Patricia Grimshaw Prize: Winning Articles
The Patricia Grimshaw Prize was instituted by the board of Australian Historical Studies in 2014, in honour of the outstanding contribution which Professor Grimshaw has made to the nurturing of young historians across Australia. It is awarded biennially to highlight excellence in an article and one that makes the most significant contribution to our understanding of Australian history.
For the 2022 award, covering the years 2020-21, the judges, Emerita Professor Fiona Paisley (Griffith University) and Emeritus Professor Tim Rowse (Western Sydney University), short-listed six outstanding examples of important and original work in Australian history*
The prize this year went to the article by Kate Gleeson. The judges stated:
Gleeson's paper is comparative, offering a persuasive explanation of the differences between Ireland's and Australia's policies of 'redress' for wrongs committed against children placed under institutional care. It constructs and clearly expounds a framework for interpreting the approaches taken in each nation to the institutional management of children. Drawing on a strand of Irish historical studies that has mobilised Foucault's concept of bio-power – succinctly and lucidly explained here – the paper treats Ireland and Australia as British colonies with significantly different institutional configurations, shaped by specific relationships of church and state and by the centralised/federated structure of the state itself. This ambitious paper achieves much by its insightful interpretation of historical sources, its compelling theoretical imagination, and its capacity for compression without losing complexity.
View the Shortlisted Papers.
* The judges are the current editors of Australian Historical Studies, but neither was editor of the journal during the period relevant to this award.