Stuart Forbes Macintyre (born 21 April 1947), Australian historian, academic and public intellectual, is a former Dean of the Faculty of Arts at the University of Melbourne. He has been voted one of Australia's most influential public intellectuals[1]
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Macintyre was born in Melbourne, Victoria in 1947, the son of Forbes Macintyre and Alison Stevens. He was educated at Scotch College, and later studied at the University of Melbourne, specialising in history, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1968. He also holds a Master of Arts degree from Monash University (1971) and a PhD from the University of Cambridge (1975), for which he was awarded the Blackwood Prize. He married Martha (Bruton) Macintyre [1], a social anthropologist, in 1976.
While a postgraduate student at Monash in the early 1970s Macintyre joined the Left Tendency of the Communist Party of Australia. His membership lapsed while he was studying in the United Kingdom, and on returning to Australia he joined the Australian Labor Party. He now considers himself to be a democratic socialist. As an historian he identifies with the tradition of labour historians, such as Henry Pelling, who was his doctoral supervisor in Britain.
Macintyre has had a long and distinguished academic career at a range of institutions in Australia and internationally. From 1977 to 1978, Macintyre was a research fellow at St John's College at the University of Cambridge. He returned to Australia in 1979 as a lecturer at Murdoch University in Perth, Western Australia, and the following year returned to Melbourne where he lectured at the University of Melbourne until 1981. From 1982 to 1983 he was a research fellow at the Australian National University in Canberra, and in 1984 he was promoted to Senior Lecturer at the University of Melbourne. From 1988, Macintyre was a reader in history at the University of Melbourne, before being promoted to professor in 1991, when he was given the Ernest Scott chair in history. Macintyre was appointed Dean of the Faculty of Arts in 1999. In 2002 he was made a Laureate Professor of the University of Melbourne. Macintyre has also been a visiting scholar or fellow at Griffith University (1986), the University of Canterbury, New Zealand (1988), the University of Western Australia (1988), the Australian National University (1991) and the University of Otago, New Zealand (1992).
From 1987 to 1996, Macintyre was a member of the Council of the National Library of Australia (NLA) and from 1989 to 1998, a member of the Council of the State Library of Victoria (SLV). He also served as chairperson of the Humanities and Creative Arts Panel of the Australian Research Council (ARC) in 2003. Recently, Macintyre has been outspoken about the actions of former federal Education Minister Brendan Nelson, who personally vetoed several ARC grants which had already been approved by the ARC's peer review process.[2]
Macintyre finished a second term as the Dean of Arts in mid-2006. For the 2007-8 academic year he holds the Harvard Chair of Australian Studies, retaining his academic appointment at Melbourne. He is President of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia. He is also a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities.
Macintyre has published a number of books, including a history of Marxism in the United Kingdom in the early 20th century,[3] based on his doctoral thesis, a history of the labour movement in Australia,[4] and a history of the Communist Party of Australia.[5] Perhaps his most widely known work is The History Wars (with Anna Clark),[6] a study of the history wars, a public debate about the recent interpretation of various aspects of the history of Australia. The book was launched by former Prime Minister of Australia Paul Keating, who took the opportunity to criticise conservative views of Australian history, and those who hold them (such as the then current Prime Minister John Howard), saying that they suffered from "a failure of imagination", and said that The History Wars "rolls out the canvas of this debate."[7] Macintyre's critics, such as Greg Melluish (History Lecturer at the University of Wollongong), responded to the book by declaring that Macintyre was a partisan history warrior himself, and that "its primary arguments are derived from the pro-Communist polemics of the Cold War."[8] Keith Windschuttle said that Macintyre attempted to "caricature the history debate" but failed to explain what he meant.[9] In a foreword to the book, former Chief Justice of Australia Sir Anthony Mason said that the book was "a fascinating study of the recent endeavours to rewrite or reinterpret the history of European settlement in Australia."[10]
Macintyre has received many awards, including the Premier of Victoria's Literary Award for Australian Studies in 1986, for his work in authoring the fourth volume of the Oxford History of Australia,[11] and the Redmond Barry Award from the Australian Library and Information Association in 1997, in recognition of his work with the NLA and SLV. His book The Reds won The Age Non-Fiction Book of the Year Award in 1998. The History Wars won the 2004 Premier of New South Wales' Australian History Prize.[12]