Diane Kirkby is a Professor of Law and Humanities at UTS and a Research Professor (Emeritus) in History at La Trobe University, Melbourne. She is an elected Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities and the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia and, in 2015, was honoured by being elected a Fellow of the American Society for Legal History.
Diane has an outstanding international record of innovative scholarship at the intersections of legal, feminist, labour and social history. In major monographs and edited collections, numerous chapters in scholarly books and articles in high-esteem journals, she has produced a body of distinctive and influential work, marked by its empirical depth, originality and research that crosses disciplinary boundaries.
She is a Fulbright Alumnus and has served several terms on the Victorian Fulbright Selection Committee. Her research on the Fulbright program in Australia was funded by an Australian Research Council (ARC) grant and resulted in the 2019 book, Academic Ambassadors, Pacific Allies: Australia America and the Fulbright Program. Diane has a track record of research funding by the ARC including her current project on women workers in the maritime and transport industries. She won the WK Hancock Prize for Alice Henry: The Power of Pen and Voice.
Her studies have been widely acclaimed as locating labour’s cultural and social significance beyond the industrial relations of the workplace. She has contributed to an international conversation on gender conventions and has addressed theoretical issues at the forefront of scholarship. She has brought legal history into conversation with social and cultural history to provide new insights into women’s working experience, and on issues of economic autonomy and citizenship. Her latest book Maritime Men of the Asia-Pacific conveys the importance of labour legislation and international conventions in maritime unions’ pursuit of labour rights.
Diane has held fellowships at the Humanities Research Centre, State University of New York at Stony Brook, and Wolfsohn College Oxford. She is a founding organiser of the annual Law and History Conference and has been significant in the organisational history of the Australian and New Zealand Law and History Society.
Diane’s work has featured on the Conversation Hour, ABC Radio (Sydney) and the Sydney Writers Festival program, and she has participated in a documentary aired on the History Channel. She has also featured on a panel discussion at GOMA: Museum of Modern Art, Brisbane, which was broadcast on ABC Radio; and is frequently invited to give media interviews and public talks, such as to National Gallery Victoria. In 2023, she presented the Annual Archives Lecture at ANU.
Incredibly passionate about her work, Diane’s ultimate aim is to shift and deepen understanding of working people’s experience, empowering them with knowledge of their history.