Carolyn Strange

Carolyn Strange is a Professor and former Head of the School of History at the Australian National University (ANU). She holds adjunct and visiting professorships at Murdoch University and the University of Toronto. Her research focuses on legal, social, and cultural history, particularly crime and justice, gender studies, and environmental history. She has taught at institutions in Canada, the U.S., and Australia, and her work bridges academia with public engagement through museum exhibitions and symposia.

Strange has been awarded prestigious fellowships at Warwick, Macquarie, and Sydney Universities, and is a Fellow of both the Academy of Social Sciences and the Australian Academy of the Humanities. Her research has been supported by grants from the Australian Research Council and others, including a five-year strategic grant for a cross-campus network on the History and Legacies of Violence. She currently leads a working group on Coercive Control funded by the ANU Gender Institute.

Her research interests span gendered homicide, capital punishment, and historical memory. Recent projects include analyzing inter-gender homicide in NSW and examining public attitudes toward coercive control. She has published extensively on crime, justice, and gender in Canadian, Australian, and British contexts.

Strange’s teaching expertise includes graduate training, having founded ANU’s Cross-Cultural Research and History graduate programs. She has also served as an external assessor for Hong Kong’s Lingnan University History Department and curates exhibitions linking history with contemporary issues.

Key achievements include the 2013 ‘Researcher of the Year’ award from the New York State Archives and a 2014 Huntington Library Fellowship. Her work often involves interdisciplinary collaboration with scholars in law, environmental science, and media studies.