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Tristan Moss

(he/him)
Senior lecturer, UNSW Sydney

Dr Tristan Moss is a senior lecturer in history at the University of New South Wales, Canberra. He is a historian researching Australian space history and the history of the Australian Defence Force and is currently writing a history of Australian space activities, 1957 – to the present. He is the author of Guarding the Periphery: The Australian Army in Papua New Guinea, 1951–75 (Cambridge University Press, 2017), and co-editor of Beyond Combat: Australian military activity away from the battlefields (NewSouth Books, 2018) and Fighting Australia’s Cold War: the Nexus of Strategy and Operations in a Multipolar Asia, 1945–1965 (Australian National University Press).

Tristan has previously worked at Australian Command and Staff College, on the Official History of Peacekeeping, Humanitarian and Post-Cold War Operations, and on the Official History of Australian operations in Afghanistan, Iraq and East Timor at the Australian War Memorial. Tristan is the winner of a Discovery Early Career Researcher Award, titled 'Australia and Space: Government policy and public imagination, 1957 – 2021’. Tristan is also a Fulbright Senior Scholar, (Fulbright Professional Scholarship in Australian-U.S. Alliance Studies) and a Chief Investigator on the Discovery Project 'A Century of Sex and the Australian Military, 1914 - 2020'.

Experience

  • 2019–present
    Senior lecturer, University of New South Wales, Canberra

Education

  • 2015 
    The Australian National University, PhD
  • 2008 
    The University of Melbourne, BA(Hons)

Publications

  • 2023
    The Foundations of Australian Space Policy, Griffith Asia Institute
  • 2023
    The space between alliance and self-reliance: The evolution of the Australia-US defence space relationship, United States Studies Centre
  • 2021
    Fighting Australia's Cold War: The Nexus of Strategy and Operations in a Multipolar Asia, 1945-1965, ANU Press
  • 2020
    ‘There Are Many Other Things More Important to Us Than Space Research’: The Australian Government and the Dawn of the Space Age, 1956–62, Australian Historical Studies
  • 2018
    "‘Talking Itself Out of a Political Future’: Education and Australian Army Engagement with Papua New Guinean Independence, 1966–72", Journal of Pacific History
  • 2018
    Beyond Combat: the Australian military away from the battlefield, UNSW Press
  • 2017
    Guarding the Periphery: the Australian Army in Papua New Guinea, 1951 - 1975, Cambridge University Press