Prof Catharine Coleborne
Prof Catharine Coleborne
SENIOR ASSOCIATE
Catharine S. Coleborne FASSA is a Professor of History at the University of Newcastle.
She is an experienced manager, leader, and facilitator in higher education with a strong public profile in the arts, humanities, and social sciences. She works energetically to bring people together across boundaries to formulate projects in education, research, and engagement. Her external engagement in leadership roles has focused on three main areas: arts and culture communities; social research, non-government, and social work industry partners; and technology, creative industries and future employers.
Catharine is a historian and interdisciplinary thinker with research interests that span several fields, including histories of health, medicine and institutions, especially mental health and psychiatry, and mobility studies, colonialism and imperialism, and gender studies. She has researched and taught in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand, experiences which have allowed her to grow awareness of trans-Tasman and Pacific research themes and student cohorts. She has experience in using archival data, oral history methods and practice, as well as writing for professional and public audiences. She has been a CI on major research grants from the Australian Research Council. She has been a PI on grants funded by the Royal Society of New Zealand’s Marsden Fund. She has also partnered with community organisations, museums and health services in research projects.
In recent years Catharine has managed large-scale change inside higher education, led the transformation of a School’s academic staff profile, created new academic roles and structures, advocated for the arts, social sciences and humanities in national debates through her role as the Immediate Past President of the Australasian Council of Deans of Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (DASSH). She has also chaired a network of educators for pedagogical innovation across the whole of the university. She has contributed significant work to renewing academic programs since 2016. She seeks to build awareness of the need for change and uplift in her work with academic staff. She has a special interest in human-centred approaches to the development of academics interested in taking on leadership roles.
Catharine’s professional interests include academic strategy and planning, facilitating individual reflection and development in leadership, workshopping group solutions with teams of middle-leaders, encouraging innovative thinking about where to position academic research for new (public) audiences, general workshop facilitation, and individual and group coaching and mentoring.
Catharine’s leadership appointments include:
Director, Research Ethics and Integrity, University of Newcastle (Secondment, June 2023 to March 2024)
Head of School Humanities, Creative Industries and Social Sciences / Dean of Arts
Faculty of Education and Arts, University of Newcastle, Australia (2022)
Head of School, Humanities and Social Sciences/ Dean of Arts, University of Newcastle (2015-2021)
Chair, the Educator Network, University of Newcastle (2019-2022)
Member, Royal Society of New Zealand’s Marsden Humanities Panel (2019-2020; 2013-2015)
REC Member, Humanities and Creative Arts, ARC ERA (2018)
Performance Based Research Fund Coordinator, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences University of Waikato, New Zealand (2014 – 2015), also serving on the TEC’s PBRF Sector Reference Group.
Associate Dean Graduate and Postgraduate, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, University of Waikato, New Zealand (2012 – 2015)
She also held a Head of Department of History role and was seconded to work as a Research Developer at the University of Waikato.