Robert Reynolds

Biography

My field is post-ww2 Australian History with a particular emphasis upon identity politics and sexuality. I undertook my PhD at The University of Melbourne, studying under two of Australia's leading gender historians, Professor Patricia Grimshaw and Professor Joy Damousi. I took up a post-doctoral fellowship in 1999 at Sydney University and a five year Australian Research Council Fellowship at the University of New South Wales in 2004. In recent years I have moved into oral history, deploying this method to understand how individuals are shaped by history - as well as shaping it. The historical construction of the self fascinates me, and I have taken this interest into my other (part-time) life as a psychotherapist. I've written on psychoanalytic theory, but I come at this more as a practitioner than an academic. With my colleagues here in Modern History, I am committed to supervision and mentoring; the size of the department encourages integration of both graduates and early career researchers. I am happy to supervise projects that are set against the context of post-war Australian culture, politics and society from a variety of methodological approaches, but especially oral history and life history methods. I also have a strong secondary research interest in post-war America. Much of my research on Australian gay life has required knowledge of social and political change in the United States and, to a lesser degree, Great Britain.

Research Interest

• Teams • Employee attitudes and performance • Underemployment and overqualified employees • Unemployment • Research methods; Employee surveys