University of Melbourne confers Honorary Doctorate on Associate Professor Martha Macintyre
Pictured: Associate Professor Martha Macintyre, conferred an Honorary Doctorate by the University of Melbourne.
The University of Melbourne has conferred an Honorary Doctorate on Associate Professor Martha Macintyre, one of Australia’s most eminent anthropologists.
The Doctor of Letters (honoris causa), the University’s highest honour, was conferred on Associate Professor Macintyre at a graduation ceremony on Sunday 8 December.
Associate Professor Macintyre is renowned for her willingness to challenge theoretical orthodoxies and voice uncomfortable truths. She has conducted groundbreaking work on the famous Kula exchange of Papua New Guinea, produced paradigm-shifting publications on gender and domesticity in the Pacific and led an astonishing range of engaged research on some of the most wicked contemporary problems facing people of Oceania today.
Associate Professor Macintyre has undertaken extended fieldwork in remote areas of Papua New Guinea and ventured into profoundly male-dominated industries like mining and policy, opening the path for the next generation of female anthropologists.
Following her extended fieldwork on Tubetube in the Massim region of Papua New Guinea, she led a generation of scholars who insisted on attending not only to social functions and structures, but also to profound historical changes that had occurred through European colonialism.
Associate Professor Macintyre is currently an Adjunct Professor at the Centre for Social Responsibility in Mining at the University of Queensland and an honorary Principle Research Fellow in Anthropology in the School of Social and Political Sciences in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Melbourne.
Associate Professor Macintyre is a University of Melbourne alum, having completed her BA at the Faculty of Arts, where she was deeply engaged in activism and feminism.
Dean of the Faculty of Arts, Professor Jennifer Balint, said: “Associate Professor Macintyre has been instrumental in changing the way we understand inequality, personhood, agency and gender in the contemporary Pacific Islands.”
“Through her decades of anthropological research and fieldwork, Associate Professor Macintyre has demonstrated considerable generosity and courage, and her work continues to make a difference”.