Joy Damousi

Professor Joy Damousi is Professor of History in the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies within the Faculty of Arts at the University of Melbourne, holding the title of Professor in Australian History. As an ARC Kathleen Fitzpatrick Laureate Fellow, she led the Child Refugees and Australian Internationalism Laureate Fellowship project (1920-1970), investigating the experiences of child refugees in Australia, humanitarian campaigns by relief agencies, and links to Australia's international role in refugee and migration policy. Her research encompasses the history of emotions, memory and war trauma, migration and displacement—particularly post-World War II Greek immigrants and the Greek Civil War—psychoanalysis in Australia, colonial language and sound history, and gender in wartime bereavement. Damousi completed her PhD at the Australian National University in 1987 with a thesis titled Socialist Women in Australia, c.1890-c.1918. Born to Greek post-war immigrants, she grew up in Melbourne's inner suburb of Fitzroy during the 1960s and 1970s.

Throughout her career at the University of Melbourne, Damousi has authored numerous influential books, including The Labour of Loss: Mourning, Memory and Wartime Bereavement in Australia (Cambridge University Press, 1999), shortlisted for the NSW Premier's Australian History Prize; Freud in the Antipodes: A Cultural History of Psychoanalysis in Australia (UNSW Press, 2005), winner of the Ernest Scott Prize; Colonial Voices: A Cultural History of English in Australia, 1840-1940 (Cambridge University Press, 2010), shortlisted for the NSW Premier's Australian History Prize; Memory and Migration in the Shadow of War: Australia's Greek Immigrants after World War II and the Greek Civil War (Cambridge University Press, 2015); Depraved and Disorderly: Female Convicts, Sexuality and Gender in Colonial Australia (1997); Living with the Aftermath: Trauma, Nostalgia, and Grief in Post-War Australia (2001); and The Transnational Unconscious (2009, co-edited with Mariano Plotkin). She has also edited volumes such as Talking and Listening in the Age of Modernity: Essays on the History of Sound (ANU E Press, 2007, with Desley Deacon) and Gender and War: Australians at War in the Twentieth Century (1995, with Marilyn Lake). Her scholarship has shaped understandings of Australian social history, humanitarianism, and transnational memory studies.

Professional Email: j.damousi@unimelb.edu.au