Dr Nicholas Brown

Nicholas Brown

Dr Nicholas Brown is a Senior Research Fellow at the National Museum's Centre and for Historical Research, and at the Australian Dictionary of Biography at the Australian National University's Research School of Social Sciences.

Nicholas has worked in the Australian National University's Urban Research Program and held the Keith Cameron professorship in Australian history at University College Dublin. In 2007 he was a member of the External Reference Panel invited by the Australian Minister for Education to provide a national guide to the teaching of Australian history in years 9 and 10.

His research interests span 20th century Australian environmental and social history, with a particular focus on biographical approaches.

• Ten years is enough: the life and afterlife of Rick Farley (1952-2006). A study of Farley's work in economic reform, environmental sustainability and Indigenous reconciliation, emphasising his contribution to the development of new partnerships (such as the Landcare movement) and an applied consciousness of these issues.
• Testing ourselves: the 'international' in Australian politics and culture (1900-present). An exploration of how Australians from aid workers to artists, peacekeepers to protesters, have engaged with, and been influenced by, one of the overarching yet most ambiguous concepts of the 20th century.
• Down here: a social and environmental history of the south coast of New South Wales (1920-present). A survey of changing values, regional identities, work and leisure, patterns of land use and regulation, tensions between 'locals' and 'sea-changers' in a dynamic but in some ways marginalised area.

Nicholas has supervised graduate students working across the field of Australian history, in areas including urban, housing and environmental history, the history of education and government, and sport in society.

N Brown and L Cardinal (eds), Managing Diversity : Practices of Citizenship in National and Post-National Contexts - Ireland, Canada, Australia, 2007, University of Ottawa Press.

N Brown, Richard Downing: Economics, Advocacy and Social Reform in Australia, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 2001.

N Brown, Governing Prosperity: Social Analysis and Social Change in Australia in the 1950s, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1995.

N Brown, P Campbell, R Holmes, P Read and L Sitsky (eds), One Hand on the Manuscript: Music in Australian Cultural History 1930-1960, Humanities Research Centre, Canberra, 1995.

N Brown, '"They are still people": economics, welfare and advocacy in Australia,' in D Callahan (ed.), Australia - Who Cares?, API Network, 2007, pp. 67-84.

N Brown, 'The Gamekeeper's View: A Memoir' in S Macintyre and S Fitzpatrick (eds), Against the Grain: Brian Fitzpatrick and Manning Clark in Australian History and Politics, Melbourne University Press, 2007, pp. 223-231.

N Brown, 'Everybody says that the trees talk to you: the NSW south coast', in T Bonyhady and T Griffiths (eds), Words for Country: Landscape and Language in Australia, UNSW Press, Sydney, 2002, pp. 84-101.

N Brown, 'Making oneself comfortable, or more rooms than people', in P Troy (ed.), A History of European Housing in Australia, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2000, pp. 107-24.

N Brown, '"It's a case of using any stick to beat a dog": RI Downing, the Keynesian revolution and reconstruction', History of Economics Review, 1999, no. 30, pp. 90-107.

N Brown, 'On the margins of the Littoral Society: the New South Wales South Coast since 1945', Environment and History, 1998, vol. 4, no. 2, pp. 210-38.

N Brown, '"A sense of number and reality": economics and government in Australia, 1920-1950', Economy and Society, 1997, vol. 26, no. 2, pp. 233-56.

N Brown, '"Sometimes the cream rises to the top, sometimes the scum": the exacting culture and politics of style in the 1950s', Australian Historical Studies, 1997, no. 109, pp. 49-63.

N Brown, 'Shaping the plain Australian: social analysis in the 1940s and 1950s', in I Craven (ed.), Australian Popular Culture, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1994, pp. 173-89.

N Brown, 'Australian intellectuals and the image of Asia, 1920-1960', Australian Cultural History, 1990, no. 9, pp. 80-92.