Tanya Evans
Biographic Data
| ID | 3840797 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Tanya Evans |
| GIVEN NAMES | Tanya |
| FAMILY NAME | Evans |
| SIGNATURE | EVANS T |
| AFFILIATIONS | Macquarie University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-5126-432X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 41 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 38 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 41 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2005 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Sharing memory and identity across generations: An interdisciplinary memory conversation and oral history project
Introduction: Public Sport History and Community Sport
Most of the articles published in this special issue on Public Sport History and Community sport were presented at a symposium held both in person and online for international participants at Macqu
The Impact of Sex and Gendered Stories of Sport in Australia
This article is the result of collaboration by a public historian of sport and a scholar who specializes in biomechanics. They report on their research project titled ‘Do men and women participate in community sport differently? A pilot study to understand modifiable risk factors in female athletes’. It is focussed on contemporary Australia. The aim of this study was to gather qualitative data through surveys with grassroots level athletes to rec…
Inheriting the family: Emotions, identities and things
This introduction to the special issue ‘Inheriting the family: emotions, identities and things’ briefly explores how attention to different forms of inheritance as emotional practices offers new ways to understand ‘intergenerational emotion’. It explains the importance of new methodologies to interrogating this emotion and introduces a range of possibilities that are taken further by the contributors in the issue. These include analysis of emotio…
Sharing memory and wisdom across generations: A scaffolded community reminiscing programme for adolescents and older adults
The role of memory in supporting adolescents' sense of place and past is not well understood, but older adults offer a wealth of life stories and wisdom that they can share with younger generations. This in-depth pilot study positioned Australian high school students as oral historians to interview older Australians about their lives. Oral historian training and materials were provided, and pre- and post-intervention measures of adolescents' sens…
Serenade Serenade , Culture Walks, Mark Dunn, curator, City of Sydney in Partnership with the Australian Centre for Public History, University of Technology, Sydney, with Funding Support from the Paul…
I don’t even trust now what I read in history books’: Family history and the future of co-production and collaboration
Family historians are a large and often neglected group of historical researchers. They have a strongly articulated sense of their practice, and a well-developed set of methodologies and research apparatuses. They mostly work on their own, or in partnership with other family members, and are associated with public libraries, archives and local historical societies. They are a community who are situated outside the academy, often marginalised by t…
Public History in Australia
This article charts the peaks and troughs of public history inside and outside academia in Australia and the promise of the establishment of a new network of public historians in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand. It reveals the value of Australian creative engagements with the past. It concludes by suggesting that networks and team-based work are vital for the successful practice of public history in Australasia and elsewhere
Engagement of undergraduate STEM students: The influence of non-routine problems
This study describes an intervention that introduced a period of solving non-routine problems into tertiary STEM lectures. The aim was twofold: to attempt to increase student engagement and to introduce them to the kind of domain-free abstract reasoning that involves critical, creative and innovative thinking. The study involved over 600 STEM participants in five lecture classes from three tertiary institutions. The results show that a style of l…
Family History, Historical Consciousness and Citizenship: A New Social History
Family history is one of the most widely practiced forms of public history around the globe, especially in settler migrant nations like Australia and Canada. It empowers millions of researchers, linking the past to the present in powerful ways, transforming individuals’ understandings of themselves and the world. This book examines the practice, meanings and impact of undertaking family history research for individuals and society more broadly. I…
Biography and Life-Writing Can Re-Make the Nation’: A Review of Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume 19, 1991-1995 (A-Z)
The pedagogical and social value of public history and work integrated learning: A case study from Australia
This essay presents research undertaken in Sydney Australia on the pedagogical and social impact of a public history undergraduate course on students between 2016 and 2019 using surveys, interviews and focus groups. It argues that historians working within universities need to recognise the value of public history teaching and learning, framed by a commitment to the politics of social and cultural history, to help combat the forces of neo-liberal…
Family History and Life Writing
Public History in Australia
Mathematicians’ Assessments of the Explanatory Value of Proofs
Non-routine problem solving through the lens of self-efficacy
This study involved an intervention designed to examine whether employability prospects for STEM students studying mathematics could be improved. It incorporated use of non-routine problem solving in second-year mathematics courses at two New Zealand universities. From a theoretical standpoint, we conceptualised a novel construct called lateral thinking self-efficacy, which is defined as a learner’s confidence in their ability to solve non-routin…
