Academy Fellow

Professor Ann McGrath is Director of the Australian Centre for indigenous History in the History Program, Research School of Social Sciences at the Australian National University. She has written on indigenous history across trans-national frontiers in Australia and North America. Professor McGrath is currently working on a project with Frances Peters-Little and Margo Neale entitled Unsettling Histories: Australian Indigenous Modes of Historical Practice. In collaboration with the National Museum of Australia, she has also launched a new project on Indigenous Collectors and Collecting.

Her past work has included a general state by state history entitled Contested Ground: Australian Aborigines under the British Crown (1995) and Born in the Cattle: Aborigines in Cattle Country (1987) which made extensive use of oral history in reframing the narrative. Professor McGrath has worked on Northern Territory land claims, for the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, and as an expert witness in the Gunner and Cubillo stolen children test case.

She is interested in the relationship between historical experts and the law, co-editing with I. MacCalman Proof and Truth: the Humanist as Expert (2003). She is deputy chair of the Editorial Board of the journal Aboriginal History and of Public History Review. She recently organized a large collaboration with scholars from the Lamar Centre at Yale University which included a symposium Narrating Frontier Families in Australia and North America in Canberra, and a one-week study tour of the Northern Territory in collaboration with Charles Darwin University and the National Museum of Australia.

• Senior Citationship, Centre for Cross-Cultural Research, ANU (1998 - 2000)
• Archibald Hanna Jr Citationship in American History, Beinecke, Yale University (1997)
• Human Rights Award, non-fiction (1994)
• John Barrett Prize for Australian Studies (1994)
• W K Hancock Prize for History (1998)