Jean Isobel Martin

Jean Isobel Martin FASSA (née Craig; 21 June 1923 – 25 September 1979) was an Australian sociologist who was a pioneer of the discipline in Australia. Many of her works examined the role of immigrants in Australian society. Her academic career "spanned teaching and research appointments in seven Australian universities".

Early life and education Martin was born in Melbourne to Elizabeth (née Alexander) and David Craig. Her father was a civil servant born in Scotland. She grew up in Sydney, attending Abbotsleigh before going on to attend the University of Sydney. She graduated Bachelor of Arts in 1943 and Master of Arts in 1945, studying anthropology under A. P. Elkin; she was awarded the University Medal and won first-class honours. Martin undertook further studies at the London School of Economics and University of Chicago, eventually receiving a Ph.D. from the Australian National University in 1954.

Academia Martin lectured at the University of Sydney until the birth of her first child, after which she worked part-time and often carried out unpaid research. In 1965, she was appointed as the inaugural professor of sociology at La Trobe University. She resigned due to ill health in 1974, subsequently taking up a senior fellowship in the Research School of Social Sciences at Australian National University.

Works Martin completed her M.A. thesis on dairy farmers in New South Wales and her Ph.D. thesis on refugees in New South Wales; the latter was published in book form as Refugee Settlers (1965). She later published Community and Identity (1972) and The Migrant Presence (1978), studies of refugee groups and societal attitudes towards migrants. Two works were published posthumously – The Ethnic Dimension (1981), a collection of her research papers, and The First Wave (1985), a "longitudinal investigation of Australia's earliest Vietnamese refugees".