School of Culture and Communication

Research interests

Cultural theory, Cultural memory and cultural history, aboriginality and cultural studies, cultural tourism, cultural politics.

Qualifications

MA (Birm), PhD (Melb).

Appointed to University of Melbourne, 1992.

Current research

Australian television and popular memory: new approaches to the cultural history of the media in the project of nation-building.

An ARC-funded Discovery Project with John Hartley, Allan McKee and Sue Turnbull and Graeme Turner.

Project Summary

Despite its importance to our everyday lives since the 1950s, there is no history of television's role in Australian popular culture. This project will develop a series of collaborative histories that focus upon the popular experience of television and in particular its role in forming national culture.

The research will not only involve conventional academic sources, but also those connected with 'the people': memories, memorabilia, personal collections as well as the full range of popular and ephemeral publications which support the popular engagement with the medium. The project is the first to examine television's historical role in our national life.

Social Memory and Historical Justice: How Democratic Societies Remember and Forget the Victimisation of Minorities in the Past.

An ARC-funded Discovery Project with Klaus Neumann and Maria Tumarkin.

Project Summary

We will analyse how the victimisation of minorities is publicly and collectively remembered in a range of countries, including Australia, New Zealand, Spain, the Ukraine, Austria, Germany, Peru, Chile and the USA. We will identify key factors that enable democratic societies to work towards historical justice. By exploring how memories are contested and how communities actively negotiate the legacies of the past, we will address issues of crucial contemporary concern. The project will provide research training and international experience for a ostdoctoral fellow and three doctoral students in an area at the cutting edge of the humanities and social sciences.

Recent research grants

ARC Discovery Project, DP034335: Four South Pacific Museums: New Museums and Public Culture, 2003-2005

Teaching

Chris Healy is on leave in Semester one, 2009.

Recently completed PhD supervisions

Date	Topic
2005	Alison Huber, 'Learning to Love the Mainstream: Top 40 Culture in Melbourne'
2004	Daniel Palmer, 'Participatory Media: Visual Culture in Real Time'
2003	Paul Harvey Williams, 'New Zealand'd Identity Complex: A critique of cultural practices at the Museum of New Zealand, Te Papa Tongarewa'
2003	Pauline Griffiths, 'Chamber Music Audiences: Access, Participation and Pleasure at Melbourne Concerts'(Co-supervision with Music)
2002	Maria Tumarkin, 'The Secret Life of Wounded Space'
2002	David Stokes, 'Localising Rock: Music, Media and Culture in Late Twentieth Century China'
2001	Brian John Morris, 'Journeys in Extraordinary Everyday Culture: Walking in the Contemporary City.'

Publications

Books

• Healy, Chris. Forgetting Aborigines, UNSW Press, Sydney, 2008 (July), pp. 256. (pictured)
• Healy, Chris and Andrea Witcomb, eds, South Pacific Museums: Experiments in Culture, Monash ePress, Melbourne, Sydney, 2006.
• Healy, Chris. From the Ruins of Colonialism: History as Social Memory, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, New York and Melbourne, 1997, pp. 254
• Ferber, Sarah, Chris Healy and Chris McAuliffe, eds, Beasts of Suburbia: Reinterpreting Cultures in Australian Suburbs, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1994, pp. 257
• Healy, Chris. ed., The Lifeblood of Footscray: Working Lives at the Angliss Meatworks , Living Museum of the West, Melbourne, 1986, pp. 164

Healy, Chris. Forgetting Aborigines,
UNSW Press, Sydney, 2008 (July), pp. 256. (pictured)

Journals, edited

13 including ten issues of Cultural Studies Review (2002-6)

Books chapters and journals articles

Over 35 including 2003-8 :

• Healy, Chris, 'The Cultural Studies Fever in Australia', in Amit Sarwal and Reema Sarwal, eds, Creative Nation: Australian Cinema and Cultural Studies Reader, New Delhi, (In-press), 2008.
• Healy, Chris, 'Alcheringa: Invisible Aborigines on TV', Liz Jacka, ed., Australian Television History an issue of ACH: The Journal of the History of Culture in Australia, vol. 26, 2007, pp. 68-90.
• Healy, Chris, 'Encountering Historian Carter', Southerly, vol. 66, no. 2, 2006, pp. 199-209.
• Healy, Chris, 'Very Special Black People: Indigenous People and the Museum', in Healy, Chris Healy and Andrea Witcomb, eds, New South Pacific Museums, Monash ePress, Melbourne, 2006
• Healy, Chris, 'Crowd-or Community', Meanjin, vol. 65, no. 2, 2006, pp. 167-72
• Healy, Chris with Karen Burns, Jon Cattapan and Tom Nicholson, 'The Group Discusses', The Drowned World: Jon Cattapan, works and collaborations, The Potter Museum of Art, Melbourne, 2006, pp. 12-18.
• Healy, Chris, 'Remembering Architecture: Robin Boyd', Mongrel Issue, 1, July 2005, pp. 72-5
• Healy, Chris, 'All Australian Graffiti and the Cultural Cringe', Post Master Gallery, Australia Post, Melbourne, On-line exhibition catalogue (refereed), 2005.
• Healy, Chris and Kylie Message, 'A Symptomatic Museum: The New, the NMA and the Culture Wars'Borderlands, Nov 2004. Published online at: http://www.borderlandsejournal.adelaide.edu.au /vol3no3_2004/messagehealy_symptom.htm
• Healy, Chris, 'The City'in Fran Martin, ed., Interpreting Everyday Life, Edward Arnold, London, 2003, pp. 54-66
• Chris Healy, Annamarie Jagose and Fran Martin, 'At home in the suburb'in Fran Martin, ed., Interpreting Everyday Life, Edward Arnold, London, 2003, pp. 67-86
• Healy, Chris, 'Dead Man: film, colonialism and memory', in Susannah Radstone and Kate Hodgkin, eds, Contested Pasts: The Politics of Memory, Routledge Studies in Memory and Narrative, Routledge, London, 2003, pp. 221-36. Republished in Susannah Radstone and Kate Hodgkin (eds), Memory, History, Nation: Contested Pasts, Transaction, New Jersey, 2005

Other positions (selected)

2006- Cultural Studies Review (Editorial Board)

2005- Member of the Committee of Management and Advisory Board, ARC-funded Cultural Research Network

2003-2006, Member of the Transforming Culture External Advisory Board, UTS

2002-2006 Co-editor, Cultural Studies Review

2002 Visiting Scholar, Memory, History and Cross-Cultural Research program, the Centre for Cross-Cultural Research, ANU

2001- ARC Assessor (International Reader)