Georgine Clarsen

Georgine Clarsen is a senior lecturer in the School of History and Politics in the Faculty of Arts.

Academic Qualifications

• Bachelor of Social Studies and University Medal from the University of Sydney;
• Certificate in Automotive Engineering and a diploma in advanced tuning from the Sydney Technical College;
• M.A. in Women’s Studies from the University of Melbourne;
• Ph.D. in History from the University of Melbourne.
• Her dissertation was entitled: The Vote on Wheels: Australian Women and Motoring 1915-1945.

Awards and Fellowships

Georgine has continued her research interests in women and automobility via a series of postdoctoral fellowships and awards:

• Adelaide Research Center for Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Adelaide;
• Fulbright Foundation Fellowship, Transportation Institute, University of California, Berkeley;
• Australian Bicentennial Fellowship, Menzies Center for Australian Studies, Kings College, University of London;
• Postdoctoral Fellowship, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC;
• Ernestine Richter Avery Fellowship, Huntington Library and Botanical Gardens, San Marino, California;
• Research Grant-in-Aid, Hagley Museum and Library, Wilmington, Delaware;
• Australian Research Council Postdoctoral Fellowship, History Program, Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University.
• She has been an Affiliate Scholar in the Beatrice M. Bain Research Center for Gender Studies, University of California, Berkeley, and a Resident Scholar in the Center for Cultural Studies, University of California, Santa Cruz.

Research Interests

Georgine’s research interests include history of technology, tourism and travel, twentieth-century modernity, women and war, historiography, Australian environmental history, and a history of physical performance in Australia. She has just completed a book manuscript on early women motorists and is writing a cultural history of Australia in the 1950s, using the Australian Redex Trials of 1953-55 as a framework.

Teaching

Georgine teaches Australian cultural history. Her subjects focus on the history of environmental thinking and the relationships between Indigenous people and recent settlers in Australia, with an emphasis on the ways that humans might continue to live justly and sustainably on this continent for the next 60,000 years.

Committees

Georgine is a University Staff Representative on the University of Wollongong/Area Health Service Human Research Ethics Committee for the Social Sciences; Head of Postgraduate Studies for the History and Politics Program; Co-Convener of the Australian Studies Major; and on the Occupational Health and Safety Committee.

Fun

Georgine is a qualified motor mechanic and has worked for many years as production manager with Circus Oz. She grew up in the Illawarra and went to Oak Flats High School. You might see her cycling to work (it’s the Dutch genes coming out) and she spends as much time as she can in the surf.

Publications

Searchable RIS publications from 2000 to date .

• Eat My Dust: Early Women Motorists, Johns Hopkins University Press (forthcoming, 2008).
• “Machines as the Measure of Woman: A Cape to Cairo Automobile Journey,” Journal of Transport History, vol. 29: no.1, March 2008 (in press). 
• “’The Woman Who Does’: A Melbourne Motor Garage Proprietor” in Laura Doan and Jane Garrity, Sapphic Modernities: Sexuality, Women and National Culture, Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 2006, 55-71.
• “A Fine University for Women Engineers: A Scottish Women’s Munitions Factory in World War One” Women’s History Review, volume 12, number 3, 2003: 333-356.
• “Still Moving: Bush Mechanics in the Central Desert” Australian Humanities Review, February-March 2002: http://www.lib.latrobe.edu.au/AHR.
• “”The Dainty Female Toe” and the “Brawny Male Arm”: Conceptions of Bodies and Power in Automobile Technology,” Australian Feminist Studies, 15, 32 2000: 153-163.
• “Tracing the Outline of Nation: Circling Australia by Car”, Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies, 13, 3 1999: 359-369.
• “Car Culture”, Review Essay, Meanjin, 3, April 1999: 178-183.
• “Women, Modernity and Cars in Inter-War Victoria” in Martin Crotty and Doug Scobie (eds) Raiding Clio’s Closet: Postgraduate Presentations in History, The University of Melbourne Conference Series, No.5, 1997: 61-75.
• “Difference and Technology: The Case of Miss G.W.K.” in Patricia Grimshaw and Dianne Kirkby (eds) Dealing with Difference: Essays in Gender Culture and History, Melbourne University Press, 1997: 179-210.

Email: georgine@uow.edu.au
Phone: (02) 4221 3670

Photograph: Affrica Taylor.

Last reviewed: 12 March, 2008