Rate My Professor Mark Hearn

Dr Mark Hearn is an Honorary Senior Lecturer in the Department of History and Archaeology within the School of Humanities at Macquarie University. He completed his PhD at the University of Sydney in 2001, with a thesis entitled ‘Hard Cash: John Dwyer and his contemporaries 1890-1914’. Hearn's research specializations encompass historical theory and historiography, with a particular emphasis on the fin de siècle period circa 1890-1914. He also explores the history of ideas and governance during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Australia. His work examines narrative constructions, temporalities in historical periodization, and the social imaginary of governance, contributing to understandings of late modernity and Australian political history.

In his career, Hearn has served as a Senior Lecturer at Macquarie University. Notable appointments include Visiting Scholar at the Centre for Philosophical Studies of History, University of Oulu, Finland in 2018, where he researched historical periodization of the fin de siècle; Researcher with the International Network for Theory of History since 2017; and Australian Prime Minister’s Centre Fellow at the Museum of Australian Democracy, Old Parliament House, Canberra from 2014 to 2015. He was awarded the C.H. Currey Memorial Fellowship by the State Library of New South Wales in 2006. Hearn has been a member of the Editorial Board of Labour History since 2002. Among his key publications are the monograph The Fin de Siècle Imagination in Australia (Bloomsbury, 2022); "Negotiating 'a realm of public power and responsibility': Labour's social imaginary of governance at Federation" in Australian Historical Studies (2025); "Interpreting Eric Hobsbawm's History of the Fin de Siècle 'Twilight Zone'" in The Historical Journal (2023); "A single Australia? Alan Atkinson's narrative construction of late modernity" in History Australia (2022); and "The fin de siècle and the multiple temporalities of historical periodization" in Rethinking History (2022). He has delivered presentations such as "Dissolving into history? Historicizing Modern Nation Building" in 2018 and contributed opinion pieces, including "Is the prime ministership really an 'impossible office'?" in the Canberra Times (2022).