Melanie Nolan

Melanie Claire Nolan (born 1960) is a historian and university academic from New Zealand, specialising in labour and gender history. She is the director of the National Centre of Biography at the Australian National University, and general editor of the Australian Dictionary of Biography (ADB).

Early life and education Melanie Claire Nolan was born in 1960 in Reefton, on the West Coast of the South Island of New Zealand, to Paul Nolan and Alison Coad. She attended many schools as her parents moved around the country for work, including Villa Maria College, Christchurch (1967–1971), Mercy College, Timaru (1971) and St Patrick's College, Teschemakers, Oamaru, (1974–1975) and Mount Maunganui College, where she was dux.

In 1978 she won a scholarship to study at the University of Canterbury, which she attended from 1979 to 1985. She obtained a Master of Arts in 1985, with her masters thesis titled Jack McCullough : workers' representative on the Arbitration Court. She then won a further scholarship to study at the Australian National University, which she attended from 1986 to 1989 for her doctoral degree. Her thesis was a case study of women blue-collar workers in Victoria, Australia, from 1880 to 1939. as well as Professor of History, Director of the National Centre of Biography (NCB), positions she still holds .

Recognition Nolan won the 2006 Archives & Records Association of New Zealand Ian Wards Prize, and was shortlisted for the 2007 Ernest Scott Prize for her work Kin.

Selected works Suffrage and Beyond: International Feminist Perspectives (1994), (ed.) Revolution: The 1913 Great Strike in New Zealand (2006), (ed.), Canterbury University Press War and Class. The Diary of Jack McCullough (2009), (ed.) Unions In Common Cause: The New Zealand Federation of Labour, 1937–1988 (2011), (ed.)