Rate My Professor Kirsten McKenzie

Professor Kirsten McKenzie holds the Chair in Australian History in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Sydney's School of Humanities. Born in South Africa, she obtained a BA (Hons) and an MA from the University of Cape Town before completing her doctoral research on gender and colonial identity as a Rhodes Scholar at Magdalen College, Oxford, in 1997. Following a postdoctoral research fellowship at the University of Queensland in 1998, she joined the University of Sydney in 2002, where she began teaching Australian history in the Department of History. She currently serves as the inaugural Director of the Vere Gordon Childe Centre for the Archaeology of Cultural Formation. McKenzie is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities and the Royal Historical Society. In 2025, she was appointed as Harvard University’s Gough Whitlam and Malcolm Fraser Visiting Professor of Australian Studies for 2026-7.

McKenzie's research focuses on the history of colonial Australia, the transnational lives of marginal historical characters, and key themes including scandal, identity, social status, political liberties, and constitutional change. Her major publications include the books Scandal in the Colonies (2004), which examines gossip and reputation in Sydney and Cape Town; A Swindler’s Progress: Nobles and Convicts in the Age of Liberty (2009); Imperial Underworld: An Escaped Convict and the Shadow Empire (2016); the co-edited volume Mobility and Coercion in an Age of Wars and Revolutions: A Global History, c. 1750–1830 (2024); and Inquiring into Empire: Colonial Commissions and British Imperial Reform, 1819–1833 (2025), the first history of British imperial investigations post-Waterloo. Her scholarship has received accolades such as the Crawford Medal from the Australian Academy of the Humanities. Through her work, McKenzie illuminates the intersections of law, labor, and subjecthood in imperial contexts, contributing significantly to understandings of colonial societies and British imperial reform.