Rate My Professor Desley Deacon

Deacon's research focuses on gender history, women's biography, professional women in Australia and the United States, transnational lives, global modernity, and the history of sound and voice. Major publications include co-authoring Elites in Australia (1979); Managing Gender: The State, the New Middle Class and Women Workers 1830-1930 (1987); Elsie Clews Parsons: Inventing Modern Life (1997, recipient of the Robert W. Hamilton Faculty Book Award); editing Elsie Clews Parsons' Fear and Conventionality (1997); co-editing Talking and Listening in the Age of Modernity (2007), Transnational Ties: Australian Lives in the World (2008), and Transnational Lives: Biographies of Global Modernity 1700-present (2009); and authoring Judith Anderson: Australian Star, First Lady of the American Stage (2019), shortlisted for awards. Her articles won the Women and Politics Prize of the Australasian Political Studies Association in 1983 and 1984. A Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia since 2002, she received a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for University Teachers and served on editorial boards including History Australia and the ANU Lives series. Deacon advanced equity and women's issues at ANU and the University of Texas, mentored postgraduate students, and contributed to interdisciplinary historical approaches.