Fiona Gatt

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Fiona Gatt is a historian of urban history, housing, class and colonialism.

Her PhD thesis completed at Deakin University in 2023, recovers the lived experience of nineteenth-century urbanisation on Melbourne’s colonial urban frontier, focusing on the area of (Hotham) North Melbourne. She works as a casual academic, teaching at various universities, as a research assistant, and on public history projects including the ‘Our Land Your Law’ project at the Old Melbourne Goal for the National Trust (Victoria). She is co-editor of the Journal of Australian Studies and of Pharos, the newsletter of the Professional Historians Association (Vic & Tas). She has a leadership role in the New Housing Histories Network. Fiona lives (and mainly works) on unceded Dja Dja Wurrung Country.

Fiona has published on the long view of the Great War provided by family history methodology in the Victorian Historical Journal and on memory, childhood and self-indigenization in Postcolonial Studies.

Fiona is currently (2023–2024) ‘Historian in residence’ at the Royal Historical Society of Victoria, working on a project to investigate the place of shopkeepers in nineteenth-century Melbourne society.

Australian Policy
 and History

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