Faculty of Arts

Georgine ClarsenGeorgine Clarsen

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

Photograph: Affrica Taylor.
 

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

Academic Qualifications

  • Bachelor of Social Studies (hons) 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:

  • Discovery Grant 2011-2013 – Mobile Modernities: 'Around-Australia' automobile journeys, 1900-1955
  • Australian Research Council Postdoctoral Fellowship, History Program, Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University;
  • Fulbright Foundation Fellowship, Transportation Institute, University of California, Berkeley;
  • Australian Bicentennial Fellowship, Menzies Centre for Australian Studies, Kings College, University of London;
  • Postdoctoral Fellowship, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC;
  • Adelaide Research Centre for Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Adelaide;
  • Ernestine Richter Avery Fellowship, Huntington Library and Botanical Gardens, San Marino, California;
  • Research Grant-in-Aid, Hagley Museum and Library, Wilmington, Delaware;
  • 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

Research Interests

Georgine is currently researching the ways that Australian national culture and automobile culture developed together during the first half of the 20th century.  An ARC grant supports her research into our obsession with driving around Australia and how that the view through the windscreen of a moving car has shaped national understandings of the Australian landscape as well as ideas of Australian national identity. Other research interests include history of technology, tourism and travel, women and war, historiography, and Australian environmental history.  Her research is motivated by the need to develop a more sustainable culture of mobility for the future. Georgine is a member of T2M, the International Association for the History of Traffic, Transport and Mobility, (http://t2m.org/), and is an Associate Editor of the new Mobilities journal published by Berghahn, Mobilities: Interdisciplinary Journal of Mobility Studies (http://journals.berghahnbooks.com/trans/). She has worked as a consultant on the documentary series Wide Open Road (Bombora Films and Music), with producer/director Paul Clarke, to be screened on ABC TV..

Teaching

Georgine teaches Australian cultural history with a special interest in historical theory. Her teaching focuses on the relationships between Indigenous people and recent settlers in Australia and the history of people’s relationships with the environment. Her teaching always keeps in mind the hope that humans might be able 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 and a member of the University Education Committee. She is also the Convener of the Australian Studies Major in the Faculty of Arts.

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 .

  • “Automobility ‘South of the West’ : Toward a Global Conversation”, in Gijs Mom, Peter Norton, Georgine Clarsen and Gordon Pirie (eds), Mobility in History: Themes in Transport, 2010, Neuchatel: Editions Alphil, 25-41.
  • Mobility in History: Themes in Transport (2010), with Gijs Mom, Peter Norton, and Gordon Pirie (eds),  2010, Neuchatel: Editions Alphil, Presses Universitaires Suisses.
  • “Automobiles and Australian Modernisation: the Redex Around-Australia Trials of the 1950s", Australian Historical Studies, vol. 41, no. 3, 2010, 352-368.
  • 'Challenges of the large survey subject: teaching and learning how to read history', The Student Experience: Proceedings of the 32nd HERDSA Annual Conference, 2010, Higher Education Research and Development Society of Australasia, Milperra, Australia, 81-89.
  • “Mobility in Australia: Unsettling the Settled”, in G. Mom, G. Pirie & L. Tissot (eds), Mobility in History: the State of the Art in the History of Transport, Traffic and Mobility, (2009), Neuchatel: Editions Alphil, Presses Universitaires Suisses, 123-128.
  • “Gender and mobility: historicizing the terms”, in G. Mom, G. Pirie & L. Tissot (eds), Mobility in History: the State of the Art in the History of Transport, Traffic and Mobility , (2009), Neuchatel: Editions Alphil, Presses Universitaires Suisses, 235-241.
  • Eat My Dust: Early Women Motorists, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008. View news article from Higher Education
  • “Machines as the Measure of Woman: A Cape to Cairo Automobile Journey,” Journal of Transport History, vol. 29: no.1, March 2008: 44-63.
  • “’The Woman Who Does’: A Melbourne Motor Garage Proprietor” in Laura Doan and Jane Garrity, Sapphic Modernities: Sexuality, Women and National Culture, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006, 55-71.
  • “A Fine University for Women Engineers: A Scottish Women’s Munitions Factory in World War One” Women’s History Review, vol. 12, no. 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.
Last reviewed: 3 April, 2013