Dr Graham Willett

Biography

Graham Willett returned to Melbourne University in 1994 to research the history of gay and lesbian political activism in Australia. The results of this work were published in 2000 in his first book, Living Out Loud: A History of Gay and Lesbian Activism in Australia.

He brings to his teaching and research a background in a variety of jobs (from book-putter to book-keeper to federal public servant) and as a trade unionist and political activist in far left parties and various campaigns for gay rights including Gay Community News, ACTUP and Queer Action.

He is an enthusiastic promoter of links between the university and community-based historians. He is President of the Australian Lesbian and Gay Archives, co-hosts its annual Melbourne queer history walks and has been actively involved in organising the national Homosexual Histories conferences for many years.

In 2005-2006 he was DAAD Visiting Lecturer at the Institute for English Studies at the Freie University in Berlin.

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Research

Graham's interest in the history of the gay and lesbian movement in Australia has developed in two different directions in recent years. One path has followed homosexual politics backwards, examining its origins in Britain in the 1950s and its subsequent diffusion through the British World. But the history of gay and lesbian politics is also the history of the development of Australia as a liberal, tolerant and republican society in the period after 1945, and this has provided a second area of research interest.

Current projects include:

Homosexual Law Reform in the British World: Origins and Diffusion
The Times and Life of Laurie Collinson
The Gay and Lesbian History of Melbourne

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Publications

Books

• G. Willett, Living Out Loud: A History of Gay and Lesbian Activism in Australia, Allen and Unwin, 2000
• G. Willett, Australia's Homosexual Histories: Gay and Lesbian Perspectives 5, Australian Centre for Lesbian and Gay Research and the Australian Lesbian and Gay Archives, 2000, (edited with David Phillips)
• G. Willett (editor), Thinking Down Under: Australian Politics, Society and Culture in Transition, WVT, Trier, 2006

Articles and Chapters

• G. Willett, 'Introduction: We Are Everywhere!' in International Periodicals and Newsletters from the Canadian Gay and Lesbian Archives, Gay Rights Movement Series 11, Primary Source Microfilm, Woodbridge, Connecticut 2006
• G. Willett, 'What the Right Got Right' in Graham Willett (ed), Thinking Down Under: Australian Politics, Society and Culture in Transition, WVT, Trier, 2006
• G. Willett, 'Lesbian and Gay Activism in Australia: Writing, Reception and Impact', in Russell West-Pavlov (ed) Who's Australia, Whose Australia, WVT, Trier 2005
• G. Willett, 'Camp Melbourne' in Tanja Lukins and Seamus OíHanlon (eds), Go! Melbourne in the Sixties, Melbourne Publishing Group, Melbourne, 2005
• G. Willett, 'Psyched in: Psychology, Psychiatry and Homosexuality in Australia', in Gay and Lesbian Issues in Psychiatry, vol. 1, no. 2, August 2005
• G. Willett, 'Social Exclusion and Gay and Lesbian People' in D. Weiss (ed), Social Exclusion: An Approach to the Australian Case, Peter Lang Verlag, Frankfurt, 2003
• G. Willett, 'Australian Gay Activists: From Movement to Community', in Radical History Review, no 76, 2000

Conference Papers, Encyclopedia Entries and Working Papers

• G. Willett, 'Gay movement' and 'Queer Politics' in Brian Galligan and Winsome Roberts (eds), Oxford Companion to Australian Politics (forthcoming)
• G. Willett, 'Daughters of Bilitis', 'Homosexual Men', and 'Society Five' in Andrew Brown-May and Shurlee Swain (eds), The Encyclopedia of Melbourne, Cambridge University Press, Port Melbourne, 2005
• G. Willett, 'From Camp to Gay: The Homosexual History of the University of Melbourne, 1960-1976', Working Paper no 6, The History of the University Unit, University of Melbourne, 2002
• G. Willett, 'The Australian Lesbian and Gay Archives', Past Caring?' in What Does Society Expect of Archivists? Proceedings of the Australian Society of Archivists Conference, ASA, Canberra, 2002
• G. Willett, 'Australia' in GLBTQ: An Encyclopedia of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer Culture, www.glbtq.com
• G. Willett, 'Australia: History and Politics' in Timothy Murphy (ed), Reader's Guide to Lesbian and Gay Studies, Fitzroy Dearborn, Chicago, 2000
• G. Willett, 'Laurence Collinson', 'Rodney Croome', 'Craig Johnston', 'Lex Watson', and 'Sue Wills', in Robert Aldrich and Garry Wotherspoon (eds), Who's Who in Gay and Lesbian History, Routledge, 2000

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Teaching

102-210 From Mateship to Mardi Gras
102-111 Australia Now
102-003 Australia and America: Comparing New Worlds
102-508 Theories in International Studies

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Supervision

Graham's primary area of supervision is in gay and lesbian history and politics in Australia and internationally. But his interest in interdisciplinary Australian studies has brought him to supervise in fields as diverse as the Irish food and drink in Australia, refugee law and Lebanese Muslim communities in Melbourne.

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