Researcher profile

Associate Professor Benjamin Mountford

Faculty of Education and Arts, National School of Arts and Humanities

Areas of expertise: global and imperial history; British history; Australian history

HDR Supervisor accreditation status: Full

ORCID ID: 0000-0002-5429-2921

Phone: +61 3 5336 5413

Email: benjamin.mountford@acu.edu.au

Location: ACU Ballarat Campus

My research focuses on global history, British and British imperial history, and Australian history. My main project at the moment, is a book on the impact of the nineteenth century gold rushes on Victorian Britain. My first book "Britain, China, & Colonial Australia" was published by Oxford University Press in 2016, and was later awarded the 2017 Prue Torney Fellows Award. I am the co-editor of two other books, "A Global History of Gold Rushes" (University of California Press, 2018) and "Fighting Words: Fifteen Books That Shaped the Postcolonial World" (Peter Lang, 2017), and a special issue of The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, "Making Connections: Essays in Honour of John Darwin" (2019). Before coming to ACU I held research fellowships at La Trobe University and the Huntington Library in California and lectureships at Federation University and the University of Buckingham. From 2008-15 I was at Oxford, where I was a Rae and Edith Bennett Travelling Scholar, a Beit Scholar in Commonwealth and Imperial History, a Research Associate at the Oxford Centre for Global History, and the first Michael Brock Junior Research Fellow in Modern British History.

Academia profile

Select publications

Books

• Mountford, Benjamin. (2016). Britain, China, and Colonial Australia Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198790549.001.0001

Book chapters

• Mountford, Benjamin. (2018). The Pacific gold rushes and the struggle for order. In In B. Mountford and S. Tuffnell (Ed.). A Global History of Gold Rushes pp. 88 - 108 University of California.
• Mountford, Benjamin and Tuffnell, Stephen. (2018). Seeking a global history of gold. In In B. Mountford and S. Tuffnell (Ed.). A Global History of Gold Rushes pp. 3-41 University of California.
• Mountford, Benjamin. (2017). "'The match is in the spinifex': the Gurindji walk off and Frank Hardy's the unlucky Australians". In In D. Davies, E. Lombard and B. Mountford (Ed.). Fighting Words: Fifteen Books That Shaped the Postcolonial World pp. 215 - 230 Peter Lang Publishing. https://doi.org/10.3726/b13185
• Davies, Dominic, Lombard, Erica and Mountford, Benjamin. (2017). "Fighting words: books and the making of the postcolonial world". In In D. Davies, E. Lombard and B. Mountford (Ed.). Fighting Words: Fifteen Books That Shaped the Postcolonial World pp. 1 - 26 Peter Lang Publishing.
• Mountford, Benjamin. (2015). "'The interest of our colonies seems to have been largely overlooked': Colonial Australia and Anglo-Chinese relations". In In R. Bickers and J. Howlett (Ed.). Britain and China, 1840-1970: Empire, Finance and War pp. 84 - 102 Routledge.
• Mountford, Ben and Reeves, Keir. (2009). Reworking the tailings: New gold histories and the cultural Landscape. In In J. Carey and C. McLisky (Ed.). Creating White Australia pp. 19 - 33 Sydney University Press. https://doi.org/10.30722/sup.9781920899424

Journal articles

• Mountford, Benjamin. (2019). Colonial Australia, the 1887 Colonial Conference, and the struggle for imperial unity. The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History. 47(5), pp. 912-942. https://doi.org/10.1080/03086534.2019.1677341
• Fletcher, Robert S. G., Mountford, Ben and Potter, Simon J.. (2019). Making connections: John Darwin and his Histories of Empire. The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History. 47(5), pp. 801 - 814. https://doi.org/10.1080/03086534.2019.1677355
• Mountford, Benjamin. (2017). Send Fook Shing: the Chinese detective in colonial Victoria. History Australia. 14(3), pp. 361 - 377. https://doi.org/10.1080/14490854.2017.1359070
• Reeves, Keir and Mountford, Ben. (2011). Sojourning and settling: Locating Chinese-Australian history. Australian Historical Studies. 42(1), pp. 111 - 125. https://doi.org/10.1080/1031461X.2010.539620
• Mountford, Ben. (2008). The Queen vs Ah Pew: Murder, mystery and controversy in colonial Castlemaine. Victorian Historical Journal. 79(1), pp. 39 - 59.
• Reeves, Keir and Mountford, Ben. (2007). Court records and cultural landscapes: Rethinking the Chinese gold seekers in central Victoria. Provenance: The journal of Public Record Office Victoria. 6, pp. 30 - 41.

Accolades and awards

• Menzies Australia Institute Bicentennial Fellowship, 2018-19
• Huntington Library Mayers Visiting Fellowship, 2018
• David Myers Research Fellowship, La Trobe University, 2017-18
• Allan Martin Award, Australian Historical Association, 2017
• Prue Torney Fellows' Prize (for Britain, China, and Colonial Australia), 2017
• M.G. Brock Junior Research Fellowship, Corpus Christi College, Oxford, 2012-15
• Huntington Library Corpus Christi Exchange Fellowship, 2015
• Oxford Beit Research Scholarship in Commonwealth History, 2011-12

Editorial roles

• Editor, History Australia, 2022-24