A/Prof. Clare Corbould

Clare Corbould specialises in African American history. In 2009, she published Becoming African Americans: Black Public Life in Harlem, 1919-1939 (Harvard University Press). The book won the 2010 Victorian Premier's Literary Award for First Book of History, was shortlisted for two other prizes and named a 2009 Outstanding Academic Title by the American Library Association's magazine, Choice. Her articles and book chapters about twentieth-century African American history and culture have appeared in Radical History Review, Journal of Social History, Transition, and in collections published by  Cambridge University Press, UNC Press, University of Georgia Press, and Columbia University Press.

With the support of an Australia Research Council Future Fellowship and large Discovery Project grant, Clare is currently writing two books. The first is about interviews in the United States with elderly men and women who had been enslaved as children, which took place in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. With Michael McDonnell (University of Sydney), she is writing a book about the memory and legacy of the American Revolution among African Americans. It will be published by The New Press. A co-edited collection related to the latter topic, Remembering the Revolution, appeared in 2013.

Clare also has an interest in unfree labour and its aftermath in Australia, especially in relation to the United States. With Hilary Emmett (University of East Anglia), she is co-authoring work on the legacy of Atlantic slavery in Australia. These pieces have appeared in Journal of American Studies and Griffith Review.

In addition to the Australian Research Council, the following bodies have supported Clare's research: Australian Academy of the Humanities; Academy of Social Sciences in Australia; American Philosophical Society; Beinecke Library at Yale University; Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History; and Fulbright Australia.

Educated at the University of Sydney, Clare joined Deakin in 2018 after working for fifteen years at Monash University and the University of Sydney, where she also received a Faculty of Arts Teaching Excellence award.

Clare tweets @clarecorbould.