Ross L Jones

Ross L Jones is Senior Research Fellow in the Indigenous History of the University of Melbourne Project in the Centre for the Study of Higher Education in the Faculty of Education at the University of Melbourne. The outcome of this project is the recent publication of, Dhoombak Goobgoowana: a History of Indigenous Australia and the University of Melbourne, volume one: Truth (eds Ross L. Jones, James Waghorne and Marcia Langton) Melbourne University Press: Carlton, 2024. Volume 2 ‘Voice’ will be published in 2025. Ross studied in the History School and Education Faculty at the University of Melbourne and then taught for two decades in secondary schools in Australia and the United Kingdom. He then completed a Master of Educational Studies and a PhD at Monash University, the latter on the eugenics movement in Victoria.

After teaching the histories of medicine and biology in the Department of the History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Melbourne, he took up an ARC postdoctoral position in the History School at the University of Sydney which culminated in, amongst other publications, Anatomists of Empire: Race, Evolution and the Discovery of Human Biology (2020). In 2016 he was awarded the Redmond Barry Fellowship at the State Library of Victoria to write on the history of tuberculosis. He has held honorary positions at the University of Melbourne, the University of Sydney and La Trobe University variously in Medicine, Law and History departments. Ross's research interests and publications range across medical and educational eugenics in Australia and the US and UK; the history of human anatomy, anthropology and race theory; the development of public education; medical biography and public health policies. He was commissioned by the Melbourne Medical School to write Humanity’s Mirror: 150 years of Anatomy in Melbourne (2007). He has given numerous keynote and invited presentations at local and international conferences. Ross has also been regularly involved in all forms of media as a public historian, on screen and as a researcher, including for Who do you think you are? on SBS. He has 90,000 readers for articles in The Conversation and has been invited to talk for local and national radio on many occasions. He has also prepared and participated in documentaries for ABC Radio National.