The Careers of Humanities Students in Interwar Australia

Abstract

This article uses prosopographical methods to map the broad patterns of the geographical, vocational, and social circulation of a cohort of arts students in interwar Australia. In doing so, it sheds light on the lives of a significant but largely neglected category of people who carried humanities knowledge and helped reproduce it. The article reveals both the breadth of professional work undertaken by this cohort and their international and regional entanglements, thereby showing how individuals with humanities training moved into a wide array of knowledge domains. In the process, it identifies sites for further studies and shows that prosopography might offer a valuable method for historians of humanistic knowledge.