Effectiveness, efficiency, engagement: Mapping the impact of pre-lecture quizzes on educational exchange
Our study addresses a systemic issue facing higher education – a lack of rigorous educational research alongside new technology-assisted ways of teaching and learning. The issue highlights the disciplinary disconnect as many academics do not research outside their discipline, yet are tasked with educational modernisation through trying out new educational technology. Addressing this issue, we present our conceptual framework, the course transacti…
Student achievement emotions: Examining the role of frequent online assessment
The rapid inclusion of online assessment in higher education has left a void in investigating the relationship this form of assessment has with student emotions. This study examines the influence of frequent online assessment on student emotions in a university setting using a mixed-methods approach. Students' emotions in an online quiz and a traditional classroom test in a second-year mathematics course (n = 91) were analysed using both quantita…
How Do Family Historians Work with Memory
Drawing on survey data and oral history interviews undertaken with family historians in Australia,England, and Canada this article will explore how family historians construct memories using diverse sources in their research. It will show how they utilize oral history, archival documents, material culture, and explorations of space to construct and reconstruct family stories and to make meaning of the past, inserting their familial microhistories…
The emotions of family history and the development of historical knowledge
This article will explore the relationship between the emotions of family history and the development of historical knowledge using surveys conducted with family historians in Australia, Canada and Britain since 2016. Many family historians begin to produce their family histories because they ‘owe’ their ancestors the benefit of their research skills, historical knowledge and the time it takes to reveal their life stories. Their emotional connect…
Re-imagining Contested Communities: Connecting Rotherham through research
Re-Imagining Contested Communities: Connecting Rotherham through Research
This is a book that challenges contemporary images of place. Too often we are told about deprived neighbourhoods but rarely do the people who live in those communities get to shape the agenda and describe, from their perspective, what is important to them. In this book the process of re-imagining comes to the fore in a fresh and contemporary look at one UK town, Rotherham. Using history, artistic practice, writing, poetry, autobiography, and coll…
Working towards the ‘welfare of the world’: Britishimperial networks of philanthropy in the nineteenth century
This article examines philanthropic networks created and sustained by Florence and Rosamund Hill, Caroline Emily Clark, Henry Parkes, Mary Carpenter, Arthur Renwick, the Windeyer family, and others as they travelled across the British Empire, moving between England, Australia, and elsewhere, gathering research data and sharing their ideas and resources through formal organisations like the Social Science Association as well as through their infor…
Swimming with the Spit’: Feminist Oral Sport History and the Process of ‘Sharing Authority’ with Twentieth-Century Female Swimming Champions in Sydney
This paper presents a case study from my research as part of a local and community history of the Spit Amateur Swimming Club, which began at the Spit Baths on the lower north shore of Sydney, Australia, in 1917. It reveals some of the tensions involved in writing feminist oral sport history and the ways in which shared authority can be negotiated between historians and sportswomen when writing a community sport history. Competitive male and femal…
A highly nuanced reading of crosscultural encounters
Review of Tony Ballantyne, Entanglements of Empire: Missionaries, Māori, and the Question of the Body (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2015)
Secondary Analysis of Dennis Marsden Mothers Alone
A secondary analysis has been made of 116 interviews with unmarried mothers carried out by Dennis Marsden in the mid-1960s. These are now held at ESDS Qualidata, University of Essex. They are being used in a wider study of unmarried motherhood in Britain since 1918. There are significant differences in research practices then and now: the interviewer did not obtain the interviewees consent to use the interviews in his research; the interviews wer…
Unfortunate Objects’: London's Unmarried Mothers in the Eighteenth Century
Unmarried mothers in eighteenth‐century London captivated the public imagination in unprecedented ways. Using the petitions for admission into London's Foundling hospital, this article argues that unmarried mothers did not have to conform to a model of female sexual passivity, of ‘respectable illegitimacy’, in order to receive charitable relief in the eighteenth‐century metropolis. The governors of the Foundling Hospital could be indiscriminate i…
The emotions of family history and the development of historical knowledge
This article will explore the relationship between the emotions of family history and the development of historical knowledge using surveys conducted with family historians in Australia, Canada and Britain since 2016. Many family historians begin to produce their family histories because they ‘owe’ their ancestors the benefit of their research skills, historical knowledge and the time it takes to reveal their life stories. Their emotional connect…
The use of memory and material culture in the history of the family in colonial Australia
This article explores the use of memory and material culture in the history of families who travelled between Britain and Australia and settled in the early colonies from 1788 until 1901. It draws on diaries, memoirs, letters, and objects belonging to a variety of cultural institutions including the Museum of Childhood in Perth, Museum Victoria, the Powerhouse Museum, and the Historic Houses Trust of New South Wales, as well as those within priva…
