Julie Kimber

I teach history and politics in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences. In 2021, I was elected president of the Swinburne Branch of the National Tertiary Education Union. I have long been associated with the Australian Society for the Study of Labour History, which publishes Labour History: A Journal of Labour and Social History. In 2016, I was elected federal Secretary of the Society, and since 2005, I've edited the triannual publication, Recorder, for its Melbourne Branch. From 2013 to 2020 I was co-editor (with A/Prof. Maggie Nolan) of the Journal of Australian Studies (journal of the International Australian Studies Association), and a book review editor of Labour History (2002 to 2015) (with Prof. Phillip Deery and Prof. Stuart Macintyre). I've edited book collections and conference proceedings on Australian political and labour history. I currently co-edit (with Prof. Diane Kirkby) Radical Currents, Labour Histories, and have written on vagrancy laws and labour and political history. My research interests include the Cold War, biography, and political/radical/legal history. I'm working on a study of anti-institutional protests in prisons in New South Wales and Victoria. Before joining Swinburne, I taught at several universities in NSW and Victoria.


2023 Teaching
• HIS30007 War and Peace in the 20th Century
• ART20003 Skills and Strategies for Social Change
• POL20018 Winners and Losers: The Politics and Ethics of Work


Current Postgraduate Supervision
• Dimity Hawkins: Nuclear Shadows: Nuclear weapons testing in the Pacific and the Fijian response 1966-1975 (with Chris Agius and Michael Leach);
• Nicholas Pelley: An examination of hyper-exploited labour and collective acts of resistance in Australia (with Peter Love, Peter Robinson, and Lorenzo Veracini);
• Lucky Setunga: Caste and Politics in Post-Colonial India and Sri Lanka (with Michael Leach);
• Janice Woolley: Understanding the emergence and spread of conspiracy theories in the post-9/11 era; from the Tea Party and twenty-first-century anti-vaxxers, to QAnon and the COVID-19 Pandemic (with Chris Agius).