Grace Karskens

Content sourced from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Grace Elizabeth Karskens (born 12 March 1958) is an Australian historian and professor of history at the University of New South Wales. She was born in Sydney and studied at the University of Sydney, earning degrees in history and historical archaeology, including an MA in 1986 and a PhD in 1995. Before joining UNSW as a lecturer in 2001, she worked on heritage and archaeological projects and published several books.

Her research focuses on Australian history, especially early Sydney and Indigenous histories. In 2012 she was named a Carson Fellow at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society for her project on the Penrith Lakes and Castlereagh, New South Wales. She has served on the Reserve Bank of Australia's Design Advisory Panel and has been a trustee of the Historic Houses Trust of New South Wales (now Sydney Living Museums) and the Dictionary of Sydney. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of New South Wales, was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities in 2010, and became a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia in 2022.

Notable works include The Rocks: Life in Early Sydney (1998) and The Colony: A History of Early Sydney (2009). Her book People of the River (2021) won the New South Wales Premier's Australian History Prize and the Prime Minister's Prize for Australian History, and was shortlisted for the 2021 Indie Book Awards in Nonfiction.

Awards include the New South Wales Premier's Community and Regional History Prize (1998) for The Rocks; the Calibre Prize (2019) for her essay Nah Doongh's Song; and the Prime Minister's Literary Award for Non-Fiction (2010) for The Colony (which had been shortlisted for the 2009 Prime Minister's Prize for Australian History). The Rocks and The Colony are widely recognized for bringing early Sydney and Indigenous histories to a broad audience.