Matt Allen

Dr Allen is a Historian and Criminologist whose diverse research is all focussed on the eighteenth and nineteenth-century British world and particularly colonial New South Wales, in the period 1788-1856. He is currently writing a history of alcohol in the Colony which will explore the political symbolism of both celebratory drinking rituals and the deviance of public drunkenness. He is also researching the changing nature of deviance in New South Wales through a quantitative and qualitative study of magistrates and summary justice; and the role of religious faith, and especially protestant dissent, in the emerging colonial public sphere.