migration and refugee histories, memory studies, public history, oral history, multiculturalism and ethnicity, cultural heritage management and interpretation, industrial and working class heritage, migrant rights movements

Alexandra Dellios is a historian and senior lecturer in the Centre for Heritage and Museum Studies at the Australian National University. Her research considers the public and oral history of migrant and refugee communities, their experiences of settlement, and working and family life. She has published on: child migration; popular representations of multiculturalism; immigration centres and hostels; the intersections of migrant, industrial and labour heritage; public history practices, and cultural heritage management in Australia. 

She is the author of Heritage Making and Migrant Subjects in the Deindustrialising Region of the Latrobe Valley (Cambridge University Press, April 2022) and Histories of Controversy: Bonegilla Migrant Centre (Melbourne University Publishing, 2017), editor of Memory and Family in Australian Refugee Histories (Routledge: 2019), and co-editor (with Eureka Henrich) of Migrant, Multicultural and Diasporic Heritage: Beyond and Between Borders (Routledge: 2020).

She is Chair of the Editorial Board for Studies in Oral History, a founding member of the Australian Migration History Network, and Executive Committee member of the Association of Critical Heritage Studies.

She remains engaged in oral history projects and teaching, community volunteering, and heritage interpretation efforts. 

Post-war Migration and Collaborative Community Heritage Practices (2017 - )

This project analyses community-initiated heritage and public history projects that pertain to post-WWII migration and settlement in Australia (the Latrobe Valley, in particular). It is interested in community negotiation (and challenge) to heritage discourses and multiculturalism/social inclusion rhetoric.

Remembering Migrant Protest and Activism: Migrant Rights Discourses in pre-Multicultural Australia (2019 - ) / The Community Origins of Multiculturalism in Australia: A New History (2022 - )

This project explores 'migrant rights' discourses and collective community memories of activism and protests in pre-Multicultural Australia (1960s and 1970s) - focussing, in the first instance, on the community archives and oral histories of Greek, Turkish and Italian community groups, and their allies (including ecumenical charities and trade unions), with particular attention to the work of women in leadership and welfare service provision/as social welfare workers and advocates. Future trajectories of the project will trace the impact of these discourses and ideological developments in 'multiculturalism' on social welfare services, practices and frameworks into the 1980s and beyond, and on the situaiton for migrant workers in Australia. 

CH Currey Memorial Fellowship at the State Library of NSW for the project: Greek-Australian Women and Building Alternative Multiculturalisms: Grassroots histories of migrant welfare in New South Wales, 1960s–1980s (2022)

A grassroots history of early multiculturalism from the perspective of ethnic minority communities (especially women) who worked at the ‘front-lines’ of migrant welfare and service provision from the 1960s to the 1980s, in NSW (in state-funded agencies and from within community organisations, particularly in Sydney). Read the full Fellowship announcement from SLNW.

ARC funded projects:

Architecture and Industry: The migrant contribution to nation-building, DP190101531 (2019 - 2022)

Lead CI: A/Prof Anoma Pieris (the University of Melbourne, Andrew Sangia – University of Melbourne, Mirjana Lozanovska – Deakin University, David Beynon – University of Tasmania, Alexandra Dellios – Australian National University.

Project Description: Migrants after World War II were critical to the spatial making of modern Australia. Major federally-funded industries driving post-war nation-building programs depended on the employment of large numbers of war displaced persons. Directed to remote, rural and urban industrial sites, migrant labour and resettlement altered the nation’s physical landscape, providing Australia with its contemporary economic base. While the immigrant contribution to nation-building in cultural terms is well-known, its everyday spatial, architectural and landscape transformations remain unexamined. This project aims to bring to the foreground post-war industry and immigration to comprehensively document a uniquely Australian shaping of the built environment.

• Renee Dixon, ‘Developing a crowdsourced digital LGBTIQ archive: a new methodology to challenge knowledge hegemonies and hierarchies of normative archive practices’, PhD (2019 – ).
• Kavya Kalutantiri, 'Appeasing the Palate in Cosmopolitan Cities: An exploration of South Asian diasporic subjectivity through foodways', PhD (2020 - ), Chair.