Professor Paul Pickering is Director of the Australian Studies Institute in 2017 and a Professor in the School of Politics and International Relations, Research School of Social Sciences. Prior to taking up his current post Paul has undertaken numerous roles at ANU, including Director of the Research School of Humanities and the Arts (2012-21), a term as Dean of the College of Arts and Social Sciences (2014-16), inaugural Director of the ANU Centre for European Studies (2010-12); Director of Graduate Studies (2004-9) and a Queen Elizabeth II Fellow at the Humanities Research Centre (2000-4). He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. In 2012 he was the recipient of the Vice Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Graduate Supervision.

Paul's research and teaching interests are very broad. He has published extensively on Australian, British and Irish social, political and cultural history as well as biography, public memory and commemoration, digital humanities, industrial heritage and the study of re-enactment as an historical method.

Paul’s current book project is a study of industrial heritage in Manchester, which will be published by Routledge in 2022.

Paul has held numerous fellowships: in 2012 he was a Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies at the University of Edinburgh; in 2014 he was an Andrew Mellon Research Fellow at the Huntington Library in California, and a Vice Chancellor’s Research Fellow at Newcastle University in England. In 2015 he was a Visiting Research Professor at St. Andrews University and in 2016 Professeur invité à l'Université Paris-Sorbonne IV. In 2018 he was a Distinguished Visiting Fellow at Durham University. This year he will be Distinguished Global Visiting Fellow at the International Centre for Critical Theory at NYU.