Catharine Coleborne is an Australian academic historian of illness, health and medicine, especially mental illness and institutions. Her career contributions include a focus on patients, asylum records and medical case book narratives in the archive, and interactions between families and medical personnel in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. She has written about changing understandings of health and illness and has used oral histories to examine the patient experience. She has published numerous books, chapters and journal articles and her work is internationally recognised.

 

She is currently leading an Australian Research Council project (with Dr Effie Karageorgos) focused on mental health aftercare in New South Wales, Victoria and Western Australia, 1900 to 1960. This will result in a co-authored book and a public-facing exhibition to share the histories of mental health aftercare to a wide audience.

 

In 2025, she will be a Visiting Fellow at the State Library of NSW and a residential Fellow at the National Library of Australia working on a history of polio memories and experiences. Catharine has supervised student research theses on a wide range of topics including mental illness and mental health; child health and disability; public health; patient pathography; and institutions.

 

She is currently based at the University of Newcastle, New South Wales where she is a Professor in the School of Humanities, Creative Industries and Social Sciences. Her most recent book is Vagrant Lives in Colonial Australasia: Regulating Mobility, 1840-1910 (Bloomsbury, 2024).