Judith Brett
Judith Margaret Brett AM (born 1949, Melbourne) is an Emeritus Professor of politics at La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia. She retired from La Trobe in 2012, after a restructuring of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in which the School of which she was head was dismantled.
Judith Margaret Brett | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1949 (age 74–75) Melbourne, Australia |
| Awards | Ernest Scott Prize (1993, 2004) Member of the Order of Australia (2023) |
| Academic background | |
| Alma mater | University of Melbourne (BA) (PhD) University of Oxford (DipSocAnth) |
| Thesis | 'The Milk of Language: A Psycho-Analytic Interpretation of Hugo von Hofmannsthal's Chandos Crisis' (1980) |
| Influences | Dennis Altman |
| Academic work | |
| Institutions | La Trobe University (1989-2012) |
| Main interests | Cultural history, political history |
| Notable works | Australian Liberals and the Moral Middle Class (2003) Robert Menzies' Forgotten People (1992) |
Her PhD from Melbourne University’s Politics Department in the 1970s was on Austrian fin-de-siècle poet Hugo von Hofmannsthal.
Brett's 2017 biography of Alfred Deakin won the 2018 National Biography Award. Her next book, From Secret Ballot to Democracy Sausage: How Australia got Compulsory Voting, was shortlisted for the 2019 Queensland Literary Awards University of Southern Queensland History Book Award.
Brett was appointed a Member of the Order of Australia in the 2023 Australia Day Honours.