We are delighted to welcome Associate Professor Clare Corbould to Deakin University and the Contemporary Histories Research Group.

Associate Professor Corbould is a historian of the United States with expertise in African American politics and culture. She has also published work on the transnational development of ideas about race and practices of racism and resistance in the US and Australia. Educated at the University of Sydney, Clare worked there from 2003 and was promoted to Senior Lecturer in 2010. In 2011 she moved to Monash University as a Larkins Research Fellow and Senior Lecturer. From 2012 to 2017 she held an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship at Monash. In 2018 she joined the CHRG at Deakin as Associate Professor in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences.

Clare is the author of Becoming African Americans: Black Public Life in Harlem, 1919-1939(Harvard UP, 2009), which won or was shortlisted for several awards. She has published articles and chapters on the sounds of Harlem’s streets in the interwar years; anti-lynching plays; African Americans’ ideas about Haiti; and the blockbuster 1977 miniseries, Roots. Forthcoming work includes pieces in Radical History Review, Journal of American Studies, and a collection on the place of Harlem in African American life from Columbia UP.

Clare’s two current book projects share an interest in the role that historical consciousness plays in identity formation and political activism. The first, supported by an ARC Future Fellowship, brings to life the process by which elderly African American men and women were interviewed in the 1920s, 30s, and 40s. In the book, Clare then traces the legacy of those interview materials.

Clare’s second major project is a book co-authored with Michael McDonnell at the University of Sydney, and supported with an ARC DP13 awarded to them both and to Fitzhugh Brundage at UNC Chapel Hill. Together with Mike, Fitz, and Frances Clarke, she co-edited Remembering the Revolution: Memory, History, and Nation Making from Independence to the Civil War  (University of Massachusetts Press, 2013). The monograph with McDonnell surveys African Americans’ involvement in the American Revolution and their accounts of that service in the time since. The working title is “To Choose Our Better History: African Americans and the American Revolution from Independence to Today.”