Rate My Professor Rebecca Sheehan

Dr. Rebecca Sheehan is a Senior Lecturer in History and Gender Studies in the School of Humanities, Faculty of Arts, at Macquarie University, where she serves as Course Director for Modern History. She earned her PhD and MA in History with a specialization in Gender Studies from the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, receiving a Graduate Teaching Assistant Award. She also holds a BA in English Literature and Linguistics with Honours in History from the University of New South Wales, for which she was awarded the History Prize and the Australian Society of Sports Historians National Dissertation Prize, and spent a year as a Fulbright Scholar at UCLA. Her research adopts an intersectional approach to analyzing gender, sexuality, and race, exploring topics such as barriers to access for women film directors in 1970s Hollywood, Beyoncé's role in raising fans' intersectional consciousness, feminist intellectual history and friendships, teaching race in Australia, the American reception of Germaine Greer, boxing and masculinity, and rock music culture in the global 1970s. She has a book in progress, Rise of the Superwoman: How Sex Remade Gender in America’s Long 1970s, under contract with Harvard University Press.

Sheehan's career includes serving as Program Director of Gender Studies from 2017 to 2021 and teaching core units such as GEND1000 Freedom Dreams: Foundations in Gender Studies and GEND2030 Sex, Race, and Rock. Previously, from 2009 to 2016, she was a founding member of the teaching program at the United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney, earning a Teaching Excellence Award. She received the Macquarie Faculty of Arts Student-Led Teaching Champion Award in 2018, a 2020 Harvard University Schlesinger Library Research Fellowship, and other honors including the 2017 United States Studies Centre Travel Grant and 2015 Alvin Achenbaum Travel Grant from Duke University. Key publications include 'If we had more like her we would no longer be the unheard majority': Germaine Greer's reception in the United States (Australian Feminist Studies, 2016), Liberation and redemption in 1970s rock music (The shock of the global: The 1970s in perspective, Harvard University Press, 2010), and 'Little giants of the ring': fighting race and making men on the Australia-Philippines boxing circuit, 1919-1923 (Sport in Society, 2012). Committed to sexual safety, she chairs Macquarie University’s Consent Education Subcommittee, serves on its Sexual Safety and Wellbeing Committee, and advised on the Broderick Report’s 23 recommendations for cultural change at Sydney University’s residential colleges. She communicates her research through media outlets including ABC, The Conversation, and Meanjin, and has delivered public presentations on topics like generational politics and intersectional struggles from MeToo to BLM.