Academy Fellow

Andrew J. May is a Professor of History in the School of Historical & Philosophical Studies at the University of Melbourne, where he directs the Melbourne History Workshop (https://melbournehistoryworkshop.com) and the ‘My Marvellous Melbourne’ podcast (http://mymarvellousmelbourne.net.au). He has held positions as Associate Dean (Research) and Head of History. Professor May is a social historian with broad interests across urban, colonial and imperial history. As an urban historian he has published on the social experience of the Australian city, its public spaces and communal rituals, its suburban qualities, and its cosmopolitan cultures. As Director of the Encyclopedia of Melbourne, he guided that project's development from the mid 1990s to its publication by Cambridge University Press in 2005. His interests in multimedia have seen him involved in the development of history in new media formats, including Melbourne Podtours, eGold, Pathways to the Past (a learning module on using images as historical evidence), and eMelbourne (the Encyclopedia of Melbourne online). As a historian of imperialism, he also has a particular interest in imperial networks of science, religion and governance in the Khasi Hills of northeast India. He has served on boards, executives or advisory committees of the Australian Historical Association, National Trust of Australia (Victoria), City of Melbourne, Public Record Office Victoria, Australian Historical Studies, Heritage Victoria, State Library of Victoria, Melbourne Immigration Museum, Royal Historical Society of Victoria, Melbourne Museum, and the National Archives of Australia. He is a current historian member of the Victorian Heritage Council, and on the editorial boards of Urban History (UK), the Journal of Urban History (USA), and the European Association for Urban History.

Professor of History, School of Historical and Philosophical Studies, The University of Melbourne

Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia

Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society

1. May, A.J. (2017) Melbourne street life: the itinerary of our days (Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, first published 1998).

2. May, A.J. (2015) ‘“The starched boundaries of civilization”: sympathetic allegiance and the subversive politics of affect in colonial India’ in W. Jackson and E. Manktelow (eds), Subverting Empire: deviance and disorder in the British Colonial World (Palgrave Macmillan, Cambridge Imperial and Post-colonial Studies Series, 2015), pp. 61-84.

3. May, A.J. (2014) ‘Homo in nubibus: altitude, colonisation and political order in the Khasi Hills of Northeast India’, The Journal of Imperial & Commonwealth History 42 (1): 42-60.

4. May, A. (2012) Welsh missionaries and British imperialism: The empire of clouds in north-east India (Manchester: Manchester University Press).

5. Brown-May, A. & Swain, S. (eds) (2005) The Encyclopedia of Melbourne (Melbourne: Cambridge University Press).