School of Historical Studies History

Dr Keir Reeves

Lecturer and ARC Postdoctoral Fellow
Associate Director, Cultural Heritage Unit
Telephone: (+61 3) 8344 3355
Email: keir@unimelb.edu.au
Fax: (+61 3) 8344 7894
Location: Room 345 East
History, John Medley Building
The University of Melbourne VIC 3010
Academic Profile (click on the link for more information)
Biography
Research
Publications
Teaching
Supervision


Biography

After completing his undergraduate degrees in Arts and Economics at Monash University where he majored in politics, history and economics, Keir Reeves continued his studies in history at the University of Melbourne completing his MA in 2001 and PhD in 2005. Dr Reeves’ main research focus to date has been on the cultural history of gold mining communities, particularly the experience of the gold fields Chinese in Victoria during and immediately after the gold rush era of the mid-nineteenth century.

He is the associate director of the Cultural Heritage Unit in the School of Historical Studies and currently serves on the Public Records Office of Victoria Stakeholders Committee, the Mount Alexander Diggings Board of Management and the Heritage Victoria Reference Panel for the Framework of Historic Themes Project and the Steering Committee for the Buckland Project.

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Research

Reeves research has been closely connected to historical cultural landscape analysis, Australian history, heritage studies, cultural heritage management policy, public history, comparative goldfields history, regional history, Chinese Australian history, new media and historical interpretation.

He is currently an ARC Postdoctoral Research Fellow working on a three-year research ARC LINKAGE project titled Historical studies in central Victoria's regional heritage 1834-1950 that uses historical landscape analysis to consider the cultural history of central Victoria and its role in the emergent Pacific Rim goldfields sociétés of the mid-nineteenth century. Reeves’ main contribution has been to uncover the complex nature of the cultural fabric and racial exchange on the Mount Alexander diggings during the second half of the nineteenth century. He is also interested in the nineteenth century history of Australian gold mining industry and the world heritage values of the region.

Reeves is also involved in the Places of Pain and Shame ARC Discovery project with Cultural Heritage Centre for Asia and the Pacific at Deakin University. This project is conceived as a cross-cultural study of imprisonment sites, their heritage values and the ways that communities, government agencies and heritage professionals deal with these cases of ‘difficult heritage’. The findings of this will be presented in the forthcoming book Places of Pain and Shame: Dealing with 'Difficult' Heritage to be published by Routledge Press, UK.

He has extended his research interest in cultural landscape analysis to the Indochina and was recently awarded an Australian Academy of the Humanities Travelling Fellow for a project titled Rethinking Historical Cultural Landscapes: Laos as a Case Study.

Using cultural landscape analysis and cultural history his current research aims at considering the Australian gold seeking experience within the broader historical rubric of the the Pacific Rim gold rushes.

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Publications

Peer Reviewed Articles

Book Chapters

Peer Reviewed Conference Proceedings

Government and Technical Reports

Reviews and Shorter Entries

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Teaching areas

131-544 Applications in Public History
131-548 Heritage Workshop Chinese in Australia

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Supervision

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