PROFESSOR CASSANDRA PYBUS
Australian Research Council Professorial Fellow, University of Sydney

Professor Cassandra Pybus is an Australian Research Council Professorial Fellow at the University of Sydney, where she completed both her Bachelor of Arts (Hons) in 1971 and her Ph. D in History in 1978.

Upon successfully completing her Ph. D on history and social change in the work of Robert Penn Warren and C. Vann Woodward, Pybus worked first as an academic and then as a policy advisor to government.

In 1985, she became a full-time writer and historian. Since then, she has contributed greatly to Australian publishing, first as editor of literary magazine Island and later, as founding editor of one of Australia’s earliest online periodicals, Australian Humanities Review. She is a frequent contributor to many of Australia’s best-known publications, such as The Age and The Australian, and is interviewed regularly on Australian and US television.

Pybus has published extensively on Australian, American and Transatlantic history. Her interests span as broadly as Australian social history, colonial history in North America, South East Asia, Africa and Australia, slavery and the history of labour, and the history of Tasmanian Aborigines.

Pybus currently divides her time between Sydney, her home in Lower Snug, Tasmania, and various cities in the United States. In 2008 she will be a Distinguished Visiting Professor at University of Texas in Austin.