Dr Emma Thomas
PhD History University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
MA History University of Melbourne
BA (Hons) University of Queensland
I am a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Laureate Centre for History & Population at UNSW, Sydney. My research focuses histories of gender, labour, and colonialism in the Asia-Pacific. Grounded in extensive archival research conducted in Australia, Papua New Guinea and Germany, my current book project analyses intersections of gender and sexuality, labour regimes, violence and demographic concerns in Papua New Guinea under German colonial rule (1884-1914). My research interests also include Pacific conceptions of reproductive health and healing and their dynamic relationships to colonialism, economic and environmental change, human and women’s rights discourses, and processes of medicalisation in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I earned my Ph.D. from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in 2019, where I was also a graduate fellow at the Institute for the Humanities (2016-17) and the Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies (2017-18). My doctoral dissertation was awarded the Arthur Fondiler Prize for best doctoral dissertation in the Department of History at the University of Michigan in 2019, as well as the Fritz Stern Dissertation Prize for the best doctoral dissertation on a topic in German history written at a North American university by the German Historical Institute, Washington, DC, in 2020.
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- Teaching and Supervision
2017-18 Graduate Student Research Fellow, Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies, University of Michigan
2017 Research Grant, Institute for the Humanities, University of Michigan
2016-17 Mary Fair Croushore Graduate Fellow, Institute for the Humanities, University of Michigan
2016 Boyd/Williams Dissertation Grant for Research on Women and Work, Institute for Research on Women and Gender, University of Michigan
2016 Institute for Research on Women and Gender/Rackham Graduate Student Research Award, University of Michigan
2020 Fritz Stern Dissertation Prize, German Historical Institute, Washington, DC
2019 Arthur Fondiler Prize for best doctoral dissertation in the Department of History, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI