Joy Damousi

Biography

Professor Joy Damousi AM FASSA FAHA is one of Australia’s most distinguished historians and humanities thought leaders. She is the Immediate Past President of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, and a Fellow of both the Australian Academy of the Humanities and the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia.

She has served as the President of the Australian Historical Association, Chair of the Australian Research Council’s humanities and creative arts panels for Excellence in Research for Australia and on the College of Experts. She is currently the Director of the Australian Catholic University’s Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences, and has held leadership positions as Professor in the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies, Head of School, Associate Dean (Research) and Pro-Vice Chancellor (Research) at the University of Melbourne.

Joy’s areas of research include Australian social and cultural history, gender history and memory and the history of emotions. Her current research project is a history of child refugees, humanitarianism and internationalism from 1920, for which she was awarded an Australian Research Council Laureate Fellowship. Key publications include The Labour of Loss: Mourning, Memory and Wartime Bereavement in Australia (1999), Living with the Aftermath: Trauma, Nostalgia and Grief in Post-war Australia (2001), a collection of essays edited with Robert Reynolds, History on the Couch: Essays in History and Psychoanalysis (2003), Freud in the Antipodes: A Cultural History of Psychoanalysis in Australia (2005 – winner of the Ernest Scott Prize), Colonial Voices: A Cultural History of English in Australia 1840-1940 (2010) and Memory and Migration in the Shadow of War: Australia’s Greek Immigrants after World War II and the Greek Civil War (2015). Joy is the co-editor of a four-volume ,Cambridge World History of Violence (2020). Her latest publication is The Humanitarians: Child War Refugees and Australian Humanitarianism in a Transnational World, 1919-1975 (Cambridge 2022).

Appointed as a Member (AM) in the General Division of The Order of Australia in the Queen’s Birthday 2022 Honours List.