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Dr Jane Carey

Tel: +613 990 54205
Fax: +613 990 20321
Email: jane.carey@arts.monash.edu.au
Room 221 (2nd Floor)
Building 55 (Monash Museum of Art), Clayton Campus

Jane Carey holds a five year Monash Fellowship in the Centre for Women's Studies and Gender Research and the Centre for Australian Indigenous Studies. She has a PhD in History from the University of Melbourne where she also completed degrees in Arts (honours) and Science (genetics). Previously she held a four year ARC Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Melbourne, and a short-term fellowship at the Smithsonian Institution. She joined Monash in 2009.

Research

Jane’s current research project explores the intersections between race, reproduction and the politics of population in British settler colonies from the mid-nineteenth century into the recent past. This work highlights the relationship between two processes essential to the creation of settler societies within the British Empire: the attempts to eliminate Indigenous populations; and the concurrent efforts to propagate a white population to replace them. While settler colonies’ treatment of Indigenous peoples (and other ‘non-white’ groups) has widely been understood in terms of ‘race’, this is far less true of activities aimed at increasing and improving the white population. The project thus has a significant focus on the racial politics of whiteness. It encompasses the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, to illustrate both the fundamentally transnational nature of these discussions, but also the often radically different ways they played out in specific times and places. The project is organised around case studies of governmental and popular responses to the four major ‘population panics’ that have consumed settler colonial societies: the Indigenous population ‘problem’; immigration; the declining (white) birth rate and concurrent anxieties about racial degeneration and the promotion of birth control and other eugenic measures; and broad concerns about health and hygiene.

Jane’s previous postdoctoral research explored the significance of race and whiteness in the Australian women’s movement from the 1880s to the 1930s, as well as the broader historical trajectories of whiteness and the synergies between the theoretical frameworks of whiteness studies and postcolonial theory. Her earlier PhD research examining the history of Australian women and science will be the subject of a forthcoming monograph in 2010. Her other publications include three edited collections Historicising Whiteness, Re-Orienting Whiteness, and Creating White Australia (forthcoming with Sydney University Press) and numerous chapters and articles, including two in premier international journals - Gender and History and the Women’s History Review.

Jane also has an interest in the history of eugenics and the re-emergence of neo-eugenics and genetic counselling, and has been researching a history of representations of white womanhood at American World’s Fairs from 1876-1940. Her broader research interests include colonialism and postcolonial theory, history of science, the history of ‘race’ and gender, exhibition history and transnational history.

Publications

A list of Jane’s publications can be found here (PDF)

Postgraduate Supervision

Jane has supervised a wide array of students at honours, masters and PhD levels and is interested in supervising topics in a wide range of areas in gender, race, whiteness and colonial studies, including:

Professional Profile

Jane is a member of the following professional organisations:

She is currently convenor of the Melbourne Feminist History Group seminar series, the Victorian representative for the Australian Network for Research in Women’s History and a member of the editorial board for the ACRAWSA e-Journal.

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