Associate ProfessorClare Corbould

I am an award-winning scholar of African American history. My primary preoccupation is with the way people use history for political ends. In my first book, Becoming African Americans, I examined the role that ideas about Africa's past played in African American life, culture, and politics in the 1920s and 1930s. In recent work, I investigate the Australian legacies of Atlantic slavery.

I have also published on the reception in the United States and Australia to the iconic 1976 miniseries Roots; how poets, newspaper cartoonists, and an extraordinary artists' model interpreted life in Harlem in the 1920s and 1930s; and what we learn by listening to the sounds of Harlem's streets.

In 2026, two long-running collaborative projects have resulted in book publications. With Charlotte Greenhalgh (Waikato) and Warwick Anderson (Sydney), I have edited a book titled The Social Survey in Global Perspective, 1900–2020s (Berghahn Books, 2026). It includes a chapter drawn from my ARC Future Fellowship-supported project about narratives of American slavery, "Researching While Black and Female: How the Unsung Labour of African American Women Pioneered Social Survey Methods."

Along with long-time collaborator Hilary Emmett (University of East Anglia) and four other colleagues in the UK, I have completed American Studies in the Age of New Area Studies: Infinite Space (Routledge, 2026).

For a full list of past publications, follow the tabs above. Those links also contain details of: grants, awards, and prizes; supervision of honours and graduate/postgraduate researchers; service roles past and present; and current teaching and research students.

Below, I'll outline current research projects, which are not otherwise included on this site.

If you have any questions about me, my teaching, or my research, please don't hesitate to get in touch. I welcome media requests. I am especially keen for inquiries from current students and others who are considering an MA, PhD, or an honours year (or part-time two years) to add to their undergraduate qualification.

--Current projects:

1. With Michael A. McDonnell (University of Sydney), I am writing a book about the memory and legacy of the American Revolution among African Americans. The research is supported with an Australia Research Council Discovery Project grant and the monograph will be published by The New Press, New York. With Michael, Frances M. Clarke (Sydney), and W. Fitzhugh Brundage (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill), I co-edited a related collection, Remembering the Revolution (University of Massachusetts Press, 2013).

2. With the support of an Australia Research Council Future Fellowship (2012-2018), I conducted research 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. This will be the topic of my third monograph.