Peter Hobbins

Experience

• 2025–present
  Coordinator, Collection Acquisition & Curation, State Library of New South Wales
• 2021–2025
  Head of Knowledge, Australian National Maritime Museum
• 2020–2021
  Principal, Artefact Heritage Services
• 2019–2020
  Senior Communications Officer, National Archives of Australia
• 2016–2019
  ARC DECRA Fellow, Department of History, University of Sydney
• 2016–2017
  Merewether Fellow, State Library of New South Wales
• 2013–2016
  Research Associate, Department of History, University of Sydney
• 2012–2012
  Associate Lecturer, Department of History, University of Sydney
• 2011–2011
  Postgraduate Teaching Fellow, Department of History, University of Sydney
• 2007–2010
  Freelance Medical Writer, Badger's Den
• 2000–2006
  Director, Elixir Healthcare Education
• 1999–2000
  Medical Writer, Alchemy Communications
• 1997–1999
  Copywriter, Medicus
• 1995–1997
  Senior Medical Writer, Oxford Clinical Communications

Education

• 2024 
  Australian Institute of Company Directors, Graduate of the Australian Institute of Company Directors
• 2014 
  University of Sydney, Doctor of Philosophy (History)
• 2009 
  University of Sydney, Master of Medical Humanities with Merit
• 1995 
  University of Melbourne, Bachelor of Science with Honours (Pharmacology)
• 1995 
  University of Melbourne, Bachelor of Arts (English Literature and History and Philosophy of Science)

