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About Me

Dr Meg Foster is an award-winning historian of banditry, settler colonial and public history, and a Research Fellow at the University of Cambridge. She has been awarded the Mary Bateson Research Fellowship (for Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences) from Newnham College at the University of Cambridge, from 2020 to 2023, to investigate the connections between British highway robbery and Australian bushranging. She has also been appointed a Visiting Fellow at the University of New South Wales to assist her in this endeavour. It was at UNSW that Meg received her PhD in History in March 2020.

Meg has a strong publishing record and has received prestigious awards for her writing. Most recently, she was awarded the Aboriginal History Award from the History Council of New South Wales for a paper that later featured in Australian Historical Studies, the top-ranking Australian history journal. As well as journal articles, Meg has published book chapters, reviews, newspaper articles and blog posts. She has worked as a public historian, undertaken historical consultancy, featured in historical documentaries, and engaged in artistic collaborations. Meg has a breadth of experience engaging academic and public audiences and a passion for connecting history to the contemporary world. Her first book Boundary Crossers: the hidden history of Australia’s other bushrangers was published by NewSouth in 2022.

Recent Publications

‘Protecting the Colony from its People: bushranging, vagrancy and social control in colonial New South Wales’, Law and History Review (accepted for publication).

‘The Other Bushrangers’, in Nancy Cushing (ed.), A History of Crime in Australia: Australian Underworlds (London: Routledge, forthcoming December 2022).

Boundary Crossers: the hidden history of Australia’s other bushrangers (Sydney: NewSouth, 2022).

‘Unprecedented Times?: COVID-19 and the lessons of history’, in Paul Ashton and Paula Hamilton (eds.), The Australian History Industry (Sydney: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2022).

with Toni Burton, Mark Finnane, Carolyn Fraser, Peter Hobbins and Hollie Pich, ‘A History of Now: historical responses to COVID-19’, Public History Review vol. 27 (2020), pp. 86-115.

‘Pathfinders: a history of Aboriginal trackers in New South Wales by Michael Bennett’, Aboriginal History vol. 43 (2020).

‘Texture, Light and Sound: a sensory history of early Sydney’, Australian Historical Studies vol. 51, no. 3 (2020), pp. 344-347.

‘The Forgotten War of 1900: Jimmy Governor and the Aboriginal People of Wollar’, Australian Historical Studies vol. 50, no. 3 (2019), pp. 1-16 (winner of the 2018 Aboriginal History Award from the History Council of NSW).

‘Approaching Public History’ in Paul Ashton and Alex Trapeznik (eds.), What is Public History Globally? working with the past in the present (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019), pp. 159-172.

‘Murder for White Consumption? Jimmy Governor and the bush ballad’ in Yu-ting Huang and Rebecca Weaver-Hightower (eds.), Archiving Settler Colonialism: culture, race, and space (Oxon: Routledge, 2018), pp. 173-189.

‘Drawing the Historian Back into History: creativity, writing and The Art of Time Travel’, Rethinking History, vol. 22, no. 1 (2018), pp. 137-153.

with Paul Ashton, ‘Public Histories’ in Sasha Handley, Rohan McWilliam and Lucy Noakes (eds.), New Directions in Social and Cultural History (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), pp. 151-170.

‘Another Way to Enter the Past (Book Review)’, History Australia, vol. 13, no. 4 (2016), pp. 632-633.

‘Online and Plugged In? Public History and Historians in the Digital Age,’ Public History Review, vol. 21

(2014), pp. 1-19 (winner of the Deen De Bortoli Award in Applied History, 2015). Republished in 2018 for Public History: A National Journal of Public History (China) 公众史学.

‘The Public History Reader edited by Hilda Kean and Paul Martin (Book Review),’ Public History Review, vol. 21 (2014), pp. 102-104.

Media Coverage

Social Media

@MFoster_history

Country Focus

Expertise by Geography

Australia, England, United Kingdom

Expertise by Chronology

18th century, 19th century

Expertise by Topic

Colonialism, Gender, Indigenous Peoples, Law, Libraries & Archives, Local & Regional, Museums, Pedagogy, Public History, Race, Rebellion & Revolution, Sexuality