Dictionary of Biography. Her awards include the 2025 Kathleen Fitzpatrick Early Career Research Fellowship, Highly Commended for the 2025 John Mulvaney Fellowship, 2024 Monash University Indigenous Higher Degree Research Excellence Award, 2024 Wilhelm, Martha, and Otto Rechnitz Memorial Fund Grant Award, 2022 Jennifer Straus Fellowship Grant, 2022 In Memory of Feminist Fathers Bursary, and 2021 Marcia and Henry Pinskier Family Bursary. Key publications are "Married to a ‘British Subject’" (2023, Australian Journal of Politics and History), "Yarning with the Archives" (2024, co-authored with L. Russell, The Routledge Handbook of Australian Indigenous Peoples and Futures), "Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander young people leaving out-of-home care in Australia: A national scoping study" (2021, co-authored with P. Mendes et al., Children and Youth Services Review, 30 citations), "Indigenous youth transitioning from out-of-home care in Australia" (2022, co-authored with P. Mendes et al., Journal of Children's Services, 13 citations), and "Songlines in Action: Tracing five generations" (2023, Australian Book Review).