Melanie Nolan was born in Reefton on the West Coast of Te Waipounamu, New Zealand’s South Island. She won a Junior University Scholarship in 1978 to attend the University of Canterbury (1979-1985) before being awarded an ANU PhD scholarship (1986-1989); her doctoral thesis was 'Uniformity and Diversity: A Case Study of Female Shop and Office Workers in Victoria, 1880 to 1939'. She taught for 16 years at Victoria University of Wellington (1992-2008), becoming Professor of History; she was Head of History (2006-2008). Between stints at university she worked in the New Zealand public service, including the State Services Commission (1984-1986), the Treaty Issues Unit of the Crown Law Office (1989), and the Historical Branch, Department of Internal Affairs (1990-1992). In 2008 she was appointed Professor of History, Director of the National Centre of Biography (NCB) and General Editor of the Australian Dictionary of Biography (ADB) at the ANU.

As a labour historian, she researches changes in work and workers, connecting labour and class, gender and women, and (more recently) ethnicity in 20thC Australian and New Zealand history. She has an abiding interest in the role of the state in Australasian history. She has been a long-serving member of both the Labour History Project (formerly the TUHP) in Wellington and the Australian Society for the Study of Labour History (Canberra regional branch), being President (2010-2015) and currently is Vice President. She is on the Advisory Boards of Labour History (Sydney), Labour History Review (London) and Journal of New Zealand Studies (Wellington); and is a member of the editorial team of Australian Journal of Biography and History. She convenes the Editorial Board, ANU.Lives, the ANU Press’ series in biography; she was on the judging panel of the Magarey Medal for Biography (2008), the selection panel for the Australian Prime Ministers Centre research & scholarship program (2008-2011) and judging panel for the National Biography Awards (2013-2015). She was a visiting scholar at CALTECH (1996), the ANU (2002), University of Cambridge (2013) and was an S.T. Lee Visiting Professorial Fellow, School of Advanced Study (SAS), University of London (2016). In 2016 she was elected a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia (FASSA). 

MA (Hons) (Canterbury, NZ), PhD (ANU)

Biography, labour,  gender, transnational