Stephen Garton is Professor of History and currently Principal Advisor to the Vice-Chancellor at the University of Sydney.
He is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia, the Royal Australian Historical Society and the Royal Society of NSW. A graduate of the University of Sydney (BA) and UNSW (PhD), he has held a number of senior management positions at the University of Sydney, including Head of the History Department (1996-98), Deputy Dean of the Faculty of Arts (1999), Dean of the Arts Faculty (2001-9), Provost and Deputy Vice-Chancellor (2009-2019), Senior Deputy Vice-Chancellor (2019-21) and he was interim Vice-Chancellor (December 2020-July 2021). In November 2023 he was appointed President of the Australian Academy of the Humanities.
In 2003 he was awarded the Centenary Medal for services to Australian history and in 2020 was made a Member of the Order of Australia for services to tertiary education administration and to history.
His major areas of research are 19th and 20th century Australian history, but he has also written on the history of the British Dominions, and areas of American history. His major concerns have been the history of mental illness, poverty and social policy, crime and imprisonment, sexuality, masculinity, the problems facing returning veterans and their families and more recently the history of higher education. He has been a Chief Investigator on projects that have been awarded over $5m of funding from the Australian Research Council. He is the author or co-author of 7 major monographs with publishers such as Oxford University Press, Harvard University Press and Melbourne University Press, as well as nearly 100 articles, chapters, encyclopaedia entries, and essays. He was a chief investigator on two major funded projects that won prestigious prizes for innovation in digital history including the National Trust Prize for Community History (for “The Dictionary of Sydney”) and the American Historical Association Roy Rosenzweig Prize for Innovation in Digital History (for “Digital Harlem”).
[February 2024]