Dr Mary Tomsic is Research Fellow in the Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences at Australian Catholic University. Her current research is on visual representations of child refugees. Her scholarly research has been published in edited collections, including, Gender & Violence in Australia: Historical Perspectives (Monash University Press, 2019), Visualising Human Rights (UWA Publishing, 2018) and Children’s Voices in the Past: New Historical Perspectives (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019); journals including History Australia, The History of the Family, Australian Journal of Politics and History and History Education Review (with Claire Deery). Beyond the Silver Screen: A History of Women, Filmmaking and Film Culture in Australia 1920–1990 (Melbourne University Press) is her first monograph and was published in 2017.
Mary’s research and scholarship is strongly connected to community-based activities through collaborating with community arts publisher, Kids’ Own Publishing. Activities include researching books published by children, developing teaching materials to support the use of children’s stories to teach refugee and migration history, and working with young people with a refugee background to create digital stories. The project Books by Children (a part of SOCEY) was initiated when she was part of research team on an ARC Laureate Fellowship project on Child Refugees and Australian Internationalism: 1920–1970 (LF140100049). Mary has worked with school based history projects and collaboratively hosted Wikipedia edit-a-thons.