This week Historians At The Movies goes Down Under to talk about 1986's Crocodile Dundee and we are doing it with the founders of Historians At The Movies: Australia: Chelsea Barnett and Joel Barnes. This movie is everything HATM was designed for: taking something fun and then pointing out everything we can take from it. This was a blast to record.

About our guests:
Dr Chelsea Barnett is a gender and cultural historian whose work explores the representation of masculinities in Australian popular culture, in order to understand the complex and varied ways in which masculinity has made sense in particular historical contexts. Under this broad research aim she engages with feminist and queer theory, the history of sex and sexuality, twentieth-century Australian history, and the history in and of popular culture.

Chelsea is a Chancellor's Postdoctoral Research Fellow at UTS, and is located in the Australian Centre for Public History. In her current project, she is exploring the cultural history of single men, focusing on how Australian film and magazines in the postwar world have represented and made sense of the relationship between men and the expectation of marriage. She is also the author of "Reel Men: Australian Masculinity at the Movies, 1949-1962" (Melbourne University Press, 2019). She has authored academic articles in leading journals including History Australia, Australian Historical Studies, and the Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television. Chelsea is currently the ECR co-representative for the Australian Historical Association, and is the co-convenor of Historians at the Movies Australia (#HATMAus).

Dr. Joel Barnes is a historian of the humanities, science, religion and universities. His present research examines the history of relations between evolutionary science and religious belief within Australian higher education, as part of the Science and Religion: Exploring the Spectrum project run by the International Research Network for the Study of Science and Belief in Society. Before joining the University of Queensland, Joel was a Research Associate in the Australian Centre for Public History at the University of Technology Sydney. His work at UTS was on an Australian Research Council-funded project on the history of humanities institutions in Australia since 1945, for which he is finalising a monograph on the humanities disciplines and the idea of the national interest.

This week Tyler Anbinder joins in to talk about his experiences advising on Gangs of New York as well as his work tracing the Irish diaspora.

About our guest:

Tyler Anbinder is a specialist in nineteenth-century America and the history of immigration and ethnicity in American life. His latest book, published in March 2024 by Little, Brown, is entitled Plentiful Country: The Great Potato Famine and the Making of Irish New York. That project's digital history component, created with research assistance from more than two dozen GW students, can be found at http://beyondragstoriches.org. His most recent book before Plentiful Country was City of Dreams (2016), a history of immigrant life in New York City from the early 1600s to the present. And prior to that, in 2001, he published Five Points, a history of nineteenth-century America's most infamous immigrant neighborhood, focusing in particular on tenement life, inter-ethnic relations, and ethnic politics. His first book, Nativism and Slavery (1992), analyzed the role of the anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic Know Nothing party in the political crisis that led to the Civil War. Professor Anbinder has won fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and held the Fulbright Thomas Jefferson Chair in American History at the University of Utrecht. He has received awards for his scholarship from the Organization of American Historians, the Columbia University School of Journalism, and the journal Civil War History. He also served as a historical consultant to Martin Scorsese for the making of The Gangs of New York.

Today my friend, Dr. Eric Becklin, defended his dissertation. And around here, we celebrate the wins. I talk about the process of graduate school and how important friends are to getting you to the finish line.