Tristan Moss

Dr Tristan Moss is a Senior Lecturer in History in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of New South Wales, Canberra. He completed his PhD at the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, Australian National University, in 2015, receiving the C.E.W. Bean Prize for the best PhD thesis in Australian military history. Prior to his current role, Moss served as an ANU Teaching Fellow at the Australian Command and Staff College in 2016 and contributed to significant historical projects, including the Serving Our Country initiative on Indigenous service in the Australian Defence Force, the Official History of Peacekeeping, Humanitarian and Post-Cold War Operations, and the Official History of Australian operations in Afghanistan, Iraq, and East Timor at the Australian War Memorial.

Moss's research specializations encompass Australian space history, the history of the Australian Defence Force, the Australian Army in Papua New Guinea, Cold War dynamics, war and society, and Australian military history. He is currently authoring a comprehensive history of Australian space activities from 1957 to the present. As lead Chief Investigator, he holds an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) for the project 'Australia and Space: Government policy and public imagination, 1957–2021'. Additionally, he is a Fulbright Senior Scholar with the Professional Scholarship in Australian-U.S. Alliance Studies and serves as Chief Investigator on the ARC Discovery Project 'A Century of Sex and the Australian Military, 1914–2020'. His key publications include the monograph Guarding the Periphery: The Australian Army in Papua New Guinea, 1951–75 (Cambridge University Press, 2017); edited volumes such as Beyond Combat: Australian military activity away from the battlefields (NewSouth, 2018), Fighting Australia’s Cold War: The nexus of strategy and operations in a multipolar Asia, 1945–1965 (ANU Press, 2021), and The Foundations of Australia's Space Policy (Griffith Asia Institute, 2023); and journal articles like “Consider Carefully the Best Use of Our Limited Resources”: Australian Space Policy, 1960–72 (Australian Journal of Politics & History, 2024) and “‘Fuzzy Wuzzy’ soldiers: Race and Papua New Guinean soldiers in the Australian Army, 1940–60” (War in History, 2022).

Professional Email: t.moss@unsw.edu.au