Modern and contemporary political history and politics with special reference to leadership, gender, transnational lives, and transformational change and the information strategies underlying it.

Professor Chris Wallace is in the School of Politics Economics & Society, Faculty of Business Government & Law, University of Canberra, and is a Visiting Fellow at the ANU School of History. She works in modern and contemporary political history with special reference to leadership, gender, transnational lives, and transformational change and the information strategies underlying it.

Wallace's latest book is Political Lives: Australian prime ministers and their biographers (University of NSW Press, 2023). Her book historicising Australian Labor's shock 2019 federal election loss, How To Win An Election, was published by NewSouth Books, the trade publishing arm of the University of NSW Press, in 2020. Previous books include a biography of maverick Australian feminist Germaine Greer, Greer, Untamed Shrew (Pan Macmillan, 1997; Faber & Faber, 1999); a biography of the then crusading neoliberal policy exponent John Hewson during his Opposition leadership in the early 1990s, Hewson: A Portrait (Pan Macmillan, 1993); and an exploration of the intense 30 year-long relationship between cricketer Don Bradman and his confidante, journalist Rohan Rivett, The Private Don (Allen & Unwin, 2004). She was the National Archives of Australia Cabinet Historian in 2020 and 2021 for the release of the 2000 and 2001 Cabinet papers.

A first career as an economic and political journalist in the Canberra Press Gallery has contributed to Wallace's success in public-facing scholarly communications, including through The Conversation which has twice named her one of Australia's 'Top Thinkers' (2017 and 2019). Her occasional commentary and analysis can be read in Nikkei Asia, the Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and The Saturday Paper. Twitter: @c_s_wallace

THE CASEYS IN WASHINGTON 1940-42: Smart Power Strengths and Limitations. This Australian Research Council-funded project concerns diplomatic interventions and practices in pursuit of ‘smart power’ results, explored from a present in which ‘hard power’ military intervention is often a disproportionately large, reflex response to global security threats. It focuses on Australian Minister Richard Gardiner Casey and his wife Maie Casey who served from 1940-42 in Washington, Australia's first independent diplomatic mission, and their press aide Pat Jarrett who served there 1940-1. The project maps their campaign, in co-operation with the British mission to Washington led initially by Lord Lothian then Lord Halifax, to draw the US into the war against Nazi Germany, and their contending campaign to draw the US into the Pacific at the same time contrary to Britain’s ‘Europe First’ policy. The interpersonal diplomacy of the campaign is examined, incorporating the wider Washington political and media networks in which their diplomacy was practised.