Secrets and Lies: The Radical Potential of Family History
This article focuses on the benefits of blending the methodologies of professional/academic social and cultural history with those of ‘amateur’ family history. Genealogists have often been dismissed by academic historians, categorized as conservative, with a big and a small ‘c’, in their supposedly nostalgic search for a golden age of the family. But it is also argued that genealogy provides families with a sense of identity in a period of transf…
How Do Family Historians Work with Memory
Drawing on survey data and oral history interviews undertaken with family historians in Australia,England, and Canada this article will explore how family historians construct memories using diverse sources in their research. It will show how they utilize oral history, archival documents, material culture, and explorations of space to construct and reconstruct family stories and to make meaning of the past, inserting their familial microhistories…
Common People: The History of an English Family
Sharing memory and wisdom across generations: A scaffolded community reminiscing programme for adolescents and older adults
The role of memory in supporting adolescents' sense of place and past is not well understood, but older adults offer a wealth of life stories and wisdom that they can share with younger generations. This in-depth pilot study positioned Australian high school students as oral historians to interview older Australians about their lives. Oral historian training and materials were provided, and pre- and post-intervention measures of adolescents' sens…
I don’t even trust now what I read in history books’: Family history and the future of co-production and collaboration
Family historians are a large and often neglected group of historical researchers. They have a strongly articulated sense of their practice, and a well-developed set of methodologies and research apparatuses. They mostly work on their own, or in partnership with other family members, and are associated with public libraries, archives and local historical societies. They are a community who are situated outside the academy, often marginalised by t…
Family History and Life Writing
Family history, identity, and public history: Writing a history of The Benevolent Society in its 200 th year
Since 2011, the authors have worked together on outputs associated with the bicentenary of The Benevolent Society of New South Wales, Australia's oldest charity, established in 1813. This article focuses on one of those outputs—a project making use of family histories of clients of The Benevolent Society's Asylum, in the second half of the nineteenth century, to reveal the histories of these families in colonial New South Wales. The project also …
Who Do You Think You Are? Historical Television Consultancy
This article examines my work as a historical consultant on the television programme Who Do You Think You Are? It reveals my motivations for undertaking consultancy work, some of the ways in which social history is presented in the programme and the impact it can have on its audience. In response to the lack of scholarship on audience response to television history programmes it explores both the production and consumption of Who Do You Think You…
Unfortunate Objects’: London's Unmarried Mothers in the Eighteenth Century
Unmarried mothers in eighteenth‐century London captivated the public imagination in unprecedented ways. Using the petitions for admission into London's Foundling hospital, this article argues that unmarried mothers did not have to conform to a model of female sexual passivity, of ‘respectable illegitimacy’, in order to receive charitable relief in the eighteenth‐century metropolis. The governors of the Foundling Hospital could be indiscriminate i…
Secondary Analysis of Dennis Marsden Mothers Alone
A secondary analysis has been made of 116 interviews with unmarried mothers carried out by Dennis Marsden in the mid-1960s. These are now held at ESDS Qualidata, University of Essex. They are being used in a wider study of unmarried motherhood in Britain since 1918. There are significant differences in research practices then and now: the interviewer did not obtain the interviewees consent to use the interviews in his research; the interviews wer…
From Transmitted Deprivation to Social Exclusion: Policy, Poverty, and Parenting. By John Welshman
John Welshman's book is a thorough and fascinating study of the history of poverty and policy from the mid-twentieth century to the early twenty-first tracing the links between Keith Joseph's 1972 ‘cycle of deprivation’ speech and his use of the concept of ‘transmitted deprivation’ and Tony Blair's 2006 speech on tackling ‘a hard core underclass’ and New Labour's use of the concept of ‘social exclusion’. The book explores the remarkable similarit…
Parents of poor children in England, 1580-1800 - By Patricia Crawford: Book Reviews
Exhibition Reviews
The Other Woman and her Child: Extra-marital affairs and illegitimacy in twentieth-century Britain
This article investigates the numbers of 'other women' and their children up until the 1960s in Britain. It analyses 'irregular and illicit unions' in the records of the National Council for the Unmarried Mother and her Child (now One Parent Families/Gingerbread), and explores evidence on these unions in the debates over the passage of the Divorce Acts of 1923 and 1937 as well as the Legitimacy Acts of 1926 and 1959. It suggests that the prevalen…
Lone Mothers
Secrets and Lies: The Radical Potential of Family History
This article focuses on the benefits of blending the methodologies of professional/academic social and cultural history with those of ‘amateur’ family history. Genealogists have often been dismissed by academic historians, categorized as conservative, with a big and a small ‘c’, in their supposedly nostalgic search for a golden age of the family. But it is also argued that genealogy provides families with a sense of identity in a period of transf…
