Gregory Melleuish

Professor, School of Humanities and Social Inquiry, University of Wollongong
Greg Melleuish was awarded a Master of Arts from the University of Sydney for a thesis on the intellectual history of colonial New South Wales, and a doctorate from Macquarie University for his study of the tradition of cultural liberalism in Australia. Before becoming an academic he was an administrative trainee with the Commonwealth Public Service and also worked for the Australian Gaslight Company. He has taught European history at the University of Melbourne, Australian Studies at the University of Queensland, and now teaches Australian politics, political theory and European and world history in the School of History and Politics at the University of Wollongong.

Greg has published widely in the area of Australian political ideas and intellectual history. This includes his books Cultural Liberalism in Australia, (Cambridge University Press, 1995, reprinted 2009) and The Power of Ideas: Essays on Australian History and Politics, (Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2009) as well as a number of articles. He co-wrote the entry on Australian Political Thought (with Geoff Stokes) for the Oxford Companion to Australian Politics (2007).

Greg has also published a number of articles on world history and political theory including a chapter on the utility of the idea of ‘clash of civilisations’ for understanding history and a recent article on the idea of ‘commonwealth’.

Greg has organised a number of conferences and seminars, including the V G Childe Centenary conference in 1990. He co-edited a volume of papers from that conference with Terry Irving and Peter Gathercole under the title Childe and Australia (UQP, 1995) that will soon be made available electronically. In 2008 he held a colloquium on weird history and has published a paper that he co-wrote with Stephen Brown and Konstantin Sheiko entitled ‘Pseudo History/Weird History: Nationalism and the Internet,’ in History Compass.

Greg has held two ARC Discovery Grants. The 1st (1998–9) was a study of three Australian intellectuals of the 1930s, Randolph Hughes, A R Chisholm and Carl Kaeppel. The 2nd (with Andrew Buck, 2005–8) was a study of political rhetoric in colonial New South Wales.