Associate ProfessorTony Joel

Tony is an Associate Professor in History whose main research interests are sports history and the politics of war memory and commemoration. His publications include the following books: The Dresden Firebombing: Memory and the Politics of Commemorating Destruction (I.B.Tauris, 2013; and republished in paperback edition by Bloomsbury Academic, 2020); with David Lowe, Remembering the Cold War: Global Contest and National Stories (Routledge, 2013); with Mathew Turner, On the Take: The 1910 Scandal that Changed Australian Football Forever (Slattery, 2020); and with Mathew Turner, Line & Length: A History of the Geelong Cricket Club (Slattery, 2023). This book on the Geelong Cricket Club won the Australian Society for Sports History's 2025 Book Award.

Since 2012 Tony has served as joint editor, with David Lowe, of Routledge's series entitled Remembering the Modern World. This series has published nine volumes to date, with four more volumes currently underway. It has featured almost 100 contributors based in Europe, Asia, North and South America, and Australia, spanning various disciplines including History, Sociology, International Relations, Philosophy, Political Science, Literary Studies, Poetry and Creative Writing, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, and Museology among others.

Tony is a foundation member of Deakin's Centre for Contemporary Histories (CCH) and a longstanding member of its Executive.

Tony is Associate Head of School (Teaching and Learning) for the School of Humanities and Social Sciences. For over two decades he has taught a wide range of History units at Deakin, in which time his main teaching responsibilities have been chairing AIH264 The Holocaust and AST256 Sport in History. In 2021, Tony created AST250 A History of Australian Football, 1858-2020, which remains the world's only tertiary-level unit exclusively dedicated to the history of Australia's most popular football code. Tony has received multiple teaching awards at the Faculty, institutional, and national level, including an Australian Awards for University Teaching (AAUT) Award for Teaching Excellence in 2016.

Tony mostly supervises Honours topics focused on sports history or modern Germany, Nazism, and the Holocaust. He has also supervised topics relating to the Cold War, other aspects of modern European history, and 20th century US history. Over a dozen students supervised by Tony have received First Class Honours, of whom seven have received PhD scholarships from Deakin. Tony has supervised or co-supervised PhD students through to successful completion on multiple topics relating to Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, as well as more diverse projects ranging from a murder trial during Australia's colonial period, women secret agents in WWII, and Dwight Eisenhower's presidency through to Australia's diplomatic reaction to the 1956 Hungarian Revolution and the mending of Australia-Japan relations following WWII.