Jenny Hocking FASSA

Academic, Author & Biographer

About Me

Professor Jenny Hocking FASSA is an award-winning biographer, scriptwriter and a regular commentator on Australian political history and biography. She is a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia and Australian Research Council DORA Professorial Fellow in the National Centre for Australian Studies at Monash University. Since 2014 Jenny has been the inaugural Distinguished Whitlam Fellow with the Whitlam Institute at Western Sydney University. Professor Hocking is the author of several books including The Dismissal Dossier: Everything You Were Never Meant to Know About November 1975 (MUP 2016), Gough Whitlam: His Time (MUP 2014), Gough Whitlam: A Moment in History (MUP 2008), Frank Hardy: Politics Literature Life (2005) and Lionel Murphy: a Political Biography (CUP. 1997). Professor Jenny Hocking has written extensively about Australia’s counter-terrorism developments, including Terror Laws: ASIO, Counter-terrorism and the Threat to Democracy (UNSW Press 2004), and in 2002 presented submissions on the major legislative changes to Parliamentary Committees of Inquiry.

Professor Hocking is a member of the Executive Board of the International Australian Studies Association, a member of the Professorial Advisory Committee of the Journal of Australian Studies, and a long-standing Trustee of the Lionel Murphy Foundation, a not-for-profit organisation awarding national and international postgraduate scholarships.

Gough Whitlam: His Time was winner of the 2014 Barbara Ramsden Award in the Fellowship of Australian Writers Literary Awards and was shortlisted in the 2013 Prime Minister’s Literary Awards (Australian History Prize), the National Biography Award, the Queensland Literary Awards and long-listed in the 2013 NiB Waverley Awards for Literature. Gough Whitlam: A Moment in History was shortlisted for the 2009 Magarey Medal for Biography, the Queensland Premier’s Awards, The Age Book of the Year and the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards and long-listed in the 2009 Walkley Awards.

Qualifications

PhD (University of Sydney 1990)
BEc (Monash 1979)
BSc (Monash 1975)

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