Mia Martin Hobbs

Email: mia.martinhobbs[at]deakin.edu.au

ORCID ID: http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2330-1733

BlueSky: @miamh.bsky.social

Deakin University Postdoctoral Research Fellow, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Deakin University

Deputy Director, Australian Policy and History

I am an oral historian of war and its legacies, with a research focus on the Vietnam War, the War on Terror, memory, trauma, place, gender, peace, and security. I completed my PhD at the University of Melbourne in 2018, where I taught modern US and international history 2017-2020. I recently completed work as a research fellow the ARC project 'A Conceptual History of National Security in Australia since 1901' at Deakin University.

As a Deakin University Postdoctoral Research Fellow, I am currently undertaking an oral history project with women and minority veterans who fought in the US, UK, and Australian militaries since 9/11. I am also one of a group of historians on a project 'Challenging Anzac', investigating the efforts and experiences of anti-war Australian veterans from Vietnam to the present day. Finally, I am developing a new project with people who sought asylum in Australia from conflict in countries affected by climate change.

Return to Vietnam: An Oral History of American and Australian Veterans' Journeys

See a short piece about the book on the Cambridge blog FifteenEightyFour

Hear me speak about this research on ABC Nightlife

Published October 2021 by Cambridge University Press

Since the 1980s, thousands of American and Australian veterans have returned to Việt Nam. This oral history tells their story.

‘The return journeys to Vietnam of American and Australian war veterans raise complex questions involving memory, responsibility, and repentance. In this first-rate work of historical scholarship, Mia Martin Hobbs expertly addresses them. Perceptive, sophisticated, and engagingly written, Return to Vietnam is a book I've been waiting for years for somebody to write.'

Scott Laderman - University of Minnesota, Duluth

‘Original, thought-provoking, and multi-dimensional, Return to Vietnam offers readers a comparative perspective on American and Australian veteran travels to Vietnam since 1975. Mia Martin Hobbs grounds this book in rich, and sometime searing, oral histories. She succeeds in achieving an impressive balance between presenting veterans' personal accounts and offering her own powerful analysis of memory, national commemoration, personal trauma, and war.'

Jana K. Lipman - Tulane University

WINNER, Oral History Australia Book Award, 2022

Shortlisted for the Memory Studies Association First Book Award, 2023

Honorable Mention for the Memory Studies Association First Book Award, 2023

Digital Cartography

Mapping American and Australian Veterans' Return Journeys to Vietnam

As a Resident Researcher in the Digital Studio at the University of Melbourne, I worked with the Melbourne Data Analytics Platform to develop an interactive spatial-temporal map of my doctoral interviews with Vietnam veterans.

The map shows the movement of the veterans I interviewed back and forth from Vietnam, both during the war and afterward. Clips of their oral history interviews are embedded into their movement pathways. Explore the map here.

Race, Gender, and Violence in the War on Terror

IWM Enemies or Allies

Early research presented to the Imperial War Museum's 'Enemy Encounters' conference, 2021

After 9/11, Western militaries deployed the most racially and gender diverse soldier-force in history to fight the so-called War on Terror. These soldiers waged a deeply racialized and gendered war while facing epidemics of racism and sexual violence within military institutions. Through a transnational oral history project with women and minorities who served in the US, UK, and Australian militaries in the War on Terror, I aim to understand their experiences as victims and perpetrators of gendered and racialized violence and how they understand their role in increasingly diverse militaries and broader societies.

A key aspect of this research is understanding how military violence is learned, justified, and remembered in ways that are psychologically comfortable for the perpetrator. In Lessons from History: Australia's Leading Historians Tackle Our Greatest Challenges (NewSouth, 2022), republished in The Conversation), I explore soldiers' memories of atrocities in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, showing how atrocities in war are underpinned by racialized and gendered ideologies.

Friday essay: why soldiers commit war crimes – and what we can do about itSoldier atrocities are shaped by our society, culture, and political fabric. Preventing them will require a comprehensive rethinking of policies, attitudes, and approaches to war.

National Security in Australia since 1901

With Professor David Lowe and Associate Professor Carolyn Holbrook, I investigated what 'national security' has meant to Australians since 1901, and how it's meaning has changed over time. Rather than relying exclusively on the role of speeches, policy statements and crisis moments, it enhances our understanding of national security in the Australian setting by considering how broader popular understandings were formed and interacted with political and policy prescriptions.

This project was funded by an Australian Research Council Discovery Project 2021 grant (DP210102254)

Challenging Anzac

Challenging Anzac CCH

With Professor Joan Beaumont and Associate Professor Carolyn Holbrook, I am investigating the erasure of radical, left-wing and anti-war veterans in Australia since the Great War. Our forthcoming book reveals how across Australian history, Australian service personnel have challenged war, militarism, and the Anzac Legend. Bringing together leading war historians across Australia, along with talented emerging scholars, our collection spans Australia’s military history, from World War I to the present day, revealing that the Anzac legend has never reflected the reality of Australian military service, and that Australian military institutions have diminished service personnel who challenge the Anzac mythology.

Articles and Chapters

'"We, to them, are their heroes": narratives of rescue in white Australian veterans' memories of the Vietnamese', Australian Journal of Politics & History (2025). https://doi.org/10.1111/ajph.13050

Mia Martin Hobbs, David Lowe, and Carolyn Holbrook, 'The Rise of National Security in the 1930s: An Australian Case Study', Journal of Contemporary History 60:1 (2025): 3-26. https://doi.org/10.1177/00220094241303883

'Imperial Nostalgia in Australian Defence Policy in the 21st Century', Journal of Australian Studies, published online 6 January 2025. https://doi.org/10.1080/14443058.2024.2442414

'Healing Journeys: Veterans, Trauma, and the Return to Vietnam' Journal of American History, 110:1 (June 2023): 82-107. https://doi.org/10.1093/jahist/jaad094

'Veteran Reflections: Legacies of War in Vietnam at Peace', in The Vietnam War in the Pacific World, eds. Brian Cuddy and Frederik Lovegall, University of North Carolina Press, November 2022.

'Why soldiers commit war crimes – and what we can do about it', Lessons from History: Leading Historians Tackle Australia's Greatest Challenges, eds. Carolyn Holbrook, David Lowe, and Lyndon Megarrity, New South, July 2022.

Extract republished: 'Friday essay: why soldiers commit war crimes- and what we can do about it', The Conversation, 1 July 2022.

'Calamity or Commodity? Conceptualizing Security in the Nuclear Debate in Fraser’s Australia', History Australia, (April 2022): https://doi.org/10.1080/14490854.2022.2057339

'(Un)naming: Agency, Anonymity, and Ethics in Oral Histories with Veteran-Narrators', Oral History Review, 48:1 (2021), online publication 19 February 2021. https://doi.org/10.1080/00940798.2021.1885982

See an interview I gave to Oral History Review expanding on the ethics explored in the article

‘“We went and did an Anzac job”: Memory, myth, and the Anzac Digger in Vietnam’, Australian Journal of Politics & History, 64:3 (October 2018): 480-97. https://doi.org/10.1111/ajph.12512

Winner, University of Melbourne School of Historical and Philosophical Studies Fellows’ Essay Prize, 2018.