Margaret Jolly, BA (Hons), PhD (Sydney), FASSA
Professor, Gender Relations Centre

Email: margaret.jolly@anu.edu.au

Biographical Statement

Margaret Jolly is Professor and Head of the Gender Relations Centre in the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies. She is an historical anthropologist who has written extensively on gender in the Pacific, on exploratory voyages and travel writing, missions and contemporary Christianity, maternity and sexuality, cinema and art. She is currently writing on gender in discourses of nationalism and diaspora in the Pacific, with an emphasis on visual arts and literature. Her next book will consider gender, race and sexuality in both documentary and feature films about the Pacific.

Research Interests

Gender and sexuality in the Pacific and Asia; ethnography of the Pacific, especially Vanuatu; anthropology and colonial history; politics of tradition; indigeneity, diaspora and citizenship; feminist theory; photography and cinema.

Key Publications

• (ed. with Vicki Lukere) Birthing in the Pacific: Beyond Tradition and Modernity?, University of Hawai'i Press, Honolulu, 2002.
• Women of the Place, Kastom, Colonialism and Gender in Vanuatu, Harwood Academic Publishers, Chur, 1994.
• (ed. with Lenore Manderson) Sites of Desire, Economies of Pleasure: Sexualities in Asia and the Pacific, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1997.
• (ed. with Kalpana Ram) Maternities and Modernities: Colonial and Postcolonial Experiences in Asia and the Pacific, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1998.
• (ed. with Kalpana Ram) Borders of Being: Citizenship, Fertility and Sexuality in Asia and the Pacific, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 2001.

Career Highlights

Visiting Professor, University of California at Santa Cruz (2002); Appointed Convenor, Gender Relations Project (1992); Burns Distinguished Visiting Chair, History, University of Hawai'i at Mānoa (1998); Promoted to Professor, election to Academy of Social Sciences in Australia (1999).