Rate My Professor Tanya Evans

Professor Tanya Evans is Professor in the School of Humanities at Macquarie University, affiliated with the Centre for Applied History and the Centre for Media History. She earned her PhD from the University of London in 2002. Evans is a public historian specializing in family history and the history of the family in Britain and Australia from the nineteenth century to the present, as well as cultural heritage, history and sport including gender in sport, community, local and regional history, memory and life-stories, histories of charities and NGOs, history and the media, and history in tourism. She examines how history operates in everyday life and collaborates with communities to co-create knowledge about ordinary people and places.

In her career, Evans has undertaken consultancies across various historical fields and supervises higher degree research students. She leads several funded projects, including Australian Research Council grants for The History of Grandparenting in Australia since 1945 (2025-2028) and Australians and the Past Revisited (2026-2029), a Polish government-funded project on Public Histories of Diasporic Migration (2026-2030), and research on the history of fitness in Australia. She previously directed an ARC Linkage project on history, heritage, and environmental change in deindustrialised landscapes (2020-2024). Evans serves as President of the International Federation of Public History (2022-2025) and holds other international roles including Executive Board member of Public History Weekly and International Advisory Board Member of História Oral. Her awards include the Macquarie University Vice-Chancellor’s Citation for Outstanding Contributions to Student Learning (2016) and the NSW Premier's History Award for Community and Regional History (2016). Key publications encompass Fractured Families: Life on the Margins in Colonial New South Wales (2015), Unfortunate Objects: Lone Mothers in Eighteenth-Century London (2005), Sinners? Scroungers? Saints? Unmarried Motherhood in Twentieth-Century England (2012, with Pat Thane), and Family History, Historical Consciousness and Citizenship (2022). She has edited Inheriting the Family: Objects, Identities and Emotions (2025) and authored numerous articles and chapters. Through exhibitions, media appearances on radio and television, and policy contributions, Evans influences public understanding and democratizes historical knowledge.