Film and Radio Reviews
The use of memory and material culture in the history of the family in colonial Australia
This article explores the use of memory and material culture in the history of families who travelled between Britain and Australia and settled in the early colonies from 1788 until 1901. It draws on diaries, memoirs, letters, and objects belonging to a variety of cultural institutions including the Museum of Childhood in Perth, Museum Victoria, the Powerhouse Museum, and the Historic Houses Trust of New South Wales, as well as those within priva…
Introduction to this Special Issue on Biography and Life-Writing
This special issue developed from papers presented by invited speakers at a symposium, ‘Faces in the Street: Biography and Life-Writing’, organised by Tanya Evans for History Week at the State Libr
Family history, identity, and public history: Writing a history of The Benevolent Society in its 200 th year
Since 2011, the authors have worked together on outputs associated with the bicentenary of The Benevolent Society of New South Wales, Australia's oldest charity, established in 1813. This article focuses on one of those outputs—a project making use of family histories of clients of The Benevolent Society's Asylum, in the second half of the nineteenth century, to reveal the histories of these families in colonial New South Wales. The project also …
The Meanings and Experiences of Single Mothers in Nineteenth-Century Sydney, Australia
Cet article étudie quelques-unes des trajectoires et des épreuves traversées par les femmes non mariées, blanches et pauvres, qui ont eu recours à l’asile de la Benevolent Society à Sydney (Australie) au xix e ?siècle. Les femmes pauvres, avec enfant mais sans conjoint, ont toujours représenté la part la plus importante des bénéficiaires des aides charitables, quels que soient les différents contextes historiques et géographiques. Cet article dém…
A highly nuanced reading of crosscultural encounters
Review of Tony Ballantyne, Entanglements of Empire: Missionaries, Māori, and the Question of the Body (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2015)
Common People: The History of an English Family
Who Do You Think You Are? Historical Television Consultancy
This article examines my work as a historical consultant on the television programme Who Do You Think You Are? It reveals my motivations for undertaking consultancy work, some of the ways in which social history is presented in the programme and the impact it can have on its audience. In response to the lack of scholarship on audience response to television history programmes it explores both the production and consumption of Who Do You Think You…
Fractured Families: Life on the Margins in Colonial New South Wales
Working towards the ‘welfare of the world’: Britishimperial networks of philanthropy in the nineteenth century
This article examines philanthropic networks created and sustained by Florence and Rosamund Hill, Caroline Emily Clark, Henry Parkes, Mary Carpenter, Arthur Renwick, the Windeyer family, and others as they travelled across the British Empire, moving between England, Australia, and elsewhere, gathering research data and sharing their ideas and resources through formal organisations like the Social Science Association as well as through their infor…
Swimming with the Spit’: Feminist Oral Sport History and the Process of ‘Sharing Authority’ with Twentieth-Century Female Swimming Champions in Sydney
This paper presents a case study from my research as part of a local and community history of the Spit Amateur Swimming Club, which began at the Spit Baths on the lower north shore of Sydney, Australia, in 1917. It reveals some of the tensions involved in writing feminist oral sport history and the ways in which shared authority can be negotiated between historians and sportswomen when writing a community sport history. Competitive male and femal…
Re-imagining Contested Communities: Connecting Rotherham through research
Re-Imagining Contested Communities: Connecting Rotherham through Research
This is a book that challenges contemporary images of place. Too often we are told about deprived neighbourhoods but rarely do the people who live in those communities get to shape the agenda and describe, from their perspective, what is important to them. In this book the process of re-imagining comes to the fore in a fresh and contemporary look at one UK town, Rotherham. Using history, artistic practice, writing, poetry, autobiography, and coll…
The emotions of family history and the development of historical knowledge
This article will explore the relationship between the emotions of family history and the development of historical knowledge using surveys conducted with family historians in Australia, Canada and Britain since 2016. Many family historians begin to produce their family histories because they ‘owe’ their ancestors the benefit of their research skills, historical knowledge and the time it takes to reveal their life stories. Their emotional connect…
Public History in Australia
Mathematicians’ Assessments of the Explanatory Value of Proofs
Non-routine problem solving through the lens of self-efficacy
This study involved an intervention designed to examine whether employability prospects for STEM students studying mathematics could be improved. It incorporated use of non-routine problem solving in second-year mathematics courses at two New Zealand universities. From a theoretical standpoint, we conceptualised a novel construct called lateral thinking self-efficacy, which is defined as a learner’s confidence in their ability to solve non-routin…
Sociology (29 works) · History (23 works) · Political science (20 works) · History (13 works) · Media studies (13 works) · Gender Studies (12 works) · Law (12 works) · Art (11 works) · Australian History and Society (10 works) · Genealogy (9 works)