The Australian Fulbright Alumni Association's Victorian chapter welcomes you to our upcoming Melbourne event, Wednesday 29th August, 6pm @ the Leather Room, University House, Professors' Walk, University of Melbourne:

Telling the story of the Fulbright program: From 'war junk' to 'the greatest action taken'

Prof Diane Kirkby and Dr Alice Garner will discuss the findings of their ARC project, which has researched the story of the Australian-American Fulbright program. 

Refreshments at 6pm; presentation at 6:30pm. Dinner will follow at 7:30pm.

RSVP: Dr Elizabeth Brooke, AFAA's Victorian Convener, ebrooke425@gmail.com

About the presenters:

Prof Diane Kirkby is Professor of Law and Humanities, University of Technology Sydney and Research Professor (Emeritus) at La Trobe University, Melbourne where she taught US and Australian history for many years. She has published extensively and is an elected Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities and the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia, and in 2015 became only the second Australian to be elected a Fellow of the American Society for Legal History. She is a Fulbright Alumnus and has served several terms on the Victorian Fulbright Selection Committee. Research on the Fulbright program in Australia was funded by an Australian Research Council grant and resulted in a book, Academic Ambassadors, Pacific Allies: Australia America and the Fulbright Program, being published by Manchester University Press later this year.

Dr Alice Garner is an Australian historian, teacher and performer. She completed a PhD in French History in 2001 (University of Melbourne), published A Shifting Shore (Cornell University Press) on the impact of tourism on a French Atlantic fishing town, and then a commissioned student memoir (The Student Chronicles, MUP). Alice was contemplating a move from 19th-century France to the post-war history of hitchhiking in Australia and the US when Diane Kirkby at La Trobe University encouraged her to take a side-step and join a new ARC project researching the story of the Australian-American Fulbright program. She spent the next few years digging through External Affairs and State Department archives, reading Fulbright board minutes and travelled around Australia to meet Fulbright alumni in many different research fields. She created an interactive timeline of the program history, with links to news articles and interviews, which is hosted on the Fulbright Commission website. A renewed appreciation for the power of education then led Alice to make a move into secondary school teaching, which she has pursued while co-authoring the soon-to-be-published history of the Fulbright program (Manchester University Press). Recently, Alice has combined her history and performance skills, appearing as a presenter on Coast Australia, a BBC/Foxtel (History Channel) television documentary series 2, 3 and 4 about the Australian coastline.