Rate My Professor Mel Davies

As an economic historian, Mel Davies' research interests span demography, development, social history, British economic history, and nineteenth-century South Australian history, with primary emphasis on mining history. His studies focus on South Australian copper mining at sites like the Burra Burra Mines, covering liquidity problems, financial resolutions, capital, industrial relations, copper smelting, road and shipping transportation, and Western Australian gold mining finance and capitalisation. Key publications include 'Australian Mining as an Engine of Growth and Development' (2014) in Historia de la Mineria, 'Financing the Burra Burra Mines, South Australia: Liquidity Problems and Resolutions' (2010) as a UWA Economics Discussion Paper, and 'Maintaining Liquidity: Financial Problems and Their Resolution at the Burra Burra Mines, South Australia in the Nineteenth Century' (2007). He has presented papers at national and international conferences, delivered invited lectures and seminars from 1970 to 2007, and organized conferences on economic and mining history. A founder member of the Australian Mining History Association, he has served over 15 years as Secretary and Treasurer, and as editor of the Journal of Australasian Mining History and its quarterly newsletter. Davies coordinated international mining history congresses from 1998, including events in Guanajuato, Mexico (1998), Milos, Greece (2000), Hokkaido, Japan (2003), Bhubaneswar, India (2007), and was elected Secretary for the 2009 congress in Redruth, Cornwall. He collaborates with mining history scholars in the UK, Canada, South America, South Africa, and the USA. Current projects encompass a biography of mining entrepreneur Claude Albo de Bernales and papers on John Benjamin Graham and early Burra Burra challenges.