Ian Tyrrell : Biography

Ian Tyrrell is Scientia Professor of History at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia, where he has taught for more than thirty years. Born in Brisbane, Queensland, he was educated at the University of Queensland and Duke University, where he was a Fulbright Scholar. His teaching interests include American history, environmental history, and historiography.

He was a pioneer in the approach to transnational history as a research program for reconceptualizing United States history through his essay “American Exceptionalism in an Age of International History” in the American Historical Review in 1991; and in Woman’s World/Woman’s Empire: The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union in International Perspective (University of North Carolina Press, 1991), which dealt with the issues of gender and empire in that leading nineteenth-century women’s international organization. Among his other books are two dealing with aspects of transnational history: True Gardens of the Gods: Californian-Australian Environmental Reform, 1860-1930 (University of California Press, 1999) and Transnational Nation: United States History in Global Perspective since 1789 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).

He was (1991 to 1996) editor of the Australasian Journal of American Studies, and President of the Australian and New Zealand American Studies Association, 2002—06. A Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, he was awarded a Commonwealth of Australia Centenary Medal in 2003, and has served as a visiting professor at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris. He has been appointed Joyce Appleby (Visiting) Professor of United States History at the University of California, Los Angeles, for Fall 2009; and Harold Vyvyan Harmsworth Professor of American History in the University of Oxford for 2010-11.