Professor Lynette Russell AM is an award-winning historian and Indigenous studies scholar.
She is currently a Kathleen Fitzpatrick Laureate Fellow at Monash University. She is also the Deputy Director of the Australian Research Council’s Centre of Excellence in Biodiversity and Heritage, and Director of the Monash Indigenous Centre. She has a PhD in history from the University of Melbourne and has taught and researched in the area of historical and anthropological studies for over twenty-five years.
She is an elected member of AIATSIS, and a fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences of Australia (2013), the Australian Academy of the Humanities, the Royal Historical Society, and Royal Anthropological Institute.
She is the author or editor of 17 volumes with several more in train. Lynette is the only Australian scholar to be elected to both the Royal Historical Society (London) and the Royal Anthropological Institute (London). In addition, she has held two fellowships at Cambridge University and one at All Souls at Oxford University. She is the Former President of the Australian Historical Association. All her work is interdisciplinary blending history, archaeology and material culture studies.
Her most recent books include: A Trip to the Dominions: The event that changed Australian Science; Australia’s First Naturalists: Indigenous Peoples’ Assistance to Early Zoologist, with Penny Olsen; Hunt Them, Hang Them: the ‘Tasmanians’ in Port Phillip, 1841-42 with Kate Auty; and Roving Mariners: Aboriginal Whalers and Sealers in the Southern Oceans 1790-1870.
Her new research focuses on the past 1,000 years of Australian history, in the project Global Encounters. This project is examining the Dutch, French, Spanish, Makassan and Pacific visitors to “New Holland” over the past millennia.
Professor Russell is a descendant of the Wotjabaluk people of western Victoria on her father’s side, and transported British convicts on her mother’s side.
[July 2021]