Welcome to the Australian Studies Centre at UCD Dublin which is located within the School of History.
Australian Studies currently includes the following range of activities:
- The Keith Cameron Chair of Australian History, a visiting appointment to teach and research Australian history at UCD.
- Courses in Australian history for second- and third-year undergraduates.
- Australian History research seminars and lectures which are open to the public.
- A small Australian Studies Library, which students are entitled to access.
Martin Thomas is the Keith Cameron Chair in Australian History for 2019-2020.
Martin Thomas is Professor in the School of History at the Australian National University. He has published widely in the areas of landscape history, cultural history, media, visual art and history of anthropology. He has a longstanding interest in histories of exploration and cross-cultural encounter, which he has examined in his monographs The Artificial Horizon: Imagining the Blue Mountains (2003) (winner of a New South Wales Premier’s Literary Award) and The Many Worlds of R. H. Mathews: In Search of an Australian Anthropologist (2011) (winner of the National Biography Award of Australia). He is editor or co-editor of three other volumes on exploration and expeditions: Exploring the Legacy of the 1948 Arnhem Land Expedition (2011), Expedition into Empire (2015) and Expeditionary Anthropology (2018).
Thomas is well known as an oral history interviewer and broadcaster, having recorded more than thirty whole-of-life interviews for the National Library of Australia’s Oral History and Folklore Collection. He has made numerous radio documentaries for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and in collaboration with Béatrice Bijon he completed in 2018 his first film, Etched in Bone, a feature-length documentary about the theft of human remains from Aboriginal mortuary sites during the 1948 American-Australian Scientific Expedition to Arnhem Land and their eventual repatriation. The film, which developed over an eight-year period, has been aired on free-to-air television in Australia and shown at film festivals in Australia, Tahiti, France and Germany. He is presently based in Ireland where he holds the Keith Cameron Chair of Australian History at University College Dublin.