Rosa Campbell

I am a global historian of feminism. I am a Leverhulme early career fellow at King's College London. While histories of feminism usually focus on one national context, my work examines how feminism in the late was hugely influenced by global political events, migration, tactics, ideas and texts which circulated across borders. I dislodge accounts that see white women as the primary feminist change makers and the Global North as the centre of emancipation.

I have just finished a trade book for US publisher Melville House about the worldwide impact, blind spots and furore over the now all-but-forgotten 1976 bestseller The Hite Report by Shere Hite. The Hite Report first asked American women about their sex lives and published the results in their own words. In this book, I will offer a fresh history of the culture war of the 1980s, and the making of contemporary feminism.

From 2023-2024, I was the inaugural GenderEd postdoctoral fellow at the University of Edinburgh and have held fellowships at the University of Harvard and the National Library of Australia. At King's College, I am working on the global history of the four United Nations Conferences on the Status of Women (1975-1995) and the importance of these conferences to global South feminism.

Between 2018-2023 I was a Jan Smuts Scholar at the University of Cambridge. My forthcoming book is the first global history of the Australian women’s liberation movement (1968-1990). My thesis drew on extensive archival research and over twenty oral history interviews. It was highly commended for the Australian Historical Association Serle Award for best postgraduate thesis, 2024.

My academic work on the global history of feminism has been published in Signs: A Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Third World Quarterly and Feminist Review and is forthcoming in The Journal of Global Intellectual History, History Workshop Journal, and The Routledge Handbook of the Global 1980s.

I write often for a public audience and my work on a wide range of subjects from women’s travels across borders for illegal abortions to contemporary conspiracy theories has been recently published or is forthcoming in The White Review, Literary Hub, Public Books, The Sydney Review of Books and Meanjin.