The history of Australian English; history of the book, reading, and publishing; library history;  US and Australian cultural and intellectual history; social and cultural history of war

Associate Professor Amanda Laugesen is Director of the Australian National Dictionary Centre, ANU. She completed her PhD in the History Program at the ANU in 2000, and subsequently worked as a research editor at the Australian National Dictionary Centre, ANU, as well as undertaking teaching in the History Department. She produced two lexical monographs for Oxford University Press (Convict Words: the Language of the Australian Convict Era and Diggerspeak: the Language of Australians at War) while working at the ANDC, as well as working on a number of other projects relating to the history of Australian English. Amanda was appointed as a Lecturer in History at the University of Southern Queensland in 2004, and Lecturer in History and American Studies at Flinders University in 2006. She has extensive teaching experience in US, Australian, and World History. Since taking over as Director of the ANDC, she has co-edited many Oxford Australian dictionaries, including the Australian Pocket Oxford Dictionary and the Australian Concise Oxford Dictionary. She was Managing Editor of the second edition of the Australian National Dictionary (2016) and is now chief editor.

Amanda's research includes numerous books and articles in the areas of historical memory, the history of reading, libraries and publishing, cultural history (with a particular interest in the cultural history of war), the history of Australian English, and lexicography. Her books include Boredom is the Enemy: the Intellectual and Imaginative Worlds of Australian Soldiers in the Great War and Beyond (2012), Taking Books to the World: American Publishers and the Cultural Cold War (2017), and Rooted: An Australian History of Bad Language (2020). Her current research areas include: cultural history of Australian English and slang; cultural history of war and veterans; and the history of the cultural Cold War.

Current research projects and interests include: a forthcoming book on Australian words; a dictionary of WW2 slang; a history of Australian war memoirs; a study of veterans' print culture; and work on US print culture during the Cold War.