Publications

• 2025
  Glocal defence: siting coastal fortifications in maritime context, The Great Circle
• 2025
  Colliding views of technological accidents: legal versus technical histories of aviation’s black boxes, Technology and Culture
• 2025
  The World Remade: How World War II Changed Everything,
• 2024
  The spirit of the service: dash, discipline and flying accidents in the Royal Australian Air Force, 1921–48, Australian Journal of Politics and History
• 2024
  Monetising the social contract, 1911–20, Walking a Tightrope: Milestones and Moments in the History of NSW Treasury
• 2023
  Thinkers, ambassadors & artists, Endeavour: Encounters, Stories and Objects of the Ship that Changed the World
• 2023
  Viral historicity: overcollecting the Covid-19 pandemic, Health and History
• 2023
  Commuting across Sydney Harbour, Reading the Rooms
• 2023
  Rubbery assumptions: anti-G suits and airpower in World War II, Australian Perspectives on Global Air and Space Power: Past, Present, Future
• 2022
  “The pneumonic influenza is just part of my life”: fostering community histories of the “Spanish” influenza pandemic, Pandemic Re-Awakenings: the Forgotten and Unforgotten Great Flu of 1918–1919
• 2022
  Step back in time? Local, specialist and community histories, The Australian History Industry
• 2022
  Emulating the “pucker factor”: faith, fidelity and flight simulation in Australia, 1936–58, Journal of Transport History
• 2021
  Accident conscious: accounting for flying accidents in the Royal Australian Air Force during the Second World War, War in History
• 2021
  Immunity from history: what can we learn from collective responses to crises?, Journal and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New South Wales
• 2021
  The goal of our ambition: the transformation of medical education and research at Australian universities, 1914–20, History Australia
• 2020
  A history of now: historical responses to COVID-19, Public History Review
• 2019
  Engineering the fighter pilot: aviators, anti-G suits and Allied air power, 1940–53, Journal of Military History
• 2019
  Unearthing airspace: the historical phenomenology of aviation artefacts, Australasian Historical Archaeology
• 2019
  Born on the voyage: inscribing emigrant communities in the twilight of sail, International Journal of Maritime History
• 2018
  An Intimate Pandemic: Creating Community Histories of the 1918–19 Influenza Pandemic,
• 2017
  Union Jack or Yellow Jack? Smallpox, sailors, settlers and sovereignty, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History
• 2017
  Venomous Encounters: Snakes, Vivisection and Scientific Medicine in Colonial Australia, Manchester: Manchester University Press
• 2017
  (with Anne Clarke and Ursula K Frederick) “No complaints”: counter-narratives of immigration and detention in the graffiti at the North Head Immigration Detention Centre, Australia 1973–76, World Archaeology
• 2017
  Tending the body politic: health governance, benevolence and betterment in Sydney, 1835–55, Health and History
• 2016
  (with Alison Bashford, Anne Clarke and Ursula K Frederick) Geographies of commemoration: Angel Island, San Francisco and North Head, Sydney, Journal of Historical Geography 52, pp. 16–25
• 2016
  (with Ursula K Frederick and Anne Clarke) Stories From the Sandstone: Quarantine Inscriptions from Australia’s Immigrant Past, Crows Nest: Arbon Publishing
• 2016
  (with Anne Clarke and Ursula K Frederick) Sydney’s landscapes of quarantine, In Alison Bashford, ed., Quarantine: Local and Global Histories (Houndmills: Palgrave), pp. 175–94
• 2016
  From Camels to cats: experimenting with medicine in the Australian Flying Corps, War & Society 35, no. 2, pp. 114–31
• 2015
  A spur to atavism: placing platypus poison, Journal of the History of Biology 48, no. 4, pp. 499–537
• 2015
  (with Alison Bashford) Rewriting quarantine: Pacific history at Australia’s edge, Australian Historical Studies 46, no. 3, pp. 392–409
• 2015
  “No bloody research”: bringing science to military medicine, In Jacqueline Healy, ed., Compassion and Courage: Australian Doctors and Dentists in the Great War (Melbourne: Medical History Museum, University of Melbourne), pp. 94–100
• 2014
  Imperial science or the republic of poison letters? Venomous animals, intercolonial exchange and national identity, In Robert Aldrich and Kirsten McKenzie, eds. Routledge History of Western Empires (Oxford: Routledge), pp. 285–98
• 2014
  Invasion ontologies: venom, visibility and the imagined histories of arthropods, In Jodi Frawley and Iain McCalman, eds., Rethinking Invasion Ecologies from the Environmental Humanities (Oxford: Routledge), pp. 181–95
• 2013
  Spectacular serpents: snakebite in colonial Australia, In Jacqueline Healy and Kenneth D. Winkel, eds., Venom: Fear, Fascination and Discovery (Melbourne: Medical History Museum, University of Melbourne), pp. 37–46
• 2013
  (with Hannah Forsyth) Mobilising medical knowledge for the nation, 1943–49, Health and History, 15, no. 1, pp. 59–79
• 2013
  (with Alison Bashford) Science and medicine, In Alison Bashford and Stuart Macintyre, eds. The Cambridge History of Australia, Volume Two: the Commonwealth of Australia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 263–83
• 2011
  “Immunisation is as popular as a death adder”: the Bundaberg tragedy and the politics of medical science in interwar Australia, Social History of Medicine 24, no. 2, pp. 426–44
• 2010
  Isolated cases? The history and historiography of Australian medical research, Health and History 12, no. 2, pp. 1–17
• 2010
  Serpentine science: Charles Kellaway and the fluctuating fortunes of venom research in interwar Australia, Historical Records of Australian Science 21, no.1, pp. 1–34
• 2010
  “Outside the institute there is a desert”: the tenuous trajectories of medical research in interwar Australia, Medical History 54, no. 1, pp. 1–28
• 2009
  The whole country is poisoned: framing disease mortality in the historiography of the South African War, War & Society 28, no.1, pp. 29–60
• 2007
  “Living in hell but still smiling”: Australian psychiatric casualties of war during the Malaya-Singapore campaign, 1941–42, Health and History 9, no. 1, pp. 28–55
• 2007
  (with Kenneth D. Winkel) The forgotten successes and sacrifices of Charles Kellaway, director of the WEHI, 1923–1944, Medical Journal of Australia 187, no. 11/12, pp. 645–8
• 2006
  Compromised ethical principles in randomised trials of distant, intercessory prayer, Journal of Bioethical Inquiry 2, no. 3, pp. 142–52

Grants and Contracts

• 2017
  Heritage of the Air: how aviation transformed Australia

  Role:

  Chief Investigator

  Funding Source:

  Australian Research Council

• 2016
  Black Box Re-order: technology, air safety and Australian airspace, 1938–68

  Role:

  Chief Investigator

  Funding Source:

  Australian Research Council

Professional Memberships

• Australian Historical Association
• Royal Australian Historical Society
• Civil Aviation Historical Society
• Aviation Historical Society of Australia
• History Council of New South Wales
• Professional Historians Association
• Australian Association for Maritime History

Research Areas

• History And Philosophy Of Medicine (220205)
• History And Philosophy Of Science (Incl. Non Historical Philosophy Of Science) (220206)
• Australian History (Excl. Aboriginal And Torres Strait Islander History) (210303)
• Curatorial And Related Studies (2102)